Call It “Pop”

Faith Siegel revisits Jon K. Lauck’s 2019 review of Midwestern literature, calling for increased literary exposure for the American heartland.

By Faith SiegelSeptember 9, 2025

AS A BORN-AND-RAISED Midwesterner who has pursued her undergraduate degree in Southern California, I’ve encountered a certain kind of whiplash. When I tell people back home that I attend college in Malibu, they’re typically enchanted, in awe of my proximity to ever-glamorized Hollywood; when I tell people at college that I’m from Michigan, close to Detroit (though no, not really from Detroit), I often receive a look that says yikes. The place I’ve loved and called “home” for 20 years seems to be perceived by outsiders as a flyover state at best, and a crime-ridden hellhole at worst.

I’ve observed a similar neglect of the American heartland in the literary landscape. I understand why people gravitate toward New York City and Los Angeles, the United States’ bicoastal hot spots, but I can’t help feeling personally slighted to some degree. When did the Midwest get left behind—and why?

Thankfully, Jon K. Lauck embraces three pieces of Midwestern literature in his 2019 LARB review “The Neo-Regionalist Moment: Hearing the Emerging Voices of the American Center.” He highlights Interior States by Meghan O’Gieblyn (2018), a collection of essays that reflect on the author’s various relocations, during childhood and adulthood, within Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and her overarching eventual departure from Christianity. Sarah Smarsh’s memoir Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018) is next, which touches on the American dream and the author’s financially and emotionally unstable upbringing in Kansas. Smarsh urges the reader to consider regional inequality—particularly the societal factors that allow the East and West coasts to thrive, while everything in between is neglected, impoverished. And finally, Lauck writes on Ohio (2018), a novel by Stephen Markley. As a self-proclaimed “Midwestern bro who happened to make it” and now lives in Los Angeles, Markley weaves a complex yet hopeful tale through what he calls “Deep Ohio,” interweaving themes of deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic, and sexual abuse.

Considered together, as they are compiled so deftly in Lauck’s review, these books bring to light a multitude of introspective questions, societal issues and intricacies, and personal reflections, all set against a backdrop of small towns surrounded by dusty roads and rustling cornfields. Memoir or fiction, the narratives in question remind the reading public that the American heartland is writing, and writing well. For that reason, Lauck writes, the Midwest “needs to become a strong cultural force independent of the coastal gaze.” In other words, magnetic though New York and Hollywood may be, we would be wise to linger a little longer with stories coming from the middle of the map.

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Featured image: Nyttend, Main from Warren, Rayland, 2015, is in the public domain.