This is the plan.
On Wednesday morning next week, bright and early, say 6:30 a.m., I will leave Fairwater for Ohio. I'll be headed for Maria Stein High School, there in Mercer County, Ohio, where Charlie Mescher's College English II class has read my farm memoir, Curlew: Home. The class meets daily from 10:45 a.m. to 11:30 a.m., and I'll see them on Thursday.
Yahoo's driving directions says it's going to take me about ten and a half hours to get from Fairwater, Wisconsin, to Celina, Ohio, where I will stay overnight with the Meschers. You see, I swing WAY wide of Chicago, that grunt-nosed sow of a city I've cast out of the middlewest. According to Charlie Mescher, by the rules of Mercer County hospitality it is they who are to treat me to dinner Wednesday night. (We have similar such rules of hospitality here.) On Thursday, before and after my session with the students in College English II, I will no doubt be able to keep myself entertained, reading the big assignment my Advanced Comp students will have just turned in. You see, I want to stay around until Charlie is done teaching for the day, because he has promised me a guided tour of the county afterwards.
Why am I visiting Charlie Mescher's College English II class? Well, for one thing, in January they finished reading and discussing Curlew: Home. For another thing, I am happy to answer any remaining questions they might have, or to wrestle any challenges they want to pose for the author of the book. Such a session might be a useful educational experience for the students. I know it will be educational for me.
Why am I doing this? I was in college before I ever saw a person who had actually published a book. I was even older than that before I started finding writers who respected and wrote about the world I knew growing up. For a long time, it seemed as if literature was something that happened elsewhere, in New York City or in San Francisco; it seemed as if everyone had agreed literature did not happen in such places as Palo Alto County, Iowa, or Mercer County, Ohio. By and by, I came to recognize the falsehood of such notions. Now I know better. Literature can be written anywhere, out of any material at hand, out of the common stuff of our middlewestern days. And I would be pleased to have a role in helping those College English II students realize that indeed the stuff of literature is all around them: perhaps that, most of all, is the reason I'm driving the ten and a half hours to Ohio next week, to allow those students to say "Yes, the stuff of literature and of history and of art is right here, mixed in the clay and weeds of our ordinary days and dreams."
Or perhaps I'll just answer their questions and leave the BIG PRONOUNCEMENTS about life and literature unspoken.
Do you think I can hold my tongue?
Friday and Saturday of next week, on my way back to Fairwater, I will stop to spend some time on my Vagabond research in Fowler, my Indiana focus community. And then, I'm thinking, I'll come home on Sunday and get ready for another week.
Why do I do this, you ask.
Why do I do this, I ask myself again.
The answer really is: I'd like everyone in the world to be able to see that the stuff of literature is right here at our fingertips, but I can't tell that to everyone in the world, I can only reach those I meet, one classroom of young people at a time. And next week I get to meet Charlie Mescher's students in College English II.
Thanks, Charlie, for the opportunity.
You're about to live out a long-standing fantasy of mine! I'd never ask why you'd do it.
Posted by: Peter | February 08, 2006 at 07:19 PM
You know, Peter, there's no money in driving ten hours to deliver a gratis session, so there ARE those who would ask why I'm doing it. Not everyone has the soul of a poet; some have accountants' souls. And to the accountant and those who use money to keep score, it just doesn't make sense.
Posted by: Tom Montag | February 08, 2006 at 08:14 PM
Thank you, Tom, for caring enough to make the drive, and for understanding that not all of life (if any) is lived in cities.
As to not knowing the literature of our own places, I grew up and went through high school at Kewaskum, WI, the hometown of Glenway Wescott, but never heard his name until I left there and came across "Goodbye, Wisconsin" in a Milwaukee bookstore. When the bookjacket notes said he was from Kewaskum, I was sure it was some awful mistake that had been made by the printers!
Posted by: Ralph Murre | February 09, 2006 at 10:21 AM
Thanks, Ralph. Your remarks about Wescott are well-taken. What's worse: he is not the only neglected writer in Wisconsin, and Wisconsin is not the only state that has stories like this.
I am happy to say that Fort Atkinson is doing considerably better for poet Lorine Niedecker. Most of us didn't pay her enough attention when she was alive, however.
What do they say? "A prophet in his own land...."
Posted by: Tom Montag | February 09, 2006 at 10:38 AM
"I was in college before I ever saw a person who had actually published a book."
Yep.
Maybe I just needed to have a writer close by, so I had to be it! But people who grew up knowing writers, knowing artists, and being encouraged by them, have no idea what it does to you to grow up thinking that is all about somebody else and happening in some other place. Writing is a fantasy, even if you are actually trying to do it. Thank God for college and later experiences!
Posted by: beth | February 10, 2006 at 08:13 PM
Hi, Beth. That was really part of the struggle to become a writer for me - to do this when there was no model for it in rural Iowa where I was growing up. The family was supportive, but couldn't offer guidance. Part of the problem was that I didn't even know what I was doing, or trying to do. That understanding didn't come until later.
Yeah, Fairwater needs a poet, so I guess I'm it. Now if there is any budding poet down th street the question is: how do we make contact?
Posted by: Tom Montag | February 11, 2006 at 07:11 AM