It’s that time of year, when Midwestern Gothic goes all nonfiction for an entire issue. It’s flooded from cover to cover with essays and creative nonfiction inspired by the Midwest.

This time around, it’s a little more unique. It’s our last quarterly issue! Next year, we’re going semi-annual, and also featuring nonfiction in every edition of the journal. We’re super excited to be able to share some amazing nonfiction work on a more regular basis, and also a little nostalgic at the change. The magazine has looked a certain way and come out on a certain schedule for over five years. But now we’ll be able to share the beauty of the Midwest in new ways, and also create more room for MG Press titles, which we’re also super geeked about.

To commemorate the event, I’ll share an excerpt from one of my favorites from Issue 23, “Off Trail” by Dave Essinger, about a Midwesterner doing a trail run in the Montana Rockies.

The end-all be-all goal for the typical road marathoner is the Boston Marathon, and that summer I was training obsessively to qualify, because it’s the one big marathon you can’t just sign up for. For decades Boston has been limited to those who meet tough age-based qualifying times at another marathon, and I needed to take a good twelve minutes off my previous best time to make the cut. I’d started a very aggressive training plan; Alice was already easily qualified by the women’s standard, and I was determined not to have to navigate our daughter’s stroller through the epic Boston crowds of spectators while Mommy ran the race.

Twenty miles of treacherous trail was no part whatsoever of this training plan. So what exactly was I doing on this trail, on this mountain, a thousand miles from home, with an ankle growing plumper and more purple by the minute? A road-runner perilously far from any road? What part of me had thought this would be a good idea, or a fun thing to do?

Trying to answer takes me back at least ten years. I had lived in Bozeman, more by circumstance than by design, for a few months after college, and had heard of this “insane race over the mountain, that’s like fifteen miles, and everyone who finishes is just all beat up, as in, bleeding everywhere.” Naturally, my reaction then was, I want to do that, but being in rotten physical shape at the time (college the way I attended it will do that to you), and not suicidal or at least not that energetically so, I thought nothing more of it then.

Shop for Midwestern Gothic Issue 23: Fall 2016 Now!

Star Wars: Chewbacca – 2 of 5 Stars
Headed into this book, I was curious to see how they’d treat dialog from the titular character. It seemed like it’d be tough to keep the signature wookie roars and not have it get in the way of the story.

Turns out, that’s just what happened.

As a secondary character, Chewie’s dialog is both endearing and comic relief. We can fill in the blanks for him, or let whoever he’s sharing the scene with translate for us. In a main character role, it gets a little repetitive when Zarro, the plucky girl Chewbacca befriends, has to hold up both ends of the conversation.

Plenty is lost in translation, however. For instance, I had to re-read the first few pages a couple of times to figure out why Chewie was even helping Zarro with her plan to escape the larvae mines with her father and eventually prevent the Empire from gaining a foothold on her planet.

Chewie never really gets elevated above hired muscle status – he’s big, hairy, and knows how to fight. That’s about it.

Star Wars: Princess Leia – 4 of 5 Stars
Leia’s one shot takes place immediately after the medal ceremony in Episode IV, where we find out helping to destroy the Death Star isn’t quite enough to earn a woman respect, even in the Star Wars universe. Her people think she’s an “ice princess” because she didn’t shed a tear over Alderaan, or even her mother and father’s death.

Leia’s struggle to embrace her heritage and win over what remains of her people serves as the main arc of the comic, as she travels the galaxy to find pockets of Alderaanians before the Empire can hunt them down and wipe them all out.

Some are naïve and lost in their new harsh world. Some are cynical and racist. Some are mixed race, and unsure about their identity.

This was probably one of my favorite entries into the Star Wars Expanded Universe. It explored how Leia balances her sense of duty, femininity, desire for adventure, and royal upbringing in a practical way that’s messy and imperfect. You begin to see how these types of experiences help shape and transform her into General Organa in later episodes.

Shop for Star Wars: Princess Leia

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius: 4 of 5 Stars
This book is short, compact, and filled with so many lessons that a 2nd reading is probably necessary. Some lines need to be read several times in order to extrapolate their meaning and apply it to the here and now of your life. The letters penned by the aging Roman Emporer were never intended to be read by anyone. But this density also comes from clarity of thinking paired with lack of context. Some work needs to be done to connect musings from the battlefield to personal development, business, or whatever you choose to apply them to. But once you do, you’ll find the wisdom from hundreds of years ago is just as applicable today.

Anti-Fragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: 5 of 5 stars
If approached with an open mind, this book is one of the rarities that can physically shift your ideology and broaden your place on the political spectrum.

The main message of the book is that we need to build ourselves and our systems (financial, political, cultural, you name it) to be antifragile. Meaning, we embrace conflict and small shocks to the system, because it ultimately makes everything stronger. Delaying or trying to prevent these conflicts only creates negative “black swan” events, like the 2008 financial crisis.

The print is small, the book is dense, and some of the concepts are tough to wrap your head around. But nowhere have I seen the case for anti-interventionism and eliminating the tendency to fear failure so thoroughly and effectively argued.

The Skeleton Tree by Iain Lawrence: 4 of 5 Stars
I received an advance review copy of this book from the author’s agent at the Chicago Women in Publishing event. When they described it as “Hatchet-like,” I was instantly positively triggered and would have bought it immediately.

While Hatchet sets a high bar, the Skeleton Tree carves out its own tale incorporating themes about family, boy vs. wilderness, and even elements of supernatural lore from the Pacific Northwest.

I enjoyed that the story balanced the line between giving the two shipwrecked boys just the right mix of luck, personal growth, and perseverance necessary to survive. The author believably set up ways for the boys to scavenge through junk on the beach, struggle to find food, and survive encounters with the wild.

I passed this book on to my son with little hesitation, as I know he’ll enjoy this archetypal survival tale with its own set of twists.