Another summer, another issue of Midwestern Gothic! It’s amazing that no matter how long we do this, there’s always wrenches and new wrinkles that get thrown into the process. This issue will always stand out to me (I hope, if it happens again I’ll probably get committed to an asylum) as the one we lost. In the midst of copyediting, my hard drive fried and my multiple layers of redundancy backups failed, sending most of the work spent laying out the galley and making copyediting changes into the ether. I gave myself a half hour to feel bad for myself and ate some fast food that made me feel even worse, and then got right back at it.

The positive that came out of that experience was that I was able to get reacquainted with the stories and poems inside. There’s something about laying out a galley and designing how the words appear on the page that’s very tactile, almost like you can feel the work taking shape. And it reinforced why I enjoyed one of my favorite pieces in the issue, “Gen-Mods,” by Brian Pals. When I tell people about Midwestern Gothic, one of my usual lines is that we’re more than corn and cows. Well, this story is all about corn. Specifically, a group of men rogueing corn for Monsanto. That’s probably why I liked it so much, that it took the stereotypes about the Midwest and corn and showed how tradition has evolved into modern reality.

Even though big farming has evolved into numbers and chemicals, there are still men walking the fields, tending to the crops in very different ways than years ago. And the dynamics of this manual labor, overseer and worker, take on a different tone. It’s a nuanced piece takes place in the midst of a prominent debate (GMOs, Bee Extinction, etc.) without an agenda. In other words, it reflects life in the Midwest, good, bad, and ugly. Which is exactly what we’re looking for. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s possible, walking corn, to sweat yourself dirty and all the way back around to clean again. Everything flushes out, and by the end of a hundred-degree day in the field, that wet wash sliding out of your hatband doesn’t even have the taste of salt to it anymore. Pure water.

You could maybe go a day without showering, but what Honzo never seemed to get was you had to change clothes. One season he wore the same T-shirt¬, 1998 Stanley Cup, Detroit Red Wings, for a solid week of work. I doubt he really smelled much worse after than he did before, though. Honzo was just naturally ripe. Maybe he had more in his system to sweat out than the rest of us.

Whatever Honzo’s aroma was, his phone call meant money. Not easy money, or even especially big money for what you had to do to get it, but roguing cornfields for a couple, three weeks of a summer could help pay down a lot of debt. For me, it was legal fees.

Honzo would contract acres from one of the seed companies—Pioneer, Monsanto,
AgriGold—and call the crew together. Me and Dennis, maybe another guy or two. We’d walk the fields, miles back and forth, with spades sharpened up to chop rogues or volunteers, types of corn that deviated. It’s primitive work of the hand and foot, a job that usually gets started around mid-July, the hottest slice of summer. The last time I worked with Honzo, though, it got hot in May, even hotter over a rainless June, and the call came a good two weeks early.

“Ready to rogue corn, Shcotty?” Missing teeth up front, Honzo had to kind of side-lisp any word with a hissing sound in it. He had a growl in his voice, too, like a dopey cartoon dog who cursed a lot. “Monsanto’s got acres, and they need that shit walked like now. $16 corn, some of it.”

The pay was by the acre, scaled to how hard the work was. A $16-per-acre field meant tough walking and a big-enough check, if you could work long hours with a small crew.

Buy a copy of Midwestern Gothic: Summer 2015 – Issue 18 for the rest of the story, and many others inspired by the Midwest.

If The New Black, Dark House Press’s first title, was the best of what was already out in the dark wild of the neo noir landscape, then their latest anthology, Exigencies, thrusts new progeny into the abyss with new twists on the genre.

Richard Thomas, the editor-in-chief is attempting to stake out a nuanced space in the oft over simplified horror genre. Most casual readers and non-fans may not think there are sub-genres to horror, likely associating their stereotypes about the genre to the limited experiences they may have with authors (Poe, Lovecraft, etc.) or even film. But they’d do themselves a favor by sampling this anthology, which applies a tone and aesthetic across straight horror, sci-fi, contemporary lit, and even fantasy. The space Thomas carves out is in feel, the “I’ll know it when I see it,” aesthetic, making this the perfect entry point into the new black for casual fans. Find something you like, then dig deeper.

Some of my favorite stories were “Cat Calls” by Rebecca Jones-Howe, which practically oozed sex from the page, but carried a latent undercurrent of threat and malice. The dread running under Letita Trent’s story, “Wilderness” was masterful and made me wish she’d extended the short into a full length work. (Maybe she has, be right back to go check.) The visceral violence of “Monster Season” by Joshua Blair actually made me put the book down for a moment and go grab a palate cleanser of something happy. And “Single Lens Reflection” had a certain poignancy to it that takes the expectation you’ve been given in the stories before and spins the genre on its head again.

Thomas says, “…in that pulsing abyss, that endless yawning void, there is a tiny light shining.” In some stories, it’s a glimmer of hope. In others, it’s the siren call, a trick to get you to break upon the rocks. In all the stories in Exigencies, it brings you in closer, calling out to the darkest things inside you.

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The Spring Issue of Midwestern Gothic marks our entry into Year 4 of the journal, since we launched issue 1 in spring of 2011, this particular time of year serves as an anniversary of sorts and a marker of how far we’ve come. When folks ask at bookfairs if we’re new, I typically tell them that we’re not old, but not new either. I’m not sure when I’ll stop thinking of ourselves as a new entry to the lit scene, but it’s probably fast approaching.

It’s also interesting to me how different trends emerge as we put an issue together, and the trend that stood out to me this time around was how much short, short fiction we got. In a way, this almost feels like a flash fiction issue in that we received and selected more compact, powerful pieces of narrative than usual. One of my favorites from the issue was “Psychiatrist” by Corey Mertes, a short fiction about a strained relationship including a titular drinking game, which culminates in a pointed question designed to reveal a marital affair. The story examines the lead up to this moment from which there’s no going back and the fallout afterword in a way that perfectly captures the tension, second guessing, and “no going back” moments associated with decisions that come to define people. Here’s an excerpt:

She asks more questions. Rob replenishes drinks after everyone changes places for the third time. Allie thinks: Sometimes they tell the truth, other times they lie; sometimes they get up and move, and sometimes they don’t. Once in a while someone says “Psychiatrist,” but just as often they remain silent. She notices Suzanne can’t stop eating snack food and wonders if it is part of the game.

They change places after a lie, she notes, but not always—they move after the truth sometimes too. Where do they move to? Damn it! She hasn’t paid any attention to that. Now she’s really confused.

“Don’t be such a prude, Allie,” Greg says, after they’d been playing the game for half an hour. “Open it up a little.”

Everyone is laughing and having a good time except her. She tries to play along, to act the good hostess despite everything. Rule 6: Don’t be afraid to step out of your comfort zone. She asks Kristina when she lost her virginity, Andrew how many men he’s slept with. His response—fewer than fifty—evokes a selfcongratulatory chuckle from Travis, to his left, “Psychiatrist,” and then howls of laughter as everyone changes places again. Allie’s frustration escalates with each round. Why doesn’t Rob sense her alienation and come to her aid?

Buy a copy of Midwestern Gothic: Spring 2015 – Issue 17
for the rest of the story, and many others inspired by the Midwest.

The Winter Issue of Midwestern Gothic is a little extra special this time around because it features the winners and finalists of our first ever Lake Prize, an annual awards for fiction and poetry that best represents the Midwest. It seeks to reward those who see the beauty of the region, whether that be quiet forests, gutted industrial wastelands, small towns or vibrant urban neighborhoods. The first time round, we got two stellar judges, Ander Monson and Mary Biddinger, and honestly, we couldn’t have been happier with the response we got to the contest.

While I loved all the Lake Prize entries, I wanted to highlight one of the other stellar pieces we published, “Longing” by Ben Tanzer. It’s a familiar scene to most folks, neighbors spending time together with their kids. But underneath that runs the protagonists desire for something different than what he’s got now. Is it freedom, is it the separateness that alcohol brings, or is it acting on the sexual tension he perceives between himself and the other husband? Longing, to me, is something core to a lot of the Midwestern experience – most folks have the responsibility and the integrity to hang on to something far longer than they should, even when what the desperately want and need is something else. Here’s an excerpt:

It’s what we, Lisa and I, do with them, Rita and Mark. Someone comes into a bottle of something new, different, on a work trip, or vacation, maybe from some random visitor from out of town, and we drink it until it’s gone, slowly for the most part, and civilized.

When the kids were younger we were more self-conscious about drinking until things got blurry or we couldn’t walk home easily. Back then there were diapers to change and bottles to heat-up.

Now we just let them run and run around Rita and Mark’s house, watching the same movies again and again, while we just drink and drink.

Tonight it’s whiskey.

I could tell you that I don’t have a problem with alcohol, but that’s what problem drinkers tend to say, and I am not a problem drinker.
They also tend to say that I only drink when I want to, that I can stop whenever I want, and that it doesn’t interfere with my life.

All of which I have definitely said, and all of which I mean.

Still, if you drink until things are blurry, and you cannot easily walk, and this despite the fact that your children are just steps away watching Despicable Me or chasing Guinea Pigs around the house, you might have a problem.

The real question I suppose is do I ever long for a drink, and the answer to that is yes, all the time. I can taste the alcohol hit my tongue even when it isn’t there, and feel the warmth burn the back of my throat.

So, do I long for that, that feeling of being both alive and dead all at once? Yes, endlessly.

Buy a copy of Midwestern Gothic : Winter 2015 – Issue 16 for the rest of the story, the Lake Prize winners and finalists, and many others inspired by the Midwest.

5 of 5 Stars

Bittersweet has never been as beautiful, heartbreaking, and provoking as it is in Sarah Elizabeth Schantz’s coming-of-age tale, Fig.

When Fig realizes Mama is sick, the deep love she bears for her mother becomes her burden as well. She takes on the fierce battle to help Mama reclaim her mind from a disease as constricting as barbed wire, schizophrenia. An insurmountable task for a six-year-old. Over the course of the novel, Fig makes daily sacrifices, ones she fully believes will make Mama whole again, but instead ends up losing herself in the process.

Schantz’s writing style can best be described as evocative, lovely and heartbreaking. She achieves clarity in communicating the raw emotion of her characters in a way that feels unrushed, yet there are no wasted breaths in Fig. Each word, sentence and paragraph reveals the unplumbed depths of the novel’s layers in a way that makes you want to gather the young Fig into your arms and say, “There, there. It’s going to be O.K.,” even though you can see no way out of the despair her family is trapped in.

While the book centers around characters with mental disease, I felt Schantz avoided making an overt, unearned commentary on mental illness, aside from that the people it affects are so much more than their condition. Schizophrenia and OCD manifest in Fig and her mother in good and in bad ways, and both are people that are worthy of compassion. Often, those who struggle with these types of conditions are ignored or broomed into the corners of society – Schantz shows us that these people are our mothers, our daughters, our fathers and sons. We should not relegate them to the edges.

The novel also explores the nuanced relationship between daughter and mother, girl and woman, self and other. It’s a rare debut from an author that bares the soul not only of the characters, but of the reader as well.

If you want to read and remember one book this year, make sure it’s Fig.

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