F183.
East Coast, West Coast, Best Coast: Writing the Midwest
Friday, February 9, 2024
12:10 pm to 1:25 pm
“If you opened me up, you’d find Ohio,” writes Maggie Smith. Writers from all coasts wrestle with the question of how to write place, but it’s especially charged in the Midwest, where our forests and lakes, our asphalt and industry are so often called fly-over country. How can stories dig deeper into the truth of this place and its people? Whether we’ve been here our whole lives, left and returned, or never want to go back, the Midwest lives in the body, not in our heads but our bones.
Participants
Megan Stielstra is the author of three collections. Her work appears in The Best American Essays, New York Times, The Believer, Longreads, Tin House, and on NPR. She teaches creative nonfiction at Northwestern University and is an editor at large with Northwestern University Press.
Maggie Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful and six other books of poetry and prose, including Goldenrod, Keep Moving, and Good Bones. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry.
Rebecca Makkai's fifth book, I Have Some Questions for You, was published in 2023. Her novel The Great Believers was a finalist for both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award; it won the LA Times Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal, and the Stonewall Award. She is artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago.
Denne Michele Norris is the editor-in-chief of Electric Literature, winner of the 2022 Whiting Literary Magazine Prize. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has been supported by MacDowell and Tin House, and widely published. Her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, is forthcoming from Random House.
Ashley C. Ford is an essayist and the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir Somebody’s Daughter, published by Flatiron Books. Ford is the former cohost of The HBO companion podcast Lovecraft Country Radio, and the current host of Ben & Jerry’s Into The Mix.
