Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Home Again anthology features work of USI Liberal Arts faculty
|
Jim McGarrah and Tom Watson met while in the MFA program at Vermont College, but they both have Hoosier roots. Watson, online instructor of writing for Indiana University, grew up in Bloomington. McGarrah, USI assistant professor of English, is a Princeton native. The two are co-editors of a new anthology of essays about living in Indiana. Published by the Indiana Historical Society Press, Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana, addresses what it means to make a home in the Hoosier State. “We included the whole state,” McGarrah said. “The idea is Indiana as the heartland, and not just its rural areas but its urban areas as well.” In their preface, McGarrah and Watson wrote: “At first we envisioned a collection that would celebrate Indiana as the crossroads of America, a place where there are both steel mills and mill ponds, congested cities and cornfields, high rises and microscopic hamlets. We sought to showcase the excellent writing talents of Hoosier writers. What we discovered while amassing the selections in this book was something larger and vastly more important than any mere catalog of essays reflecting upon Indiana from diverse points of view. We found we had tapped into themes relating to traditional American values, like home, family, security, and the Protestant ethic. We found our colleagues who submitted work to us wrote about quests for a better life, a life rooted in Indiana. We found the essays spoke about staying in Indiana to continue that quest, moving to Indiana and following that quest, or moving back to Indiana to bring closure to it. This book taught us valuable lessons about what we mean when we say we are home again.” In addition to McGarrah, USI faculty contributors are Patricia Aakhus, instructor in English; Leisa Belleau, instructor in English; Matthew Graham, director of Creative Writing, and Dr. Thomas Wilhelmus, professor of English. “Pat Aakhus has a beautiful lyrical essay about hearing a choral mass at Saint Meinrad. Leisa Belleau has a really good essay about growing up in Rockport, Indiana, and being fascinated by James Dean as a young girl back in the 1950s. Tom Wilhelmus wrote the forward to the book, about ways of looking at home again as it relates to Indiana, and the book begins with a poem entitled Indiana from Matthew Graham’s collection of poems, 1946. I wrote the title essay for the anthology about moving back to southern Indiana after living and working on racetracks for a decade.” Other Evansville area contributors are Scott Saalman ’87, Melanie Culbertson, winner of the Glimmer Train Press Short Story Award, and Margaret McMullan and Dr. William Hemminger, both professors of English at the University of Evansville. The book ends with an essay on being a native Midwesterner by Kurt Vonnegut (Player Piano, Cat's Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions), who is from Indianapolis. Other essay authors include Ed Breen, Les Edgerton, Rick Farrant, Michele Martone, Susan Troy Meyer, Alyce Miller, Deborah Zarka Miller, Susan Neville, Scott Russell Sanders, and Phil Schlemmer. Michael Steinberg, founding editor of Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction, said of the anthology, “By turns lyrical, nostalgic, hard-edged, and elegiac, the personal essays and memoirs in Home Again are in tone, spirit, and intent, a loving ode to the manners, mores, and idiosyncrasies that characterize the state of Indiana. At the same time, this fine collection is an evocative testimony to the longings and ambivalence all of us feel about the places we call home, be it the flat farmland and quite villages of rural Indiana, or the dissonant ambience of cities like New York and Los Angeles.” There will be readings and book signings for the anthology all over the state, including at the Evansville Borders on October 21. In January, the spring 2007 RopeWalk Reading Series will feature a reading by USI faculty who contributed to the anthology. Home Again: Essays and Memoirs from Indiana is 206 pages and available at the USI Bookstore, the Indiana Historical Society’s Basile History Market gift store, and at bookstores throughout Indiana for $19.95. |
Copyright © 2013 University of Southern Indiana. All rights reserved.