By Maria Bowler
In his new book Midwest Futures, Phil Christman examines culture, geography, capital, class, and future-making through the notoriously ill-defined region of the Midwest. A former substitute teacher, shelter worker, and home health aide, he currently lectures in the English department at University of Michigan. His work has appeared in The Hedgehog Review, Commonweal, The Christian Century, The Outline, and other places. He holds an MFA from the University of South Carolina-Columbia. He is the editor of the Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing, a journal sponsored by the University of Michigan's Prison Creative Arts Project. Midwest Futures is released from Belt Publishing on April 7.
Inspired by the way the Midwest was surveyed into six-by-six square mile grids, you organized the book into 36 1000-word “plats” or squares. What was it like writing prose within that constraint? What did it allow you to do, or think about?
I mean, for one thing, it was really useful for letting me know when I was done! This topic is infinite and I kept wanting to read five more books, then five more books, then five more books. It also kept the book short—I always wanted it to be something you could fit in a stocking and read in an afternoon. I was thinking of books like Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? or Kristin Dombek’s The Selfishness of Others—a kind of tightly coiled book, a book that feels like an unexpectedly intense conversation that you can’t pull away from. (I can’t know if that’s what I achieved, but it’s what I was after.)
You begin the book with a historical anecdote that shows how “ungraspable” the topic (and, indeed, the geographical reality) of the Midwest is. What drew you to taking on such a notoriously fuzzy subject matter?
It’s kinda funny—everything I write that anybody likes ends up being about the sorts of large, fuzzy concepts that I instinctively distrust. (I also wrote an article once about masculinity, which is a term with no fixed definition.) I think I do find it satisfying to try to narrow all that vagueness down to some definite assertions, even though this also means that I risk being wrong in a big way, or at least that I risk landing very hard with some readers and not at all with others. (Some people read what I write about the Midwest and then email me to say basically “Nope” and then describe a completely different Midwest that I have never encountered. It’s just going to happen.) Also, of course, my wife asked me about it, which is the anecdote you’re referring to. She’s a Texan and she expected the Midwest to have distinctive, nameable cultural habits similar to those that Texans have, or that Southerners have. It turns out that we do but that we have trouble naming them, beyond the silly jokey stuff (saying “oop”; eating hotdish—interesting how many of these seem distinctively Minnesotan/North Dakotan). She thought it was weird how hard of a time we had talking about ourselves as Midwesterners, and once I saw that through her eyes, I thought it was weird too. If there’s a section of your own experience that you can’t describe without vagueness or cliche, something’s probably going on there.
As the title Midwest Futures suggests, you aren’t simply interested in the historical construction of the Midwest, but how ideas about the future shape people and policies. How do you see your role as a writer intersect with the work of imagining possible futures?
This question hits me kind of hard right now because I’m realizing that a possible future that I had really staked my heart on and even worked hard to actualize—Bernie Sanders possibly being President, a sweeping Green New Deal, Puerto Rico’s debt forgiven by a stroke of the pen, etc.—may not work out. (We’ll see how he does in the final debate.) But I think it’s very hard for people to imagine a future right now. We’re living in a time when it seems like we’re asymptotically approaching apocalypse—simultaneously like something absolutely horrible will happen soon and we’ll all be wandering around in rags afterward, and also like nothing will ever change, we will just recycle the same dull half-dead political figures and reconfigure a handful of threadbare ideas and reboot the same movies and every so often a celebrity will die and you’ll think, Didn’t they die a couple years ago? It’s an awful way to live. I don’t quite think my way out of it in the book but I wanted to try to begin to, for my own sake and for readers’ sakes. Doom and gloom have a place aesthetically and as a kind of mutually pleasing catharsis but past a certain point they’re not helpful. Till an asteroid wipes us all out we’ve got to keep trying to make the world livable for people after us.
You point to how varying visions of the future—including acquisitive, racist, expansionist, and utopian ones—have shaped the Midwest. In what ways do you see increasing awareness of climate change and pictures of apocalyptic scenarios shaping our plans for the future?
I think in the short term we have to worry about rich-people land grabs and especially about attempts to secure rights to the Great Lakes, since, you know, it’s kind of easy to see how the idea of selling off all that freshwater at a premium might excite some billionaire who foresees a hotter world. We have to fight to keep as much of that wealth as possible belonging to everyone. That’s going to require political vigilance and organizing. Native American activists are already fighting this battle, e.g. the Standing Rock protests and the protests against Enbridge Line 5. When you’re trying to fight the privatization of tons of freshwater, of a relatively fertile part of the country, etc., it’s not a bad idea to take at least some cues from people who have a history of believing that land can’t be “sold.”
Critical history seems so integral to this project. How did you approach the giant task of researching for this project? Do you have any advice for writers who are engaging with archives?
I will find the section of the library that roughly fits my topic and just grab everything that looks interesting. I use Google Books a lot because shockingly weird and obscure things are on there, including, in my book’s case, a source that some of the historians I consulted didn’t seem aware of. (It comes up in the book’s very first section.) It’s super tedious, and what keeps me going is just the idea that the actual facts of the case will always turn out to be more insane than whatever I’m imagining, and the book will be better and cooler and more interesting if I try to find those. When I first took creative nonfiction classes, there was this really poisonous idea that it’s OK to fabricate some stuff or conflate certain people together in order to make the story more aesthetically powerful. Aside from being dishonest and getting us bad books like A Million Little Pieces, or that memoir by that lady who said she’d been raised by wolves (!), this view also totally misunderstands the aesthetics of nonfiction. Part of what we enjoy about Janet Malcolm or Renata Adler is precisely those ill-fitting details that would seem extraneous if you were making all of this up, or the moments when they admit that their memory might be failing them. When I get exhausted with research, I remember my favorite moments in those writers, and think about what might still be out there waiting for me.
What do you hope might become possible if we can see the region and its imaginary a little more clearly?
I don’t know if this is just me being weird, but I feel like our culture is just pervasively insulting, pervasively trivializing, of all of us, most of the time. Billboards, commercials, movies, emails from HR, tweet threads that begin “Buckle up”: I feel like we talk to each other in ways that minimize everyone’s complexity. I want to live in a social world that doesn’t do that! A lot of my writing is me just searching for a register in which to speak that doesn’t feel to me like it does this. (And probably me not finding it.) I think that if we understood each other more slowly and more carefully, we might treat each other better. And if we then turned that enlarged imagination on to the incredibly beautiful and sometimes severe place where we live, we might treat it a little better. At least we might keep fracking fluid out of the groundwater more of the time. Who knows if I’m right, but that’s the hope.
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