What We’re Reading with MAR Blog Co-Editor Gen Greer

Dirtbag Massachusetts: A Confessional by Isaac Fitzgerald. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022. 240 pages. $16.73, paperback.

As someone who lives off of Dunkin Donuts coffee and constantly smells like smoke, I felt it was my duty to do a write up on Isaac Fitzgerald’s 2022 memoir “Dirtbag Massachusetts”. This collection of chaotic and wonderfully crafted essays takes us through the interconnected chapters and spaces of Fitzgerald’s life: a Boston homeless shelter, a Catholic confessional booth, a boy’s boarding school dormitory, a BDSM porn compound, a San Francisco biker bar, a FBR (Free Burma Rangers) storehouse. In each of these essays Fitzgerald grapples with the question of what it means to try to do and be good in the face of pain and a fear that you and your body are an unsolvable problem.

If I’m being honest I had my reservations about this book and mainly picked it up because it had stamps of approval from authors who I respect and trust. Throughout my life I’ve been surrounded by books about white men finding meaning and being labeled as geniuses for their narratives. Yet so many of their narratives fail to fully interrogate the systems which act upon our world and how other people are affected by those systems. This book doesn’t make that mistake. Instead it gives us an honest account of the human truths that are hardest for us to deal with. Good people can fuck up in some pretty major ways. It’s easy to self-medicate when you don’t know how to deal with yourself. The people who you love the most are often the ones most capable of causing you the deepest pain. 

Though there are plenty of lines in this memoir which will stay with me, the one I feel best encapsulates this book is, “Which is to say, some days you are happy to be alive, and you know you’ll never forget the feeling or lose the knack. And other days you do forget; you do lose it. Nothing happens in order, and you have to do it over and over again” (p. 61). We learn, we grow, we move forward, and we backtrack. This memoir serves as a reminder that life isn’t linear and all we can do is show up for each other in the ways we know how. If that’s something you feel like you need to hear or if you just want a funny, thoughtful memoir with some light insurance fraud go put “Dirtbag Massachusetts” on your summer reading list.

What We’re Reading, with MAR Blog Co-Editor Tyler Michael Jacobs

Maybe I‘ve been feeling a bit homesick, for lack of a better word, as of late. The semester ended and I’ve found myself with too much time on my hands. So, I picked up the copy of Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (Vintage Classics, 1994) I had lying around in some unpacked boxes in my apartment and started reading. I always forget how much I love this novel by Cather who might arguably be Nebraska’s most famous author coming from the red grass fields she writes about in her novel, until I pick up the book again. I had the pleasure of visiting The National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, NE last June and got to see many of the places written about in the novel: the back door Jim runs from to go to the neighbor’s when his grandparents move into Black Hawk from the farmland outside of the town, mirroring from where Willa Cather once ran. Returning to this novel once again with a greater perspective of the influence of place and what Cather is giving us, is bringing more resonance to the work this countless read-through to truly feel the “…motion in the landscape; in the fresh, easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo were galloping, galloping….” (18). Cather’s novel is as close to this Nebraska as we can come to know; however, there’s still the same amount of sky blanketing a similar treeless prairie.

––Tyler Michael Jacobs, Mid-American Review

What We’re Reading, from Associate Editor Caitlyn Mlodzik

I have always been drawn to books with animal perspectives, so when I picked up a copy of Kathleen Rooney’s Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey (2020) at the Toledo Friends of the Public Library earlier this year, I took a chance. I am not typically drawn to war novels or any novels set during WWI or WWII, but Rooney’s novel was partially told in the perspective of a pigeon, so I had to see how that would play out. It turns out that Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is based on the true story of a homing pigeon who saved the lives of over 500 men in WWI, including Major Whittlesey. Rooney crafts a heartwarming, historically-rich, and accessible text that flies the reader straight to the battlefield, not shying away from the gruesome realities of war but not reveling in them either. Additionally, with Major Whittlesey, Rooney navigates his tumultuous return to life after the war as he deals with fame and adjusting to civilian life. Another surprise Rooney had for me was that Major Whittlesey was gay, and her attention to historical detail depicted the realities of being queer in that time period. Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey is a must-read for animal lovers, history buffs, those interested in queer history, and lovers of seeing hidden or misrepresented histories come to light as they should have long ago.  

—Caitlyn Mlodzik, MAR

What We’re Reading, from Associate Editor Mary Simmons

Whenever I need to reconnect with my personal sense of artistic inspiration, I revisit Anne Carson’s Short Talks (Brick Books Classics, 1992/2015). Short Talks was first introduced to me in a creative nonfiction course in undergrad, and later as a hybrid form in my senior seminar class. Over the years, I’ve approached this text in many different ways, and the beauty of Carson’s work in this collection is that it defies definition and begs to be revisited. The book opens with Short Talk on Homo Sapiens, which starts with an early human “record[ing] the moon’s phases on the handles of his tools” and moves into a “Face in a pan of water” and the inevitable point in stories where the teller “can see no further” (27). In just a few sentences, we leap through history, the self, and the very nature of stories as we approach Short Talks, explorer and human and face and, perhaps, storytellers ourselves. In quick, flashing images, Carson finds that stopping point in the story, and it is the very start, the beginning of what we consider ourselves to be. The point from which we can go no further is our own reflection, shallow. There is no other world in the bottom of a pan of water; there is only self, and that self is rendered blind by the very nature of storytelling. I always find myself marveling at this very first short talk and how it speaks to the rest of the collection, setting us up for discovery beyond what can be discovered, and for story beyond what can be seen.

One of my favorites is Short Talk on Ovid. Carson transports Ovid into a more modernized setting so organically and casually, with the “radio…on the floor” as the only concrete indicator that Ovid has somehow been displaced in time (38). But transported into an almost dreamscape between realities, Ovid carries his exile with him, as if his immortality within this short talk is another form of exile, or at least an extension of it. I am always struck by the understated and profound beauty of Ovid “put[ting] on sadness like a garment” (38). It is no longer a part of him, but something he wears and carries with him. There is a certain weight to grief that is outside of the self, but still intrinsically tied to you. Throughout this short talk, there is a certain gentleness within hopelessness. Though “no one will ever read” the epic poem Ovid is trying to teach himself to be able to write, there is still meaning to be found in the fact that he chooses to “[go] on writing” (38).

—Mary Simmons, MAR

Why We Chose It: “Character Sketch for the Oil CEO” by Alyssa Quinn

“Character Sketch for the Oil CEO” by Alyssa Quinn will be featured in an upcoming issue of Mid-American Review.

“Character Sketch for the Oil CEO” by Alyssa Quinn is an astounding metafictional work that shifts the authorial lens back onto the author (fictional, in this case). Though the story maps out the traits and behaviors of an oil CEO, the story also reveals the biases and preferences of the writer, an implicit character in the narrative. The writer deliberates over whether the CEO can be blamed for the cataclysmic oil spill his company has likely caused. The writer agonizes over this guilt in the same way the character might: “he is just a single person in such a large system, does he really matter that much, can he really be blamed? Can he?” The unfamiliarity of hearing this wavering from the writer exposes the tendency of writers to replicate themselves in their characters.

This story also challenges perceptions of how real characters are and what their creators owe them. Intimate description is usually considered a fundamental tool of characterization: an achievement when used well. Quinn makes it feel like an invasion. “You could follow him into the shower, describe the way he washes.” We chose this piece not because it sketches an Oil CEO well—though it does—but because it makes us doubt whether we should be sketching him at all. Perhaps he does not want to be “summoned by every sentence.”

—Daniel Marcantuono, MAR