A Midwest Writing Community

by Julie Tollefson

A few times a year, I get to write about writers for a local magazine. It’s one of my favorite assignments. In the last couple of years, I’ve interviewed award-winning science fiction authors, illustrators, poets, and short story writers. Their subjects and settings range widely through Kansas and fantasy worlds, small towns and big cities, quests and epic wars, sentient dinosaur skeletons and meatloaf. Here's a sampling, in no particular order:

 Kansas geography, politics, and culture play pivotal roles in shaping the characters in Becky Mandelbaum’s short fiction collection, Bad Kansas (University of Georgia Press, 2017). “In my experience, Kansas is a complicated place for people, especially younger people, who aren’t sure what the world looks like yet,” Mandelbaum told me. “It either pulls people apart or pushes them together.” Bad Kansas won the 2016 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction.

Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (Tor.com, 2016)—named one of National Public Radio’s Best Books of 2016 and finalist for a number of best novella awards, including the Hugo and Nebula—takes H.P. Lovecraft’s Dreamlands world and adds strong, powerful women lacking in the original.

The Queens of Innis Lear (Tor, 2018), inspired by author Tessa Gratton's frustrations with Shakepeare's King Lear, tells the story of the King's daughters as they prepare to fight to save their kingdom.

The young heroine in Mary O'Connell’s Dear Reader (Flatiron Books, 2017) believes it’s better to read about experiences than live them. But then her AP English teacher disappears, and disturbing clues appear in a copy of Wuthering Heights, magically transformed into a real-time diary of her teacher’s misadventures.

Karen M. Vaughn’s debut story collection, A Kiss for a Dead Film Star (Brain Mill Press, 2016), bends and warps reality in a style her publisher dubs “psycho-medical-magical realism.” The six stories, though very different, all explore aspects of loss. “It sounds odd,” Vaughn said, “but I almost feel like sometimes I write these stories to inoculate myself against possible tragedy and disaster.”

Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir (Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2016) is Thomas Pecore Weso's account of family and food in north-central Wisconsin from World War II through the Vietnam era. We would be happier as a society, he says, if we make our meals ceremonial. "We need to sit down and actually eat real food, and we need to have real conversations while we eat real food," he said.

Marilyn Pollack Naron loves illustration, food, and writing, and all three converge in A Meatloaf in Every Oven: Two Chatty Cooks, One Iconic Dish and Dozens of Recipes—from Mom's to Mario Batali's (Grand Central, 2017). Naron illustrated the cookbook, written by Frank Bruni and Jennifer Steinhauer.

Thomas Fox Averill explores how everyday people contributed to early scientific advances as he tells the story of a 19th century woman who turns to fossil hunting after the death of her husband in Found Documents from the Life of Nell Johnson Doerr (University of New Mexico Press, 2018).

Miriam, a gifted cook and singer, wanders the American political, communal, and spiritual desert, from the 1960s through the late 2000s, in Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg's Miriam's Well: A Modern Day Exodus (Ice Cube Press, 2018).

What a lot of talent concentrated in our mid-sized Midwestern community! It’s a great place to be a writer. I hope you’ll check out the work of some of these authors and illustrators. Also check out Lawrence Magazine—each issue’s Bookmarks section features mini-profiles of three bookish people in the Lawrence, Kansas, area.


Who are the local writers and illustrators in your community?