Indiana Winter , livre ebook

indiana winter
indiana winter
susan neville
with an introduction by
dan wakefield
indiana university press
bloomington & indianapolis
© 1994 by susan neville
introduction © 1995 by dan wakefield
all rights reserved
no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. the association of american university presses’ resolution on permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
    the paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of american national standard for information sciences—permanence of paper for printed library materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

manufactured in the united states of america
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
neville, susan.
indiana winter / susan neville.     p. cm.
    isbn 0-253-34004-7 (alk. paper). — isbn 0-253-20879-3 (pbk.: alk. paper)
    1. indiana—literary collections. I. title. ps3564.e8525I47   1994
814′.54—dc20 93-40692
2   3   4   5   00   99   98   97   96   95
it will be seen that men go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly , and one by one .
Charles Mackay, from Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
contents
preface
acknowledgments
an introduction to indiana winter by dan wakefield
stone
indiana winter
whirligig!
nineveh
jubilee
hey john, won’t you write a song about my sister stella?
quake
patterns
the tent
seeds: a meditation on the body
the garden city church of christ
the problem of evil
in the john dillinger museum
prisoners
in the suburbs
preface
“I don’t know how to pray,” Mary Oliver says in one of her poems, “but I do know how to pay attention.” I took that line as my aesthetic when I began this book—a book I had intended as a collection of prose pieces about Indiana and spiritual icons. I wanted to do something closer to journalism than to fiction or autobiography, something that would focus my eye out onto the world.
What I ended up doing was following my curiosity wherever it took me. I decided to trust it. If I was even the slightest bit curious about something, I barged right into the middle of it—talked to people, took notes. My curiosity took me into prisons and a jail, into country churches, small towns and farms, to the State Fair, the Dillinger Museum in Nashville, John Mellencamp’s art opening in Seymour, and to New Harmony on the day of Iben Browning’s predicted earthquake.
My curiosity also took me, in ways I didn’t realize, and would have guarded against if I’d known, on a road that led right back to myself and my own history—the very thing I was trying to avoid.
I wandered through Indiana with a question that was very quirkily mine, and which, for good or ill, drew certain types of images and stories from the people and the landscape as though it were magnetized.
The question is in many ways still confusing to me, but it runs something like this: I grew up in Indianapolis, in a middle-class, suburban family, in a neighborhood of other middle-class, suburban families. My mother and father were very loving and very kind. My mother was also manic-depressive, a grand weaver of delusions. So in some of these pieces, as much as they’re about high school gyms and car dealerships and sycamores, there’s a concern with the difference between story-telling and delusion-weaving, and the difference between private and public madness. My mother’s illness made me very aware of the difference between literal and metaphorical truth. It also made me very conscious of things that are hidden, of all kinds of silences. I include the personal essay “In the Suburbs” to help mark the place where the external landscape is filtered through my personal one.
I should say too that I play fast and loose with genre definitions in these pieces. Many of them occupy some gray border area between the short story, personal essay, and journalism. Some days all I had to do was pay attention to the people and the places around me and, simply, report. “Nineveh” and “Quake” are two obvious examples. The towns of Nineveh and New Harmony wrote those two essays—every detail and bit of conversation. I eavesdropped shamelessly in crowds in order to get a sense of what people were thinking and saying when they weren’t self-conscious, as they usually are when they know they’re being interviewed. Of course then I often had to fictionalize details in order to protect people’s privacy.
I think of the collection as a meditation about a place as seen through the lens of my own questions. In four of the pieces—“Jubilee,” “The Garden City Church of Christ,” “The Problem of Evil,” and “In the John Dillinger Museum”—I write about composite characters that fit my sense of a place as seen through a mind I had no legitimate way of approaching except through the imagination. The “I” narrator in Jubilee is the only “I” narrator I wouldn’t claim is me; that’s Diane talking, from John Mellencamp’s song “Jack and Diane.” I hope that the questions raised by the juxtaposition of the imagined and the observed become part of the meditation.
I’d like to thank those people who have helped me with this book: my husband, Ken, and children, Steven and Laura; my friends and readers Jean Anaporte, John Gallman, Michael Martone, Jim Watt, Kathleen O’Fallon, Grace Farrell, Andrew Levy, Susan and Michael Sutherlin, Kent Calder, Tom Emery, Dale Hathaway, Margaret Brabant, Craig Auchter, and Scott Russell Sanders.
And finally: My mother died last spring, six weeks almost to the day after my grandmother. This book is dedicated to their memory and to my mother’s courage.
acknowledgments
“Stone” and “Garden City Church of Christ” appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly . “Indiana Winter” and “The Problem of Evil” appeared in The Sycamore Review . “In the John Dillinger Museum” appeared in The Sycamore Review and Pushcart Prize XIV: Best of the Small Presses . “Whirligig!” appeared in Ambergris , “Nineveh” in Traces . “Jubilee” and “Hey John” appeared in Arts Indiana . “Quake” was published in Townships . “The Tent” first appeared in Crazyhorse and was reprinted in The Hopewell Review . “Seeds” appeared in the Mid-American Review and “In the Suburbs” in Boulevard . An earlier version of “Prisoners” was published in The North American Review .
an introduction to indiana winter by dan wakefield
First I was drawn to the book because of the title. Indiana Winter made me realize I loved both those words, their sound and what they meant to me as a native Hoosier in exile: homeland and season, especially the white magic months of childhood when deepest mysteries of life seemed coded in snowflake intricacy and etched in the frost of windowpanes. There is darkness for me in both words too—wintry silences of warring parents, the landlocked claustrophobia of the flat, dry heart of the country in the capital we learned in grade school was “the largest city in the world not on a navigable waterway.” Indiana winter—the juxtaposition seems fitting, evoking doubled ironies of light and night, warmth and cold, outside and in, comfort and threat; the architecture of experience.
I reminded myself you can’t tell a book by its title any more than by its cover, and anyway how could a collection of idiosyncratic essays by an author I’d never heard of begin to address—much less fulfill—the expectations that seemingly simple title stirred in me? For all I knew, this book published by the author’s home-state university press might simply be a series of nostalgic digressions on the lost arts of canning applesauce and hostessing a quilting bee. The first paragraph of the author’s preface, however, immediately told me I was in the right arena.
“‘I don’t know how to pray,” Mary Oliver says in one of her poems, ‘but I do know how to pay attention.’ I took that line as my aesthetic when I began this book—a book I had intended as a collection of prose pieces about Indiana and spiritual icons. I wanted to do something closer to journalism than to fiction or autobiography, something that would focus my eye out onto the world. What I ended up doing was following my curiosity wherever it took me....”
I was reminded of another author’s explanation of method from an earlier book of remarkable journalistic essays: Joan Didion’s Slouching towards Bethlehem (which I reviewed for the New York Times Book Review when it was published in 1968, calling it “some of the best prose written today in this country”). In the title piece of that groundbreaking collection—a unique “new journalism” report on the hippie phenomenon in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury District—Didion wrote, “When I first went to San Francisco in that cold late spring of 1967 I did not even know what I wanted to find out, so