Letters from the Country—Carol Bly

a lonely farm homestead in a snow-covered field with trees on three sides and an empty road in front Cover flap text: Letters from the Country is made up of a series of short essays that created a sensation when they appeared in The Minnesota Monthly a few years ago. Their author, Carol Bly, is a sophisticated writer whose fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and American Review. She is also a member of a rural community—Madison, Minnesota; population 2,242—which like communities everywhere finds itself isolated, perplexed, and increasingly at a loss in contemporary America. Wishing to do something about the malaise of the countryside, Carol Bly has decided to stand up and speak about it—a kid of one-woman town meeting.

Carol Bly’s typical approach is to present a problem and then with her own special brand of practical idealism to offer a remedy. Hence, to deal with the lack of significant communication among the members of the community (“There is little lonelier than small-town life when small talk is the principal tool of peace”) she proposes a new institution called “Enemy Evenings” (“Obviously some better word has to be used, but I like the pure madness of this one”), in which people with strongly divergent viewpoints about a given matter will be brought together to speak to each other and to the community. For example, she proposes a panel on the quality of life in rural towns that would include leaders of the Jaycees, conservative pastors, a community organizer, and psychologists from the local mental health center. Concerned about the second-class citizenship that rural people are given and accept in maters of culture, Carol Bly proposes that the local Chamber of Commerce become the center of cultural activity rather than an artificial “Arts Council,” that high school teachers rotate between the city and the countryside, and that when Wolfgang Amadeus gets his National Endowment grant and comes home to spend it that he be brought right into the community rather than be permitted to skulk in noble boredom above it.

What makes this all so fresh and appealing is that Carol Bly writes with a remarkable style as well as a brave, lively mind and a full heart. Reading her account of why many men drink heavily at Christmas time, of the peace and wonder brought by blizzards, of the fantasy life of a temporary field hand, of what a rural community goes through when it finds it must fire its minister or contemplate the impeachment of a President—is to be in touch with a first-rate writer whose wit and savvy about country matters place her in the company of Wendell Berry and E. B. White. Though her book can, and no doubt will, be read as a manual on how to survive in rural Minnesota, it also reveals once again that the universal is best seen in local and that in speaking so eloquently for the part of America she comes from, she speaks to the lostness os many of us elsewhere experience today.

tl;dr

A bunch of essays put together about the life of a small-town Minnesotan written in the 1970s.

working title

wait I picked this up to avoid the awful things happening in the country now.

moisturize summarize me

Less a summary than a list of essay titles. And by “less a summary than a list of essay titles” I mean “a list of essay titles.”

From the Lost Swede Towns
Getting Tired
Bruno Bettelheim: Three Ideas to Try in Madison, Minnesota
Forgiving Nixon in Madison, Minnesota
If a Thing is Worth Doing, It’s Worth Doing Badly
Enemy Evenings
Great Snows
Extended vs. Nuclear Families
Quietly Thinking over Things at Christmas
To Unteach Greed
Rural Feelings: Starting in the Mailroom and Having to Stay There
Even Paranoids Have Enemies
Ways Out: I. Non-Resource People
Ways Out: II. We Are Sick of Bible Camp
Ways Out: III. The Way Out of Small-Town Niceness and Loneliness
Back at the Ranch, Small Dragons, Small Princesses
Brethren Too Least for Country Life
Turning Plowshares Back into Swords
The Last Person to Get a Grant
A Malaise for Followers
A Gentle Education for Us All
Where Have All The Fifty-Five-Year-Olds Gone?
In the Same Bottle, a Different Genie
Our Class System
Chin Up in a Rotting Culture
A Mongoose is Missing
To Be Rude and Hopeful Instead of Whining and Quitting
Koko and Wolfgang Amadeus in Rural Minnesota
The City Mouse, the Country Mouse, and the Overnight-Conference Mouse
The Sticking Place
Growing Up Expressive

getting down to business to [to feel deeply unsettled by your own home town]

I’m from small-town Minnesota. I’m from a smaller town than the 2,000 people in Carol Bly’s home town. My town is so small that the high school graduates single-digit numbers of seniors. (I went to a larger town for school.) My town is so small that had I gotten in trouble in Hill City, my father would have known I was in trouble before I finished getting in trouble. (Fortunately, I had a little more room to get in trouble in Grand Rapids.) This is starting to sound like a Jeff Foxworthy joke. Actually, for comparison, have my home town, and the town I went to school in.

I love my hometown with all my heart, and because I love it, I want it to be better. We’re a bright red dot in a mostly blue state, and while I cannot say being a capital-C Conservative makes you inherently anything (just as being a capital-L Liberal doesn’t make you inherently anything else), I’d like to ask my city to read this book. Of course, this is coming from a woman who is also deeply afraid she’s outgrown her home town—that she’ll no longer be able to sit quietly in the local cafe when she hears someone say something racist (“It’s just a joke, honestly!”) or insist that everyone’s abusing welfare (in 2010, almost 15% of your neighbors were under the poverty line—that’s 72 people, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you realize that you probably know almost all of them. You’ve seen them drinking coffee at the cafe; using their EBT card at the gas station; driving an old, beat-up car that doesn’t run more than it does. You might be one of them, but you’re not one of them.). I want my city to be better, and to do that we might have to do what Carol Bly suggests in “Enemy Evenings.” Maybe we take me, a bleeding-heart liberal, a snowflake (if that’s your insult of choice) and pair me with one of my neighbors. Make us talk and listen to one another. I’m not going to agree that we need to ship all the immigrants out of the country, but they’re not going to agree with me that we all deserve fully covered health care.

I’m approaching this book from a certain mindset. I’m approaching Letters from the Country as a woman who thinks her hometown would benefit from a few more loud opposing opinions. I think it’s time we stood up and proudly said, “Yeah, I marched at the Women’s March in Boston. I marched at the counter-protest in Boston when a handful of Nazis were stuck in the gazebo on the Common and we filled roads with our bodies and our voices. And no, I’m not ashamed to be so pushy, and what I did wasn’t rude, and my family did a great job raising me, and I’m proud to be from small-town Minnesota.” I am Carol Bly’s target audience.

This review is turning into an essay about all the things I’ve wanted to say about northern Minnesota. I’m going to take a hard left turn and try to talk about the book for a hot sec.

I was relieved when my Chubs Mug of Literary Fortitude offered me Letters from the Country. Politics were particularly gnarly right then (what was happening, you ask? I have no idea. It’s been one week after another of particularly gnarly politics), and I wanted a book that was quaint and would talk about lefse and lutefisk and hot dishes, which Letters totally does. There are places in there where I laugh and I’m like “yep, yeah, that’s… that’s true. That happens,” and then there are places like “Forgiving Nixon in Madison, Minnesota” and suddenly I’m not sure if I’m reading a collection of essays written in the 1970s or written today.

There are parts of this book that are clearly dated and parts where today authors wouldn’t be so quick to reference women staying home with the children like it was their only option, but (once I acknowledged that this book was written in the 70s and not 2018) moral relativism. Sort of. But this also means that the things she mentions that are less acceptable—marching in St. Cloud against the Vietnam War in “Turning Plowshares Back into Swords,” for example—even more touching.

And, like any essay collection, there were some that I found intolerably dull or a little insulting (lookin’ at you, “Extended vs. Nuclear Families”) and maybe sometimes a little pretentious (much of the middle of “Back at the Ranch, Small Dragons, Small Princesses”). I wanted more, somehow, than I got, despite sometimes getting too much of what I wanted. I wanted proof that northern Minnesota (or small-town Minnesota, because Madison is down south) had a chance to come to terms with itself, to be what it had always been and what it could be.

That might be too much to be asking of a collection of essays written by anyone.

Another defense-mechanism remark interests me more than any of the above because it has a solution. It is: “Yeah, but if you once get started with all that protest business where’s it all going to end?” The cheerful reply is: You can start or quit fighting evil at any time, on any timeline. Only fantasy work is without measure and forever—like fantasy enemies.

…

When the fantasy-enemy action is chickenfeed compared to what real agencies are doing, it is time to become whole, politically, and identify an enemy head or two, and have at them. I think it would also bring a wide-awake feeling to our sleeping countryside. [72–73, “Even Paranoids Have Enemies]