Crossposted from my newsletter.

Dear readers,

On the occasion of my relaunching my newsletter writing on a new, less algorithmic platform, perhaps it’s worth a note to say what I’m doing here.

I am a writer in love with the world of letters, and with the world. A few years ago, I proclaimed myself, half-unseriously, the director of a new Center for Needless Splendor, an imaginary institution dedicated to “acts of frivolity, heedlessness, pleasure, beauty, conviviality, and feckless joy of all kinds.” The Center does not exist anywhere except in my own mind, but it has a purchase over me that none of the real, practical institutions of my daily life can or will have. The things I love most in this world are impractical, small, slow, quiet, analog, beautiful. And they are not reducible to “the arts” or “the sciences,” but partake profligately of a variety of disciplines. I love to read poetry and I love to split firewood with an axe. I love to prune berry bushes and I love to listen to Corelli. I have described my writing here as concerned with “literature, place, and oikonomia” (or household management), but this is really a very selective choice of the things that fascinate me.

At the same time, as a lifelong resident of the great agricultural-industrial belly of Middle America, I am acutely aware that the things I love are threatened, compromised, and desecrated by our cultural and economic order. Stealing a line from the poet Adam Zagajewski, I have never been able to forget that I am praising “the mutilated world.” My work as a writer is always to hold together beauty and desecration: poetry and landscape, critique and analysis. That project manifested initially in my first book of essays, a work concerned with the beauties of the earth and the liturgy equally with the ravages of time.

My next extended project is a book about Nebraska, my home state. Praising the mutilated world is an apt phrase for this work, for Nebraska is very beautiful and very mutilated. As a person in exile from that place and yet still utterly wrapped up with it, my feelings on the subject are complex. I hope then that what will come of this work is some writing that will help reader grapple with the complexities of their own sense of exile or belonging, and with the complicated places they call home.

A first dispatch from this project appeared in FPR early last year:

Though I can and do go home again, Nebraska as a daily presence is lost to me. To hold that lost place “bright in memory,” though, means to adopt a posture of gratitude rather than rage. Like Jim Burden, it is to be thankful for “the precious, the incommunicable past.” Dwelling in my home state may be a thing of the past, and yet that past can still be a gift to me, helping me come “home to myself.” And such a posture of gratitude means too that I can be grateful for the saplings and the weeds—for my present life in Missouri, that has sprung up in the place of the home I cherish in memory. I am no longer a child, and so I can’t proclaim myself “entirely happy” like the young Jim Burden. But I can be grateful that I get to have love in my heart, even love known only in loss. I pay the price for my love of two places in homesickness and longing, and yet I’m bound to admit as well that I’m a recipient of a great bargain.

Proceeding from my investigation of “writing exile and reading homeward,” the book will uncover the different elements of my home state in literature, landscape, and culture, drawing upon my memories as well as reading and travel.

I expect to complete the manuscript by the end of the summer; I have the privilege of a sabbatical from my teaching job this spring in order to work on it. I have been thinking about this material for—well, all my life, but acutely for more than five years. Another essay that will form a portion of the book, about my relationship to my hometown river and the 2019 Nebraska flooding, was originally published in 2020. I would have written this book before now, probably, except that it is deeply introspective work for me, and so the routine chaos of work and family life often made it difficult to make progress. Now, with some clear space mentally as well as practically, the work is exploding out of me, hundreds and thousands of words a day. I’m excited for you to see it.

I’ll be saving most of that new work for venues other than this newsletter, but I would like you to see a little of it. So here’s some new material, previously unpublished, I have added to the essay on exile, linked above. Consider it a preface to the new work:

The poet Donald Hall, himself a poet of long tenure in one place, has movingly documented the universal quality of exile in his poem “Exile,” which takes the transition from childhood to adulthood as a primordial loss, an essential exile. Hall laments: “We move and move but only love the lost / Perversity our master to the bone.” My loss of my blue dinosaur would be familiar to Hall as he notes we cast aside our toys in growing to adulthood, making ourselves “both child and murderer,” leaving each of us east of Eden, “solitary as the dead.” For Hall, such exile comes because of our pride: we all want “to king it in that perfect land / We make and understand.” But such pride is inescapable, a sin that marks us all, without exception. The challenge then is not so much to free ourselves from the exile that marks each of our lives, but to come home again, to “reach and touch” that person or those places that bring us back to ourselves. Like Odysseus, each one of us will lose the primordial innocence of our childhood innocence. We must seek for the loved one who can help bring us back home, for the Penelope who can make our homecoming real in imagination if not in experience.

This book represents my fullest attempt to make my homecoming of the imagination real. I have struggled to articulate even to myself what this book is—at various times I have conceived it as a travelogue, a literary history, and a memoir. I have considered whether it might best be transmuted into fiction or poetry. This formal uncertainty, combined with the passion I have for the subject and my geographic distance from it, has meant that the book has been slow in the writing. Perhaps readers will find it slow in the reading, too, as a project this self-motivated has every risk of being. I find it intriguing that other place-oriented works of nonfiction from the northern Plains how showed similar marks of generic confusion. Kathleen Norris termed her homecoming book Dakota a “spiritual geography,” while Wallace Stegner’s book about his boyhood on the Saskatchewan frontier, Wolf Willow, carries the tripartite subtitle A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier. Something about this landscape invites such personal grappling, it would appear, yet resists the application of simple categories.

Beyond my homecoming of the imagination, I do have a further purpose that rests close to the heart of this book, and one which speaks more than just my displacement. Nebraska is an overlooked place, a place always passing away, a place eroded by powerful forces, a place consumed by exploitation, a place desecrated by greed, a place marked by suffering. It is the distillation of what many term fly-over country, a place known more for how long it takes to get out of than by anything it has to offer. And yet I love it, and I always have.

There are many such places in this world of ours, transient, eroded, consumed, desecrated, marked. Many places that we pass over or flee from. And all these places deserve to be loved by someone, because they are real, because they exist for the sake of love.

Here is what I have to say: Nebraska is very beautiful, not just from the perspective of a homesick nine-year-old or a middle-aged reader of Wendell Berry. It is beautiful in fact, because it is a place known and loved, though without enough of either virtue. I expect and hope that some will read this book thinking of their own beloved places, and that is well, because homecoming is a universal human longing. However, I am less concerned with universals than with particulars. This means that I am less interested in persuading my readers to reflect upon homecoming in particular than to know and love Nebraska in specific. It is a place that deserves more attention than to be driven or flown over thoughtlessly. It is a place with a beauty that reveals itself only to those who look carefully and over time. It is a small place, ripening to something new-born. It is place always passing and irrecoverable, known only in loss. It is the world. Like all the rest of the world, it reveals itself only to those who love it and give it their attention.

More coming soon: on Nebraska, and on other matters. I have it in mind to write some pieces on some of the books I teach most frequently: Brave New World, Hamlet, The Odyssey. I have some notes on Wendell Berry I want to share. And a few more rants on digital technology of various kinds. Let me know if there’s any of that you find especially interesting. With the sabbatical, I expect to write here regularly for a few months.

These emails no longer have comments or other social features, thank goodness. But I would be glad to hear from you. Hit reply and send me an email.

Peace,

Matt