Hooray for Writers Who Are Alive!

A cemetery is a good place for young writers to visit because it is about dying, and anything about dying is about living as well. It is useful to wander among the graves of those whose lives are over. To feel grateful that you are still here, living the story of your life and turning it into words. So over the twenty years I taught creative writing at the Broad Ripple High School Center for the Humanities and the Performing Arts in Indianapolis for twenty years, we took an annual field trip to Crown Hill Cemetery. This was when you could still take kids in your car and kids with cars of their own could drive themselves, so we’d caravan across town, wind our way up to the James Whitcomb Riley grave, the highest point in Indianapolis. I’d spread a red-checked tablecloth on the big marble slab, start up the mix tape on my boom box: “The Not Necessarily Grateful Dead,” songs by performers no longer with us, and we’d eat our picnic lunches. From where we sat, the city we lived in looked like Oz.

To be honest, though, I did not choose JWR’s grave as the site for our excursion to celebrate his (in my opinion, dreadful) poetry. I chose it for irony’s sake. (Really? He’s the Indiana writer with the gargantuan monument?) I’m embarrassed (and annoyed) that all too often his name is the first one mentioned when the subject of Indiana writers comes up. Okay. He’s part of our history. I get that.

So are a lot of (wonderful) dead Indiana writers.

But in my writing classroom, we studied Indiana writers who were alive. So many talented young people flee the state as soon as they can. I wanted my students to know that literature made of the stuff of their own Indiana lives could be as rich and mysterious as lives led in more exotic places.

Now, as the Executive Director of the Indiana Writers Center, I try to spread that message around the state—and beyond. We all need to do a better job of celebrating Indiana writers, promoting their work so that theirs are the names that come up when conversation turns to Indiana literature.

 

Thanks to an Indiana Masterpiece Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Writers Center has the opportunity to do just that with an anthology of contemporary Indiana writers to be published early next fall. Many accomplished Indiana writers have already agreed to be part of the project, including, Scott Russell Sanders, Susan Neville, Patricia Henley, Helen Frost, Karen Kovacik, and Michael Martone.

The book will be a “snapshot” of Indiana writers at the time of its 2016 Bicentennial. It will be launched with a series of readings, classroom visits, and writing workshops around the state.

But here’s the best part: the anthology will be appropriate for use in the high school classroom. It will be available online to English and writing teachers, along with curriculum materials designed to meet state standards.

While you’re waiting to read it, check out some of the writers mentioned above, if you aren’t

already familiar with them. And here are some more I’m thrilled will be included: Shari Wagner,

George Kalamaras, Greg Schwipps, Sarah Layden, Bryan Furuness, and Jim McGarrah.

Oh, and we don’t have a title yet. Any ideas?

Fabulous Indiana Writers: Jean Harper

One of the cool things about my job as the Executive Director of the Writers' Center of Indiana is promoting the work of fabulous Indiana writers. I know a lot of them, which is one of my life's great pleasures. But I'm always discovering new ones--and Jean Harper, who lives and writes in Richmond, Indiana, is one of them. Rose City: A Memoir of Work was published by Mid-List Press in 2005.

Harper went to work as a rose cutter when she moved from her East Coast home Richmond, Indiana to be with a former professor whom she had loved since she was a student at Earlham College. She’s married; he’s married. It’s a difficult time. Harper risks everything for love and love is at the center of Rose City, but this memoir is not a love story. It’s the story of a smart, talented, well-educated woman in her thirties, who takes the only job available to her in this small college town, cutting roses, and whose co-workers accept her, teach her, and help her find her way into a new life. It’s about the rose industry, about roses. It’s about a once prosperous Midwestern town dying as new labor policies of the 1990’s lure American companies to countries where workers are unprotected and drastically greater profits can be made.

“All of it was foreign to me,” Harper writes early in the book. “I was an American, living and working in my own country, but it didn’t feel that way. I had crossed a border. I could have used a passport and a visa, entry stamped JUN 27 1992. RICHMOND, INDIANA, THE ROSE CITY.”

Thia world, which Harper so beautifully created on the page didn’t seem foreign to me at all. I grew up in the Calumet Region in the fifties, in a working class family that struggled to make ends meet—a world I left behind as soon as I could, but which, as time goes by, I realize shaped the strongest parts of me. I recognized Lil, Joy, Sammie Jo, Eddie, Bo, and Hank. They lived in my neighborhood in a different place, a different time, and so I know how well Harper captured the poignant mix of grace and resignation which they faced each day, the deep sense of responsibility they felt toward family and friends, the hope that sustained them even as the world seemed determined to drag them down.

I loved everything about Rose City: the story of this group of workers, which read like a novel; the social commentary about company practices with chemicals that put everyone in danger folded into their concerns about pregnant 17 year-old Sammie Jo; lush, lyrical forays into the world of roses; the deft characterization of Richmond, with its assortment of working class people and academics. The raw honesty with which Harper explored the disappointments and failures in her life that she knew she must face to be able to find happiness pretty much blew me away.

“The greenhouse saved me from an ordinary life,” she writes near the end of the book.

Having read Rose City, it’s hard for me to imagine that Jean Harper is a person capable of being ordinary. In any case, I’m glad she found work in the greenhouse and very glad she wrote this book about it.

Jean Harper grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. She earned her B.A. from Earlham College and her M.F.A. from Emerson College. Her short fiction, essays, and memoir have been published in The Iowa Review, Living Forge Journal, and Cimarron Review, among others. She is an assistant professor of English at Indiana University East and lives in Richmond, Indiana.