We have to thank Dan Chaon, Cathy Day, and Mike Czyzniejewski for being on the panel, reading their work, and being part of what turned out to be a fascinating conversation about Midwest Gothic. We had high hopes and it turned out even better than we could have imagined.

Add in the Q&A with the audience and we didn’t want the time to end. But we had to let the next panel into the room. We were lucky enough to continue the conversation with some of the audience at the book fair or as in one case at the Caribou Coffee around the corner. We’ve heard often from people that Midwest Gothic is what they write or what they like to read, but they didn’t know what to call it until finding the website or coming to the panel. This just makes it more exciting that all the Midwest Gothic fans, us included, were able to come together in one room and talk about something we love.

Speaking of things we love, we’re still hard at work on the MGS anthology, which will feature our three AWP panelists, among others. Stay tuned to the blog because we may have some exciting news in the next few weeks. It’s still too early to say anything more specific. However, as soon as we officially have news, you’ll hear it on the blog first.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out this Sleet Magazine interview with Cathy Day, where she talks, among other things, about Midwest Gothic. Here’s a little preview: “The Midwestern writers I love the most write about those moments when buried lives bubble up and assert themselves.”

The costume ball was hosted by the fantastic people over at Quiddity, which is based at Benedictine University in Springfield, IL. Thanks to all of them and especially Joanna Beth Tweedy and Amy Sayre-Roberts.

As a reader of this blog you know location is fundamental to the Midwest Gothic experience and we had an appropriately Gothic one in the (allegedly haunted) Brinkerhoff Home.

We had a great turn out and we were thrilled to see everyone embracing the costume aspect of the event.

The main event was Jodee’s presentation, Midwest Gothic: The Darkness Beneath. She killed it. I wish I had remembered to bring some type of recording device, so I could post audio of the discussion here. Next time. Anyways, a quick recap will have to suffice for now. She started with an introduction on how Midwest Gothic fits into the the larger Gothic tradition as well as stands apart from it. Midwest Gothic didn’t just appear in the last couple of decades. Rather it’s been brewing for quite sometime, so Jodee read excerpts from Ray Bradbury’s “The Whole Town is Sleeping” as an earlier example and Dan Chaon’s “Big Me” a more contemporary one. After a brief discussion of those stories, Jodee ended her presentation with Neil Gaiman’s “October in the Chair.” The very creepy story engrossed the entire audience. If you haven’t read the story, go do so right now. It’s chilling. Once the audience took a second to recover, they asked questions and we had a wonderful discussion about the various aspects of Midwest Gothic, including the possibility that there are or will be movies that could be classified as such.

The gorgeous painting in the picture above is by Felicia Olin. Her paintings were also featured at the costume ball. You can check out her work here.

Finally, we handed out the postcard below at the end of the presentation.

On the back, it asked people to “share something spooky, weird or mysterious about the Midwest.” We were treated to a few ghost stories, including a couple about the Brinkeroff Home. Again, we have to thank our hosts and the all those who came out for making the event so special.

Now we invite you, dear blog readers, to share your own experiences of something spooky, weird or mysterious about the Midwest in the comments.

Like any good, potentially haunted place, White Hall almost dares you to try to find your way around. As long as you stay in the hallway, which separates the courtyard from the various rooms that once provided living, work, and school quarters, which despite the peeling paint and debris covered floors, hints at function and order, you have a sense that navigating will be rather easy. And it is, until you step into the inner rooms.

These rooms were disconcerting for a number of reasons. There were couches, photo albums, toys, dressers still filled with clothes, and an odd amount of telephones randomly left about the rooms. It was as if the people leaving the base had only been given minutes to vacate, meaning they couldn’t take anymore than they could carry. Even though that wasn’t the case, the appearance of such added to the unsettling quality of the place. These signs of life only reinforced its absence, adding to the spookiness. As did going from rooms with windows, many of them broken, into long stretches of dark spaces. Zipping our flashlights around the debris and the sharp angles of half opened doors did nothing to dispel the idea that we might stumble across something ghostly.  And then there were the sounds. It was raining on the day we visited, so, as you might imagine, we heard water dripping all around us. We also heard what sounded like footsteps shuffling down the hall. They never got any closer or more distant. Perhaps it was the acoustics of the building, the sounds of the dripping water pinging off the walls or just noises of an unfamiliar building.

Here’s the thing about White Hall: there are no ghost stories, no local legends about horrible things that befell people you dared to enter, which is kind of odd for a place that looks so ready made for a horror movie.

As we ventured up to the second floor we noticed the sound of the shuffling feet had gone away. There were  classrooms with the chalkboards still intact. You could make out some of the last things written on them, circles and formulas for a geometry problem. Except for the ever present telephones and a couple of desk chairs, these rooms were empty unlike the debris filled ones on the lower floor. Yet, things felt just as uneasy up there. There were more windowless rooms, staircases that only lead to more darkness, and rooms that opened to other rooms that opened to other hallways making it difficult to keep track of where you had just been. It made you wonder how the people who used to live there kept it all straight.

White Hall does pose many mysteries. Did the final residents of the base leave behind the photo albums, clothes, and all the other things that might have been mementos of their lives there, or did squatters? Either seems possible, probable. A more confusing question is who left a boat in the courtyard? And what’s with all the telephones? We’re still left to consider if the shuffling we heard were actually caused by the rain and the design of the building playing tricks on us or if White Hall is truly haunted by what has been left behind.

Learn more about the Chanute Air Museum and Air Force Base here.

While Midwest Gothic shares many similar traits with Southern Gothic and Gothic literature, such as the grotesque, characters with strained mental states, and elements of the supernatural, it is not just a mere transportation of these elements to the Midwest. Two key ideas inform Midwest Gothic: restraint and the unspoken. Emotional restraint keeps characters from revealing their secrets and also isolates them from others. A lot is left unsaid between Midwesterners–this is how they can be outwardly friendly, surrounded by people, yet still be utterly and hauntingly alone. Geography mirroring the psychological landscape is also an important element in the Midwest Gothic aesthetic. At first, the flatness of the landscape appears one-dimensional, static, and dull—until you realize the vastness is overwhelming, limitless, and eternal. The void can swallow you. Running underneath all of this is a current of horror, which is sometimes overt and sometimes only alluded to or implied.

If you’re writing in the Midwest Gothic vein, we’d love to read your work. Below are the submission details:

• Submission period: October 1 – October 31
• Stories should be no more than 10,000 words
• Please submit only 1 story at a time unless they are under 1,000 words, then you may submit up to 3
• Previously published work allowed
• Please include a brief statement on how your story fits within the Midwest Gothic aesthetic and your connection/ties to the Midwest
• Submission will only be accepted via Submishmash

We’ve done a few posts about stories that are Midwest Gothic, so take a look around if you want to know more about this genre. We look forward to seeing your work.

Voorhies Castle was built at the end of the 19th century near Bement, Illinois, in the small, now defunct village of Voorhies. Nels Larson, the successful businessman who built the mansion and in fact owned the entire village of Voorhies, lived in the castle until 1914 when his wife was found dead at the foot of the staircase. The cause of her death was never determined; Larson himself moved out of the house immediately, never to return.

In addition to the mysterious death of Johanna Larson, Voorhies Castle is also reputed to be haunted by the spirit of the Larsons’ alleged secret child, a disabled son or daughter of whom, it is said, the family was so ashamed they kept him (or her) chained up in a hidden room. Supposedly night visitors to the castle can hear the phantom chains rattling; one may also be able to see eerie lights on the stairs as Johanna continues to move about her once-glorious home.

Voorhies Castle was abandoned for many years, but is currently under restoration–the first floor is available for tours (during the day only, sadly), and the current owner lives on the second floor as he’s working on renovations to the house and property. We toured it on a bright summer day, not very conducive to ghostly activity, but even so, the air was tinged with the mysteries of the past.

(Learn more about Voorhies Castle here and here)

AWP 2012 is in Chicago from February 29 – March 3. We’ll let you know as soon as we know the exact time and day. Below is the description of the panel:

From the stories of Sherwood Anderson to contemporary Midwestern fiction, authors have explored the darkness that lies beneath the placid exterior of an often-dismissed region of America. Five Midwest-based writers and editors will discuss how the prairie landscape and traditionally Midwestern character traits, including politeness, stoicism, and a wariness of the unknown, combine with traditional Gothic literary elements to create a rarely-discussed subgenre of fiction, Midwest Gothic.

There will be fun and creepiness, so we hope to see you there!

If we move out of the South and into the Midwest, we can also see that the light is not a sanctuary from human darkness, from the strangeness of the world. Wash Williams in Sherwood Anderson’s “Respectability,” much like the grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is very hateful. Unlike the grandmother, Wash William is described as being externally grotesque. So much so that George Willard, who is listening to Wash Williams explain why he hates women, is relieved when the sun goes down and the darkness prevents him from seeing Wash’s “purple, bloated face and burning eyes.” Sherwood brilliantly reverses the usual functions of day and night by not only allowing the darkness to hide Wash’s physical ugliness, but it also allows George Willard to imagine “that he sat on the railroad ties beside a comely young man with black hair and black shining eyes. There was something almost beautiful in the voice of Wash Williams, the hideous, telling his story of hate.” The night hides part of what the daylight exposes, making it a little easier for George Willard to listen to Wash Williams spew his hate, much like, as we come to learn, Wash Williams uses his hate to hide his underlying heartbreak.

This idea of horrific truths being exposed by daylight is evident in contemporary stories as well. Like “Respectability” most of Micah Riecker’s “The Drowned Girl” takes place outdoors, on warm summer days. In the story, seventeen year-old quickly meets and falls in love with Sylvia, who is also known in the story as the drowned girl.  Now here is where we take a step into the supernatural because Sylvia being called the drowned girl is not a metaphor. She is actually dead. She lives at the bottom of the lake where she drowned. Rick’s father treats his son’s relationship with Sylvia as any father might, glad for his son to have a summer romance, worried about his son’s heart being broken, etc. However, try as he might, he can’t overlook the things that are “a little unsettling” about her, “such lips, yes, but they were blue…her skin, so pale it was almost translucent. In less light…she’d be stunning.” These attributes, which cannot be ignored in the light, hint at the father’s eventual loss when Rick joins the drowned girl at the bottom of the lake.  It is another lake, a beautiful one with “its sheen bright and blinding” that might hold the truth for the sisters in Mary Grimm’s “Transubstantiation” as they grapple with the question of whether they are dead or not. They spend most of the present of the story indoors, in a dusty, abandoned coffee shop with no idea how they got there. They even wonder if there is anything beyond the windowless coffee shop. The older sister thinks, “I don’t want to know just yet what might be outside these walls.” Here we have the safety of the indoors versus the unknown outside. But the older sister’s thoughts keep returning to the lake, to the sunglasses cast off in the bottom of the canoe. It is a reminder of the life they knew or think they knew. It is that bright lake with murky waters that they don’t trust even though it could reveal their fate. The problem being that the answers the lake, the outdoors, could provide might render the memories of their lives – marriages, children, friendships ­­– false. That is the horror the sisters want to avoid.

As we’ve discussed before, characters in Midwest Gothic stories tend to hide their true feelings. They want to leave what makes them uncomfortable unsaid, ignored. As the stories discussed here show, sometimes they will use anything, night, the indoors, to help keep those things covered up to the world, to themselves. This makes it even more imperative for the writers to push these characters out of their hiding spots. Of course, sometimes it’s just in the characters’ nature to stay in the dark. However, as the stories also demonstrate, it also sometimes impossible, regardless of the time of day or whether you’re inside or outdoors, to escape what haunts you.

Read “Respectability”

Read “Transubstantiation”

To read “The Drowned Girl” order a copy of The Cincinnati Review 6.2 or New Stories from the Midwest

Bryan Furuness’s “Adios, Ramon Gonzales” is one such story. We are told, “April is a hard month in Chicagoland, raw and blustery, but generally everyone’s happy that it’s not March anymore.” Here we have place, not just because of the mention of Chicagoland, but because we have information about the mindset of the people living there. As the story progresses, we see that those conditions reflect the characters. The particular day this story is set is “the first nice day of the year,” rousing hope in people. They are out washing cars, tending to lawns, and Revie rides his bike about town. We learn this is a place where the “stupid casserole lady” makes unwanted visits, where people take “neighborliness seriously,” where the air is “ripe with mill smoke,” and most telling where they say, thank you “out of habit” after being shown a picture of the body of a boy who had been hit by a train. These moments solidly root us in the Midwest, meaning if you took out the reference to Chicagoland, you’d still be able to tell the story is in the Midwest. Even as more of the sadness and tragedy surrounding the train accident and Revie’s life is revealed, the story never loses its grip on place as these losses are reflected in the weather, the town, and the people.

The same can be said for Dan Chaon’s “Big Me.” The protagonists in both this story and the Bryan Furuness story share a very active imaginative life, which, while probably not a exclusive to Midwestern kids, certainly seems to be a large part of a childhood in the Heartland. Whereas Revie lived not in the in city, but within its reach, Andy O’Day in “Big Me” lives in Beck, a small town in Nebraska. That fact is emphasized at the start of the story, “a ‘town’ we called it.” This is just one of the many details that puts us in a specific place. We have people using push lawn mowers and Andy’s family “all eating silently, grimly, as if everything were normal” to tell us what the people in Beck are like. The description of the land surrounding Beck gives the impression of it stretching out infinitely, filled with potential danger. Yet the town feels insulated, although filled with just as much danger, except it has the mysterious stranger rather than rattlesnakes. Without the details that conjure place, in this instance Nebraska, “Big Me” would be happening in a generic setting and would lose all its power to tell the story of Andy O’Day and Beck.

Both the Chaon and the Furuness stories share a creeping sense of dread, which not only impacts the characters in profound ways, but is mirrored in the descriptions of the people and the landscape. This helps take these stories past being just Midwestern and makes them Midwest Gothic. Ultimately, place is important in Midwest Gothic for the same reason it is important in Southern Gothic because the lives of the people and their environments are impossible to untangle. How those places are invoked and identified is not always an exact science, but after reading Flannery O’Connor or the stories mentioned here, you instinctively know the people, the towns, the regions they are centered around. You can feel it.

Read “Adios, Ramon Gonzales”

Read “Big Me”

Anderson’s the “The Untold Lie,” on the other hand, is a true early example of Midwest Gothic style. In this story, details of the Midwest landscape play a significant role, the vast beauty of the fields coming to symbolize the oppression of a disappointed man in a life he can’t escape. In “The Untold Lie,” nobody knows the secret of Ray’s unhappiness — it’s hidden behind the jovial, monotonous routine of his days. In a brief moment, he’s confronted with the opportunity to make known his true feelings — it’s like a corner of a pretty tapestry being pulled back to reveal something sad, dark, and neglected underneath. And then the moment passes, the curtain drops, and Ray’s veneer of contentment settles back into place. The implication of the story is that all people of this place may share the same unhappiness (Hal seems to be cultivating a near-exact replica of Ray’s life), but the masks of genial tranquility everyone wears keeps each man alone with his discontent — a discontent that is at once ordinary and unbearably sad. –JS

Read “Hands”

Read “The Untold Lie”