Flyover Literature

Sean Clancy of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette recently published a profile of Little Rock romance novelist Margaret Etheridge (who writes under the name Maggie Wells), author of the Arkansas Special Agents series, and one particular quotation from her really hit home. When Clancy asked her if she had received any resistance from her editors at Harlequin to setting her latest stories in Arkansas, she replied:

“My editor was thrilled. Most Harlequin readers like small-town settings. They’re everyday people and they want to see themselves reflected on the page. In the flyover states, most of us get tired of reading about New York or L.A. all the time.”

That hit home for a number of reasons. Growing up in Arkansas in the 1980s, I never really saw our state reflected in much of the mass media of the era. Most television shows and movies were set in New York or California, and I don’t know when I first encountered a book set in Arkansas—one of my elementary school favorites, It’s Like This, Cat, was set in New York City. My dad’s side of the family was from Parkin, but although some of them knew Bette Greene growing up, no one ever suggested that I pick up Summer of My German Soldier, which I first encountered in graduate school.

That’s the thing about living in so-called flyover country. Because you never see yourself reflected in the world around you, you begin to think maybe what you’ve got just isn’t that interesting. And if anyone expresses an interest, it makes you suspicious.

About two years back, my wife and I took a trip to the small town of Linsborg, Kansas (population 3,776), a slightly random choice, but one predicated upon my own interest in all things Swedish and the town having been founded by immigrants from Sweden. Whenever we met people and told them where we were from and that we really were staying there for the week as part of our vacation, they would always ask, “But why?”

I’ve been there, asking visitors to Arkansas, “Why are you here? Of all the places you could be, why did you choose this? And what’s wrong with you?” So it was a little bit strange being on the other side of that. No one in Chicago ever scrunches up their eyes and asks, “Why are you visiting this place?” People up there take your presence for granted.

Throughout history, to be formally educated has constituted an initiation into a metropolitan culture, often including instruction in a language not one’s own. In medieval Europe, one went to a handful of cultural centers (Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Wittenberg, Rome, etc.) to be instructed in Latin and Greek as a precursor to studying theology centering upon the experience of a people located yet farther away. The object of one’s education was always farther away, always more encompassing, always more universal, less local.

To be urban was to be urbane. To be parish-oriented was to be parochial. So it goes.

But there’s a gendered component here, because it was the men who went off to the cities and shed their vulgar tongues while the women joked and swore and told stories in the vernacular. This wasn’t just the European experience. In Japan of the eleventh century, Chinese was the language of choice for poet and scholar, and so while the learned men were scribbling away in this foreign tongue, one woman, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote in Japanese what is now regarded as the masterpiece of Japanese literature, The Tale of Genji.

Did you know that teenage girls are regarded as the great innovators in language? Their adoption of new terms, and shedding of outdated ones, has historically been about a generation ahead of men, according to some studies. Some theories for this point to the larger social networks of which women are a part, but I think women have historically had more space to innovate because they weren’t instructed in the narrow formalities of an ancient language largely being preserved in its frozen form by elites.

Moreover, because young women have historically done most of the childcare, their innovations have often been passed along to their children. And then one day, even the learned men themselves were writing in their very own native languages, and the world comes to know the likes of Dante and Cervantes and Shakespeare.

And so I wonder about the implications of Harlequin editors welcoming books set in “flyover country.” After all, the major publishing houses in the days of yore were based in New York or Chicago or San Francisco. These places were also home to major universities and, consequently, literary circles that made them both the producers and market for high-class reading materials. (There’s a great line in Edith Wharton’s 1932 novel The Gods Arrive about how all the writers that main character Halo Tarrant knew only read each other “and Ulysses.”)

People want to be taken seriously, and so they write about serious places. But our larger culture doesn’t take romance novels seriously. The women writing them often aren’t formally trained in the craft. (Mark McGurl notes in his book, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, the strange irony that university-level creative writing programs often offer no instruction in writing the sort of books that actually make their authors money but, instead, train their students to write the sort of literary books that might help them land jobs in creative writing programs doing the same thing.)

And so, there being no cultural North Star in the field of “trashy” paperbacks, authors have the freedom to set their stories where they will, in those very places that readers are desperate to see reflected upon the page. In fact, editors go out of their way to ensure a broad geographic representation, as with the Silhouette Books series “Men Made in America,” which featured fifty titles, each one set in a different state (Another Kind of Love was the Arkansas entry).

Geographic diversity in literature seems to be one of those innovations being quietly pioneered by women. Lately it seems that there are more and more books by major publishers being set in Arkansas—Kiley Reid’s Come and Get It and Nate Powell’s graphic novel Fall Through being but two recent examples that have entries here in the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA). Movies set and/or filmed in Arkansas have also been picking up.

And it makes me wonder: Did this trend toward greater geographic representation kick off with disposable paperbacks and gradually filter outward? It might be hard to prove one way or another. But I like the idea. I like the idea that a long disrespected genre of women’s literature might have gradually given flyover country the respect it has long been denied. And it makes me wonder what unforeseen innovations might arise from a little website like the CALS EOA making Arkansas more visible and its history more accessible.

By Guy Lancaster, editor of the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas