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The Midwest Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought

Contents

ARTICLES 

Foundations of the New Traditionalism  

Working for Judith Shakespeare: A Study in Feminism 

Silent Justice in a Different Key: Glaspell's "Trifles" 

Raymond Carver and the Poem as Transitional Object 

On Not Being Nice: Sentimentality and the Creative Writing Class 

POEMS 

15 Minutes in Lincoln, Nebraska 

In the Woods Near Chestnut Hill School 

Transcription 

August Slips Into a New Gear 

Uummannaq 

Worst Winter in 127 Years 

Uncle Earl's Herd in the Thirties 

Wild Zither 

I Have the Snapshots 

Landslide 

The Fog Woman Comes 

The Fog Woman Leaves 

Burning the Lilacs 

The Song of the Limpet 

Nights 

REVIEW 

Adrian C. Louis; Skins 

Abstract

ERIC CARL LINK and STEVEN FRYE argue that "in literary studies we must create a new and productive myth of 'objectivity' that can be used to explore the possibility that history matters, that authors count, that criteria for canonization can be provisionally stabilized without being exclusionary" in order to "proceed with the act of literary criticism." The present essay, they suggest, establishes the epistemological foundation and defines the methodology for this new myth. Link teaches American literature at North Georgia College and State University where he is the Hugh Shott Professor of English. He has published a number of articles on American literary figures and movements in a variety of scholarly journals and is the co-author of Neutral Ground: New Traditionalism and the American Romance Controversy (Louisiana State University Press, 1999). He is a past recipient of the Victor J. Emmett, Jr., Memorial Award for an essay on Huck Finn that appeared in the Summer 2000 issue of The Midwest Quarterly. Frye is Associate Professor of English at California State University, Bakersfield. He has published articles, essays, and reviews in book collections and encyclopedias as well as in academic journals. He also published Historiography and Narrative Design in the American Romance: A Study of Four Authors (Edwin Mellen Press, 2001).

How is feminism defined through women writers? JANE VARLEY and AIMEE BROE ERDMAN take on this question and bring an autobiographical perspective to bear in formulating their answers. Varley left North Dakota in the spring of 2000 to take a teaching position at Muskingum College in the hills of Ohio. Her poems have appeared in a number of journals, and she is circulating a book-length manuscript of poetry entitled "The Good Morrow." Erdman is the Co-op Education coordinator at Minot State University-Bottineau in North Dakota. She and her husband work a farm near the Canadian border where they raise wheat, barley, canola, and, most recently, four cows. This is her first publication.

SUZY CLARKSON HOLSTEIN explores the varying perceptions and choices the men and women of Susan Glaspell's early twentieth-century play, "Trifles," make with regard to the evidence of a murder and of their relationship to power over the course of the events therein depicted. Holstein is Associate Professor of English at Carroll College in Wisconsin. She has published scholarly articles on such nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors as Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Willa Cather, and Harriet Arnow. She has also written and given presentations on dramatic literature, including that of Sam Shepard and Brian Friel.

HADARA BAR-NADAV, Lincoln, Nebraska, has recent publications in Paragraph, California Quarterly, and Footwork: The Paterson Literary Review. She works on the editorial staff of Prairie Schooner and is a doctoral student in English at the University of Nebraska. Her work has appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

ANDREA HOLLANDER BUDY, Mountain View, Arkansas, has published two books of poetry, House Without a Dreamer (Story Line, 1993), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, The Other Life (Story Line, 2001), and three prize-winning chapbooks. Her other awards include the 2002 Ellipsis Poetry Award, the WORDS Award in Poetry, the Porter Fund Award for Literary Excellence, the Panhandler Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Arkansas Arts Council, and from the Wesleyan and Bread Loaf writers' conferences. Recent poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, DoubleTake, Crazyhorse, FIELD, and Creative Nonfiction. Budy is Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Her work has appeared previously in the The Midwest Quarterly.

BARBARA CROOKER has published several chapbooks, including most recently The White Poems (Barnwood, 2001) and Ordinary Life (ByLine, 2001). Her poems have appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Yankee, Beloit Poetry Journal, Chiron Poetry Review, Nimrod, and numerous other journals, as well as in nearly a dozen anthologies. She has received a total of eleven poetry fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and has won numerous other awards. She lives in Fogelsville, Pennsylvania.

JAMES GRINWIS has published poems recently in Gettysburg Review, American Poetry Review, Skidrow Penthouse, California Quarterly, and other journals. He lives in Belchertown, Massachusetts. His work has appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL, Madison, Wisconsin, is the author of five books, including the poetry collection, World as Dictionary (Carnegie Mellon), and Space (Algonquin/Penguin), a memoir about growing up in Florida during the moon race. She directs the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

WALT McDONALD, a native Texan, was an Air Force pilot, taught at the Air Force Academy and Texas Tech University, and served as Texas Poet Laureate for 2001. His recent books include All Occasions (Notre Dame, 2000), Blessings the Body Gave, and The Flying Dutchman (Ohio State), and others from Harper & Row, Massachusetts, and Pittsburgh. Four of his books have received Western Heritage Awards from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly. He and his wife Carol live in Lubbock. They have three children and seven grandchildren.

GERI ROSENZWEIG grew up in Ireland and worked there as a registered nurse before moving to the U.S. Her poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Poet Lore, Voices Israel 2000, and other journals. She has published two books of poems, Under the Jasmine Moon (HMS) and Half the Story (March Street). A third, White Sandals (Sulphur River Literary Review), is due out in the fall of 2003. She won the Poet of the Year Award in 2000 from BBC Wildlife Magazine. She lives in Ossining, New York Her poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

DONNA BAIER STEIN, Peapack, New Jersey, has published poems and stories in numerous journals, including Prairie Schooner, Carolina Quarterly, Literary Review, and Iowa Woman. Her novel, Fortune, won the PEN New England Discovery Award. She has also received grants and scholarships from the Poetry Society of America, the Virginia Commission on the Arts, Bread Loaf, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and other agencies. She is a contributing essayist to writers' anthologies from Pocket Books and Story Line Press and is currently poetry editor of Bellevue Literary Review.

ROBERT TREMMEL, Ankeny, Iowa, coordinates the English Education program at Iowa State University. In 1999 he published Zen and the Practice of Teaching English (Heinemann-Boynton/Cook). His poems have appeared previously in The Midwest Quarterly.

DAVID WEHMEYER teaches communications at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. He has worked as assistant poetry editor of Seems and Passages North, and his poems have appeared in various journals. He lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

MARLYS WEST, Damascus, Maryland, has published a book of poems, Notes for a Late-Blooming Martyr (University of Akron, 1999). Her poems have also appeared in numerous journals, including Black Warrior Review, Borderlands, and Laurel Review. She was a Hodder Fellow in Poetry at Princeton University in the fall of 2002.

ROB WHITBECK is a farmer and laborer living in Fossil, Oregon. He has published poems in Talking River Review, Sulphur River Review, Coal City Review, and other journals. His collection, Oregon Sojourn (Pygmy Forest Press), appeared in 2001.

J.P. STEED uses his exploration of Raymond Carver's poetry and the psychology of the transitional object to explain how poetry works and what it can do for the poet. In particular, Steed suggests "the ways in which Carver's poetry . . . becomes a means of negotiating loss or separation." While finishing his doctoral dissertation on humor and identity in American Jewish literature for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Steed teaches literature and writing at Western Oregon University. He has published articles on authors such as Francine Prose, Rick Bass, and Bernard Malamud, and is the editor of The Catcher in the Rye: New Essays (Peter Lang, 2002).

ARTHUR SALTZMAN, finding that his students prefer quick and easy in poetic expression and sentiments, set about to confront them with their obligation to go beyond surface and things writ large. "As they begin to respect effort -- art is in the details, after all, and a poet may labor for days over a given line break or punctuation mark before the thing gets properly born, if it ever does -- they may begin to develop their palates" for self-expression and self-awareness. Professor of English at Missouri Southern State College, Saltzman has published seven books. The most recent are This Mad Instead: Governing Metaphors in Contemporary American Fiction (University of South Carolina Press, 2000) and Objects and Empathy, which won the First Series Creative Nonfiction Award from Mid-List Press in 2001.

DENISE LOW chairs the English Department at Haskell Indian Nations University and also teaches in the American Indian Studies Department. Her most recent book is New and Selected Poems, 1980-1999 (Penthe Press, 1999). Her poetry has also appeared in numerous publications, including The Midwest Quarterly.

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