Midwest Broadcast Schedule
PROGRAM 1: October 7, 2001
Townships, Michael Martone, ed.
This collection of essays by Midwestern authors reveals the anger, humor and challenges of growing up in vast farmland. Through the eyes of writers as diverse as Ray A. Young Bear, a poet from the Mesquakie Reservation in central Iowa, Michael Wilkerson, Howard Kohn, and Ellen Hunnicutt, we come to understand the idea of township and how it has been uniquely and variously expressed throughout the American Midwest.
Guest: editor Michael Martone. Readings and pre-taped interviews with Mary Swander, West of Eden; Ray Young Bear, In the First Place of My Life; and Joseph Geha, Where I'm From Originally.
PROGRAM 2: October 14, 2001
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain.
Mark Twain's classic novel intertwines humor and cruelty to take the reader into the heart of America and race relations in the nineteenth century. Huck and Jim, a renegade slave, raft down the Mississippi River, facing danger, adventure, and a cast of sometimes menacing, often hilarious characters.
Guests: Ben Doornbos and Ethan Vandrunen, two Midwestern college students who spent the summer rafting down the Mississippi River following Huck Finn's footsteps; David Anderson, Professor Emeritus American Thought and Language at Michigan State University and Founder of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature
PROGRAM 3: October 21, 2001
Beloved, Toni Morrison.
Award-winning author Toni Morrison explores the heartbreak and despair of slavery through the eyes of a young slave and mother of three, Sethe. Morrison creates an unforgettable and richly imagined world that is both beautiful and horrible. Set primarily in a house that is haunted by Beloved, the ghost of Sethe's daughter, the novel is filled with flashbacks of the horrors and cruelty of slave life, and the complex story of Beloved's death.
Guests: John McCluskey, professor of Afro-American Studies and English at Indiana University; Carl Westmoreland of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati
PROGRAM 4: October 28, 2001
Main Street, Sinclair Lewis.
In Sinclair Lewis's brilliant satire of small-town, Midwestern America, Carol Kennicott wants desperately to transform Gopher Prairie into something grander. Originally from the city and now married to the local doctor, she is frustrated with both his and the town's docility and what seems to her as a lack of cultural aspiration.
Guests: Tom Fricke, University of Michigan Antropologist and director of the Center for Midwest Life; Richard Lingeman, editor of The Nation and author of the forthcoming book Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street
PROGRAM 5: November 4, 2001
The Nick Adams Stories, Ernest Hemingway.
Each story more satisfying than the next, this collection takes the reader through the stages of boyhood to manhood, closely paralleling Hemingway's own life as a soldier, veteran, writer and parent, each piece a jewel delivered in his trademark crisp, masculine style.
Guests: Jerry Dennis, outdoors writer who grew up in Hemingway country and fished the same trout spots written about in The Nick Adams Stories; James McCullough, professor and director of Northern Michigan's Writers Alliance and friend of the Hemingway family
PROGRAM 6: November 11, 2001
Native Son, Richard Wright.
Arguably one of the most compelling novels of the twentieth century, Native Son explores the consequences of racism. Wright's genius is to reveal the truth about American social and class relations through the eyes of an unlikable, ignorant character whose world of poverty, despair, and frustration turn him into a killer.
Guests: Hazel Rowley, author of Richard Wright: The Life and Times
PROGRAM 7: November 18, 2001
A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold.
Aldo Leopold brought the world to its knees with this critically acclaimed book on nature that is credited with inspiring the conservation movement in America. His then-revolutionary philosophy combined preservation of wild places with respect for them and for the animals and plants that inhabit them, regarding humans as part of the mix--as opposed to the lords to whom Nature must be subjugated.
Guests: Nina Leopold Bradley, Aldo's daughter and conservation speaker; Bob Grese, founder of Wild Ones Ann Arbor and University of Michigan professor of landscape architecture
PROGRAM 8: November 25, 2001
The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow.
Bellow's twentieth-century masterpiece is the story of a young boy growing up in a working class Jewish family in Chicago. The Depression puts a halt to his education and work becomes odd jobs, including stealing cars. Augie wanders through life looking for definition while tripping over convoluted relationships with friends and lovers.
Guests: James Atlas, author of Bellow (pre-taped)
PROGRAM 9: December 2, 2001
Chicago Poems, Carl Sandburg, and
Selected Poems, Gwendolyn Brooks.
These two collections about working class life in Chicago are gems from these celebrated, quintessentially American poets. Here Sandburg mixes his passion for socialism with his eye for beauty to produce powerful poems of lasting impact. In
Selected Poems, Brooks shows her immense talent with a variety of forms:
ballads, sonnets, blues and blank verse. The first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize, Brooks wrote about her youth and marriage and later became known for her socially conscious writings on the civil rights movement.
Guest: Joseph Parisi, editor of Poetry magazine
PROGRAM 10: December 9, 2001
them, Joyce Carol Oates.
Although Oates has written 30 novels (and counting!), them, winner of the National Book Award in 1970, is considered her most emotionally powerful work. Through the prism of the life of a poor, white family in post-war Detroit, she explores the fear of loss of identity, especially during the turbulent 1960s.
Guest: Author Joyce Carol Oates
PROGRAM 11: December 16, 2001
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley.
Jane Smiley provides a powerful retelling of Shakespeare's classic Lear story, set on a contemporary Iowa farm. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a hugely popular novel, A Thousand Acres captures the grim realities of farm life and the conflicting passions brought on by the reality of a vast inheritance.
Guests: Author Jane Smiley; Paul Lasley, director of Iowa Farm & Rural Poll and professor of Sociology at Iowa State University
PROGRAM 12: December 23, 2001
The Antelope Wife, Louise Erdrich.
Louise Erdrich returns in The Antelope Wife to the Ojibway people, whose lives, loves, and passions she has so masterfully chronicled in previous novels. In her fictional world, where myth is woven deeply into the fabric of everyday life, "there is light as well as darkness ... and encountering it offers pain and exhilaration in equal measure."-- The New York Times Book Review
Guests: Allan Chavkin, author/editor of The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich and Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris; Anton Treuer, editor of Living Our Language: Ojibwe Tales and Oral Histories: A Bilingual Anthology.
PROGRAM 13: December 30, 2001
The Feast of Love, Charles Baxter.
In this engrossing novel--alternately hilarious and sad--the author presents varying versions of events, each from the point of view of a different character. Writer Lorrie Moore says of Baxter, "One of Mr. Baxter's great strengths as a writer has always been his ability to capture the stranded inner lives of the Middle West's repressed eccentrics."
Guest: Author Charles Baxter