50 Writers, 50 States: Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey on State by State
When I first met Minnesota's own Matt Weiland at BookExpo a few years ago, he was living in London, as an editor for the great literary magazine Granta, and had gone native to the extent that he (and his friend Sean Wilsey) had edited a book on soccer, The Thinking Fan's Guide to the World Cup, for which they asked 32 writers to write essays on the 32 countries playing in the 2006 tournament. Not too long ago, Matt moved back to the States to work on another great literary magazine, The Paris Review, and started getting back in touch with his home. By his own report, he began
hitting the Americana hard: I read Moby-Dick and Huck Finn again, and I gorged on Preston Sturges films and Will Eisner comics and the aching Old Time music that is heavy on banjos and beards. I spent a long Sunday walking down Broadway and a weekend bicycling on the Jersey Shore and a week driving 3,000 miles though the Midwest. I ate a whole lot of pie.
That's from his preface to an even more ambitious geographical stunt he concocted with Wilsey, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait. They commissioned 50 writers for essays on the 50 states (and added an interview about that underrepresented district, Washington, D.C., with its best-known chronicler, Edward P. Jones). Inspired by the WPA guides of the '30s Federal Writers Project, Weiland and Wilsey asked writers from Louise Erdrich and Jonathan Franzen to Anthony Bourdain and Sarah Vowell to write about the states they knew best--or, in some cases, states they'd never set foot in before.
It's a great idea and, it turns out, a gorgeous and smart book, looking enough like an old social studies textbook that I was tempted to write my name and homeroom in the back, except that it would have marred the lovely endpapers by the cartoonist Seth. And their inspired project has inspired a number of other stunts: our I-5 and internet neighbors at Powell's have based their third "Out of the Book" movie on State by State, which, judging by the trailer available for viewing, looks adorable and funny. And today we're embarking on a folly of our own: a project to choose (with help from you and some guest contributors, including many of the writers in State by State) the best books from each state. (Much more on that later.) But first, I talked with Matt and Sean a few days ago about regional identities, how they put the book together, where to go to get beat up in Key West, and grade-school censorship in Minnesota. You can read the interview below, but if you'd like to get an immediate sense of the regional distinctions that still remain in our homogenizing society, take a listen to this short clip (in which we discuss, of all things, regional distinctions in our homogenizing society), and note Matt's clipped Minnesota notes, Sean's mellow California tones, and my own suburban Maryland mumble.
Amazon.com: What state--or states--are you calling from?
Sean: We're both in New York city.
Amazon.com: Okay, level with me: you asked 50 writers to write about 50 states, but they all live in Brooklyn, don't they?
Matt: Oh, that is a low blow.
Sean: It's not true at all! One of my jobs for the book is to send out checks to all the writers, and I can say that very few of them went out to addresses in Brooklyn. And we can also say that only 50 percent of the editors of this book live in Brooklyn.
Amazon.com: Do places still have identities in the United States? Don't we all watch the same TV shows and read the same Internet rumors and shop at the same store?
Matt: I think Sean and I can do the it's-all-becoming-the-same plaint as well and as boldly and loudly as anybody. It's true when you drive around on the interstates or watch commercial television or turn on most of the radio stations it all does sound alike. There's the same big-box superstores everywhere and Starbucks on every corner. But it's also true that variety is remarkably resilient. The things like regional accents remain really defined and strong, and one place, strangely, is just very different from another. Just tell somebody from Minnesota that you think they're from Iowa and you'll get an earful. And the same is true of Vermont and New Hampshire: those are incredibly different places, despite so many outward similarities.
Sean: I would even go on to say that there's just a tonal difference in the way that people communicate. I sent this email last week to this bunch of people, letting them know about this tour that Matt and I are about to go on, and I got responses back from people all over the place. And tonally they just varied so much depending on where in the country the person was from. I just got this response from this poet in New Hampshire who said, "Remove me from your list!" [laughter] Okay, that's just so abrupt and cold and Granite State! And I got this long, sweet note from somebody in Utah, who told me that "Perhaps you never knew that I was from a large, polygamist family." And I just got this sense of people that had a different pace in different places throughout the country. Weather plays a huge part in that, but it's also proximity to nature and the way the country has developed. I do feel like the East Coast tends to be the faster, harder side, and then it mellows as you go west and south.
Matt: I think that points out something about the book more generally: I think the word "stereotype" has this negative connotation and of course it can be very negative. But it's also the case that stereotypes can be true, and true for a reason, and we wanted to find out why. What it is about places that make them known for certain things, whether it's the speed with which people from a certain part of the country talk, or the warmth that some people express from somewhere else. Why are those things true?
Amazon.com: I think people often seem pretty proud of those state identities. Ethnic or religious identities are much more fraught, but states, there's not as much baggage attached to them.
Matt: We also wanted to get at it in a different way, and that is by not having every state be written about by a writer from that particular state. I think sometimes you can reveal something fresh and interesting about a place by sending a writer who's never set foot there at all. And I think some of the most revealing pieces in the book are by writers who are going on a road trip somewhere and say remarkably funny and interesting and revealing, perceptive things about the place they've gone.
Amazon.com: Right, for Delaware you sent in Craig Taylor, who's from London?
Matt: He's actually Canadian, he's from the very far west of Canada, near Vancouver. He's a playwright, a journalist, and an oral historian, a great fan of Studs Terkel's oral histories. He lives in London, but he came to America and we sent him down to Delaware for a couple of weeks, and he came back with really an extraordinary piece. I didn't know much about Delaware at all beforehand, and now with his piece, in which he meets black single mothers in the Wilmington bus station and Latino fishermen fishing in the shadow of a nuclear power plant and a Dow chemical plant and the former governor of the state. I think it's a brilliant piece of journalism that gets under the skin of the state.
Sean: And made me a huge fan of Delaware and of Craig Taylor. I had never really heard of Craig, and I did not know anything about Delaware, and he turns this tiny little state into something so vivid and rich and fascinating that I'm planning a little trip to Delaware next week.
Matt: I think that reflects something else about the book. There's some very traditional kinds of pieces by Jhumpa Lahiri, and S.E. Hinton, and Rick Moody, these personal essays on their own past in a particular place, but Sean and I wanted to go beyond that sort of thing and play with form. So in addition to getting those sorts of personal essays you get things like Craig Taylor's oral history, or Jonathan Franzen's just flat-out brilliant dramatic dialogue about New York state.
Sean: Although I would have to say that Jhumpa's piece and Rick's piece are two of my favorite pieces in the book. They may be straightforward memoirs in some ways, but they are brilliant pieces of writing that reveal stuff through their own experiences without the--I mean Rick's piece is a full-on attack against Connecticut-- [laughter]
Amazon.com: Not his first--
Sean: And Jhumpa went into it thinking that she might be a little ambivalent about Rhode Island but in many ways her piece is like this declaration of love for the state that her family came to from a very, very different place.
Amazon.com: So how did you find, or decide on, the people you wanted to write for you? Did you start with the map, or did you start with the people?
Sean: We started in a bar. [laughter]
Matt: We started with beer.
Sean: Yeah, we just sat down and started talking. The whole idea of doing this project was so overwhelming to us, but we decided we'd give it a shot, and I can't think of anybody who I would have been able to do this with except for Matt, because he's got so much energy and enthusiasm and he just knows so many wonderful writers, and we were able to just sit down and look at the map. Mostly we just threw out names of people we liked first, and then tried to make connections to states. And then some people came about in the weirdest ways, like Ellery Washington, who has not really been published very much, wrote about New Mexico. He's an African American guy who grew up there because his dad was recruited by Sandia Labs to build packages to deploy nuclear physics as weaponry, and he was actually somebody I had just met and spoken to and suddenly realized he was from New Mexico and he wrote this amazing piece.
Matt: And that was true throughout the long commissioning process. It felt like one of those games you play in the back seat of the car on a long road trip with the tiles, you know? You have, like, 50 spaces and 49 tiles and you keep moving them around until you get them in order, and every time we moved one it would bump three other writers. Like in New Jersey, where we had three writers we really like, and once we chose one the others said--
Sean: "I'm not going to do anything else!"
Matt: "That's it, I'm out. I would only write about New Jersey." It was sort of heartbreaking to do, as exciting as it was matching people up.
Amazon.com: Was there anyone you had never met that you thought, oh my god, we have to get this person, and you just cold-called them?
Sean: I think most of them were like that, actually. There were a lot of people that we knew, but so many we were just fans of their work, and one or the other of us would get in touch with them and see if they would. It was a great opportunity to meet so many writers that I really admire.
Matt: There were also great surprises. I'll give you an example: Michigan is the state where I was born, and Sean and I know plenty of writers who are well known for being from there and we thought about them seriously. And then somebody told me a story that the Ghanaian writer Mohammed Naseehu Ali, who had written for the New Yorker but who I didn't know, had come to America when he was 18 and had come to study in high school in Michigan, in northern Michigan. And Sean and I thought, that would be such an interesting story. And I wrote to him, and I got the sweetest note back saying that he'd always wanted to write about that experience but had never tried it. He'd never even written much nonfiction--he's a novelist and a writer of stories. And I'm really pleased we did it, because the piece he delivered is fantastic--it's funny and surprising about, you know, becoming an American, and becoming a Michigander.
Amazon.com: I think it's not something people have been asked to write about--it's this part of their past that you might never find a way to talk about until somebody does, well, an anthology of 50 writers on 50 states. [laughter]
Sean: Yeah, until that happy day.
Amazon.com: You've made many people's dreams come true.
Sean: There are many people in many parts of the world waiting for our call, Matt.
Matt: We're dreammakers. [laughter] That's the slogan of our LLC: Dreammakers. Don't use it or we'll sue ya.
Amazon.com: So Sean, you talked about wanting to go to Delaware. Do you guys see this as a guidebook in a way? I know you based it on, or were at least inspired by, those WPA guides in the '30s. I wonder if you could talk about them and how they inspired you and how they helped you think about this book.
Matt: Well, I'm hoping somebody will use it as a guidebook and drive down to that scummy diner that Josh Ferris writes about working at in Key West, Florida, and get beat up by whoever's washing dishes there now. That would be a fine example of a guidebook being used to its fullest.
Sean: We're big fans of the WPA guides and that's what got us going on this more than anything. Our editor on the soccer book had written, saying, hey, would you guys ever want to do a book about the election? He thought of us as people who wrote about, you know, sporting events--or edited about sporting events--and so he was like, the election, that's the biggest sporting event of all. And our response was, no way, we have no interest in doing something that disposable.
Matt: It's something we wouldn't want to read ourselves.
Sean: But we're big fans of those WPA guides. And I think we're fans of them for what they're good at, and yet really aware of their shortcomings. There's just a lot of dry writing in the WPA guides, and they do have to perform the mercantile, workaday purpose of, "You should go here, and you should see this," and we didn't want to do that. We wanted brilliant writing, which is what those guides are at their best. So many writers like Studs Terkel and Richard Wright and John Cheever and Ralph Ellison got their starts working for the WPA in the Federal Writers Project, and we wanted to try to evoke that spirit, and the kind of writers they might be now. And have people--Matt, you put it really well, create a guide to the soul of the nation. That's our hope.
Matt: And Sean's right. All these illustrious writers in the '30s worked on the state guides, but many of them were frustrated and unhappy. I was just reading a bit about Jim Thompson, the great hard-boiled American crime writer--
Sean: Did he work on these?
Matt: He did.
Sean: I love him!
Matt: He worked on the Oklahoma book, and he complained bitterly that the stuff he wrote kept getting edited down and edited down into something that barely read like a human had written it. Now that wasn't the case for every guide and every writer, but that's what we wanted to avoid. We wanted the writers to shine. We wanted to pick writers that we admired and that we could set loose to do their thing. By the same token, editing them intensively and at length to make sure they were as convincing and solid and lasting as possible. That the pieces weren't disposable.
Sean: I had no idea that Jim Thompson worked on the Oklahoma guide. I felt like we both knew who the really fascinating writers were but he--you ever read A Hell of a Woman?
Matt: Never. It was banned in Minnesota. [laughter] You can't say "woman" in Minnesota. Do you know that in public high school in Minneapolis we had to read an expurgated version of Romeo and Juliet?
Amazon.com: Just called Romeo?
Matt: Yeah, they just send each other letters.
Amazon.com: You could think of the book not just as a guide to 50 states, but as a guide to 50 writers, that you may not have read before.
Matt: That's one of our hopes about the book. There's a lot of writers that people know, and are fans of. But we were very conscious to try to commission some writers that will be new to many readers, writers like Philip Connors, who wrote about Minnesota, and Said Sayrafiezadeh, who wrote about South Dakota. These are young writers who will be known in a few years, but who may not be as known now as Louise Erdrich or Susan Orlean or Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Franzen, and I think that's part of the point of doing a book like this, is that you bring some new writers to the attention of readers.
Sean: Yeah, exactly. When we started working on this project nobody had heard of Charles Bock and now he's gone and published this wonderful novel.
Amazon.com: Well, thanks for introducing us to all those writers and all those states. Thanks guys.
--Tom
Karen Templer on September 16, 2008 at 01:28 PM
It is truly a great-looking book, all the way around. I've gone so far as to call it the "most flawlessly produced book of the year."
http://www.readerville.com/index.php/journal/view/state-by-state-by-matt-weiland-and-sean-wilsey/
Can't wait to spend some time with the essays! Meanwhile, thanks for the Q&A.
Kristen on September 16, 2008 at 03:44 PM
Wonderful review/interview! I've been fortunate to visit all 50 states and teach literature and writing the past 15 years so this is right up my alley.
In fact, this is becoming a viral idea, too... Melanie Jones started a series in the Columbia Spectator last year called the 50 States of Literature. When she took a break for summer, I picked up the thread and started a series on my blog called 50 States 50 Books -- check it out:
http://www.bookclubclassics.com/Blog/category/50-states-50-books/
I'm about 2/3rds of the way through... The big question was whether to choose writers who were born in the state, or to choose writing that embraced the state. I've tended to do the latter...
Great post!
Flüge on November 25, 2008 at 06:34 AM
I love this interview! Seems to be an awesome book and I am gonna buy it. Hopefully my expections of learning more about living in the states from a profound point of view.
Tom - Ballontiere Luftballontiere Ballonkünstler on May 28, 2009 at 11:04 PM
Hello,
thanks a lot for all the useful hints on you site,
keep on doing,
greetings from germany
Tom