The Books of the States: Wisconsin (10 electoral votes; Guest: Daphne Beal)

Daphne Beal may live in New York City, and she may have written her first novel, In the Land of No Right Angles, about American ex-pats in Nepal and India, but her essay on her home state of Wisconsin for State by State is one of the most lived-in pieces in the book, full of everyday details that carry the tug of things left behind (and remembered more exactly because of it). Here's a sample:

After the smokestacks and the cabbage fields came my grandparents' house of hushedness--stately Midwestern, elements of Prairie style, not too big, not too little, with a muffling effect on all of us. We always entered through the heavy oak door to the slate-tiled front hall. Beyond it the living room sat untouched except on Christmas or Easter, with wall-to-wall beige carpeting, dusty-rose drapes, and cabinets with mesh-screen faces protecting my grandmother's porcelain Doughty birds. The large plate-glass windows that lined the room faced a rolling lawn, with two large willows (their thick trunks filled with concrete to keep them upright) like sentries at the edge, and then the lake.

She writes that Milwaukee, unlike other big cities she knew, had "no collection of glimmering towers making a jagged skyline in the distance," and even her wealthy suburb it wasn't "the Wisconsin way" to live in showy opulence. And the books of the Badger State are a little like that too: no showy frontman standing in for Wisconsin literature, no Bellow or Twain or McMurtry or Faulkner claiming to speak for the state. Instead, we lead with Aldo Leopold, the quiet environmentalist whose posthumous essay collection became a conservationist classic.

Here is her Wisconsin ten (though we have to wonder if the same folks back home who, according to her essay, wonder how Wisconsinian she is if she's never been to a Packers game with a wedge of cheese on her head will ask, politely, "Did you not have room for Jerry Kramer's Instant Replay?"):

• A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. Written in a summer shack by the Wisconsin River (published in 1949), this collection of essays by a former forest ranger is considered a seminal work in American nature and conservation writing. Cows, wolves, carbon monoxide...it's all here.
• Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm not sure I need to say anything here, but Wilder--a Willa Cather for the younger set--was who we turned to as kids to know all about the "olden days," and about the land we drove through as we got to know our state. Half-Pint, with her Ma and Pa and siblings, was something of a hero to me and inspired a calico bonnet-wearing phase when I was seven.
• Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser. Yes, this is in many ways a Chicago book, but our heroine ventures there, in 1889, from small-town Wisconsin and the fact that the novel opens with her traveling past the green landscape of her home state before entering a life vastly more complicated and urban and full of pitfalls than the one she left behind always meant something to me. It seems like so many journeys, literary and otherwise, do begin in Wisconsin. Is it the metaphorical heart of innocence?
• The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton. Though this book takes place in a small Illinois town, Hamilton is from Wisconsin, and I say this is a Wisconsin book that is part of that group of harrowing and psychologically astute modern novels that go straight for the dark side of the state, especially in rural or rural-ish settings. The phrase, "Wisconsin gothic," might work, but there is something so unassuming and quiet about the way the novels work their magic in The Dive from Clausen's Pier by Ann Packer, Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay, and most recently that lonely story from Up North (as Wisconsinites say), Edgar Sawtelle.
• Any of the poetry collections by Lorine Niedecker [find them all in Collected Works]. Born in 1903, Niedecker is a kind of Emily Dickinson of Wisconsin, specifically Fort Atkinson and the nearby Blackhawk Island. She was also the only woman associated with the Objectivist poets. Though she once visited New York and briefly lived in Madison, when she worked for the Federal Writers Project, she is really a poet of place. In her poems it's as if humanity were informed by Wisconsin's landscape. From "I Was the Solitary Plover":

I knew a clean man
but he was not for me.
Now I sew green aprons
over covered seats. He

wades the muddy water fishing,
falls in, dries his last pay-check
in the sun, smooths it out
in Leaves of Grass. He's
the one for me.

• Anywhere but Here by Mona Simpson. Like Sister Carrie, the protagonist, Ann August, is only from Wisconsin, and Bay City is the place from which all things follow, but their original home is always with this mother-daughter duo as they take to America's highways and make their way to California so Ann might become a child star.
• Drought by Suzanne McNear. I love this small-press collection of haunting stories that taps into the eeriness beneath Wisconsin's cheer-slash-stoicism. In "Excerpts from a Wisconsin Childhood," McNear (who, full disclosure, is my aunt) writes: "The silence of the prairie was heavy and audible. We heard it before we were born, in the music, in the housework that went on in the rooms where dust was being stirred into sunlight, in the twanging of rubber bands that people stretched between their thumbs and forefingers to signify the stretching of time."
• The Making of Milwaukee by John Gurda. I've used this book so many times. It's really the go-to book on Milwaukee's history whether you want to know about the famed Schlitz Palm Garden at of the turn of the (20th) century, Socialist politics Milwaukee-style, or race riots in the 60's, Gurda's book is a pleasingly accessible and authoritative read on the Brew City's history.
• Wisconsin Death Trip by Michael Lesy. More darkness from the land of cheeseheads, this now-considered cult classic (1973) is a record of a rural county's unhappy dealings, at the end of the 19th century, with alcoholism, armed tramps, barn burnings, diphtheria and smallpox. (Also see James Marsh's 2004 excellent and spooky documentary by the same name about the book.)
• Psycho, by Robert Bloch. Okay, I confess I haven't actually read this one by the pulp and crime writer Bloch, but Hitchcock based his movie on this novel, and Bloch based the novel (loosely) on the life and crimes of Ed Gein, of Plainfield, Wisconsin, who made lampshades out of victims' skin and bowls from skulls, No Wisconsin list would be complete without a reference to the serial killers from our state, most notably Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer. Ahem, did I make a case for the metaphorical heart of innocence? I'm going to have to rethink that one.

• See all of our state posts
• Read our introduction to The Books of the States: 50 States, 538 Books
• Read our interview with State by State editors Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey