What Does It Mean to Be Midwestern?

A conversation with author and cultural critic Phil Cristman on our cultural "amnesia" about the Midwest.

Hi, y’all! 

This week I have an interview¹ with Midwestern author and cultural critic Phil Cristman, someone whom Tressie McMillan Cottom says is “a beautiful writer with a sharp analytical mind.” 

He writes the newsletter

The Tourist

and is the author of the book Midwest Futures about the history and future of this region, so I wanted to ask him: What does it mean to be Midwestern? 

It’s a question that Lovey and I have grappled with since we moved to Detroit a decade ago. It’s taken me a while to consider myself a Michigander, let alone a Midwesterner. Maybe it’s because the identity seems so ambiguous, especially compared to the American West, where I’m from, or the Northeast, where I moved from. 

Christman argues that our common bond is that very lack of definition. He writes that the region is “a conceptual magpie’s nest, made from scraps of everything.” But in that pastiche, not one vision stands out strong. 

What binds the region, at least partially, Christman argues, is its in-betweenness. The Midwest has been in-between so much. In between the North and the South. Then left behind as the “frontier” moved West, so it was neither the seat of colonial society nor the vanguard of the future. Between urban and rural; past and future. 

The result, Christman says, is a sense of exhaustion here that stems from being  a “place that almost happened” and still hangs on to the hope that it will. 

I hope you enjoy our conversation. If so, you should definitely check out his book. It’s on sale right now from his publisher! And don’t miss his latest book, How to Be Normal: Essays.

See you Friday for Cocktail Hour.

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Tell me one thing or a couple of things that you absolutely love about the Midwest. What do you celebrate?

Oh, it's beautiful here in so many different kinds of ways. The flatness can be really beautiful in a strange way. I think even the winters can be really beautiful in an austere way.  I love driving through the Midwest. I mean, it's a pleasure that I'm probably going to have to forgo more often just to conserve gasoline, but even the ugly parts of the Midwest are often really beautiful to me. 

You're from Alma, a small town in Michigan. What did your hometown smell like?

Oh, man, that's a great question. My family always says that my memories of Alma are way too negative and almost dystopian, so factor that in as I tell you that Alma, especially during the summer, often smelled like gas. There was an oil refinery nearby, and, oh man, on hot days it could just stink.

When I read about the refinery in your book, I wondered if you liked or hated that smell! My dad worked in the oil refinery in my hometown, and the smell is still one of my favorites. 

I think that’s probably the healthy adaptation to make, but for me, I never got used to it.

Did you feel like you belonged in Alma?

I think by the time the idea of belonging or not belonging had arisen as a thing that I was thinking about self consciously, I already felt that I didn’t belong. But up to like age 8 or 9, I had almost pre-critical feelings toward the place. And I think if you'd asked me, Do you feel like you belong?, I would have probably said yes. 

After that, I have the standard Gen X narrative of the kid who doesn't fit in because he likes to read books. He’s too artsy. He questions society. I watched the movie Edward Scissorhands like a million times; I read Catcher in the Rye like three times; I listened to punk rock; I didn't know when I was going to kiss a girl. The whole nine yards. But I think if I could go back in time and observe myself at that age as an adult, I would probably feel like, you know, you're just having normal growing pains and being way too flummoxed about it. 

That’s interesting. I grew up in Fruita, Colorado, and when we left I was 9 or 10, and I didn’t feel like I belonged there. But as an adult, I have in some ways mentally repossessed that place as my identity. Is what we felt just a part of adolescence and youth the world over? Or were your feelings somehow more intense because of the loneliness and alienation that you write about permating the culture of the Midwest?

The book developed out of an essay, and one of the criticisms of the essay was people felt I treated things as Midwestern that are just human. So I actually thought about that quite a bit as I was writing. And the reason I ended up making the argument that there's something distinctively Midwestern about the intensity with which I felt the sense of loneliness and waiting is that, as I've gotten older and met more people from who grew up in other parts of the world, I don't take for granted that it’s universal anymore. 

In grad school, I had a friend who was passionately, passionately Southern and he and I were very similar. We were intellectual misfits from really small places, but he felt a real closeness to a loyalty to his hometown. He felt that he was able to find ways to fit in even at the time. And he was this pretty weird dude. And I've met other people who did not grow up in the Midwest who you would expect them to have had similar experiences to mine, and they really didn’t. 

Have you ever felt like you belong, and if so, can you describe what it felt like?

The first time that I really, really intensely felt like I was part of a community that was defining for me was on the staff of my college newspaper. I think what I'm labeling as “belonging” in my head is a complex of several things. One of them is definitely feeling like there are several people in this community who I identify intensely with, and the others, whom I don’t feel as similar to, I still feel like we're on the same team. I still feel this basic affection for them. Belonging is like an empathy or sympathy toward, a feeling of sameness, even with people who are temperamentally very different from you.

Do you feel like you have that with the Midwest?

I feel like the Midwest is so various that it would be like saying I feel at home in America. But yeah, I have that with places and groups of people in the Midwest. 

The Midwest is this amorphous concept. How do you describe it?

If there are a set of characteristically Midwestern American traits, one of them is amnesia. There’s actually cool shit happening, but nobody talks about it or remembers it. One of the first things that surprised me in my research is that the Midwest has been constantly talked about throughout American history, but it just never sticks and becomes this kind of narrative that people remember. There’s this sense that the Midwest is here to be forged again and historicized for the first time. But along with that sense of newness, is a sense of, like, a disappointed place, a place that almost happened. There is a melancholy that feels very particular to this region.

One aspect of your book that struck me was the idea of the Midwest as an in-between place. It was in between the North and South; in between the East and the new frontier; between what was and what could be. So we’re like geographic middle age. All the excitement of youth is gone and we’re left with the melancholy of the glory days, but the future is still ahead. And as humans we tend to remember or romanticize beginnings and the endings, but the middles are sort of forgotten. And I wonder if that's our legacy, the culture of the Midwest is the culture of the middle.  

Oh, that's a really good point. I mean, just naturally we tend to allide the middle when we historicize something in our memory, the way we make a narrative. Like when I finish a long novel, it's like I remember the beginning, usually really intensely and vividly, and then there's a handful of characteristic things from the middle that I remember, and then the end. It's like a barbell. It's like two big things and then a line, which is not actually true to our experiences at all.

We sort of forget all that rising action in a narrative arc. Our memories coalesce around the beginning and the end. Maybe the Midwest is the middle of our narrative arc as a country.

That's interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way because I was so intently looking for, like, left wing reasons for our historical amnesia that I could then get mad about in the book. That's just kind of what I do. And so I ended up with: This is what happens when you adopt a settler colonial narrative. 

I'm a big fan of the podcast 99 Percent Invisible, and it has an episode about the concept of average and how it's changed over time. In the beginning, to be average was actually to be exceptional; you were the average of everything. Now it’s quite different. Average is banal. So when people talk about the averageness of the Midwest, I wonder if we mean the original intent or the new interpretation. 

It's definitely been both. There's a way of celebrating Midwesterners as the best; sort of apex Americans. We’re just wild enough and just civilized enough, right? And then there's also a way of depicting us where, my God, we're so boring that it drives any sensible person to want to jump off a cliff.

Do you have a favorite representation of the Midwest in pop culture and/or literature?

This is a real cliche answer at this point, but I’m a huge Marilynne Robinson fanboy. 

Everybody should be.

The Gilead books, I think, are just beautiful and if you read past the first one, they increasingly cut against any sort of hagiographical tendencies or any tendency to be overly nostalgic about the Midwest. They're increasingly blunt about the ways that the Midwest has failed to live up to all those abolitionists who founded colleges in the prairies and the 18th centuries.

Ok. So explain Midwestern niceness to me. I think you call it  humbleness and a light condescension. Explain that to me. Is as part of the culture.

I don't know if I can explain it to you because I have been trying to understand it my whole life. But I do think Midwest Midwestern niceness is supposed to be more equivocal. It's supposed to be more like, I'm hedging on whether you're my friend or my foe so I'm doing this kind of blandly friendly routine that can serve both. 

I think that's the biggest difference between, like, Fake Nice in the South as I've experienced it and Fake Nice in the Midwest. Here it can actually turn to real nice depending on how the overall conversation unfolds. It feels very equivocal, very ambivalent.

One of the things you write about in the later parts of the book is climate change migration to the Great Lakes areas. What would you tell the newcomers is important about the culture?

That's such a great question. I've spent much more time thinking about how to get people who already live here to be psychologically ready to be more accepting of immigrants and refugees, especially given the nativist turn that we’ve seen in our politics over the last eight to 10 years. I haven't thought as much about how I would advise people to sort of make themselves part of the place. I guess partly because, morally, I think it's more like the job of those who already reside here to be ready to be gracious in ways that we maybe we haven't always been historically.

I’ve been thinking more about the people coming as refugees without resources. There's a long history of that in the Midwest that I think we really need to embrace as part of our cultural history. I do think we need to be much more proud of the fact that we have this infrastructure, which has a lot to do with the churches and people being genuinely charitable as a religious duty to people who are unfortunate.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

1. If you’ve followed me from the beginning, this may sound familiar. This was the first interview I did for Bar\Heart, back in July 2021. But this is the remixed, director’s cut version with more of our conversation. Enjoy!