A Flame Called Indiana: An Anthology of Contemporary Hoosier Writing - Softcover

Case, Doug Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253066808 ISBN 13: 9780253066800

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2023

Synopsis

As Kurt Vonnegut, Indiana's most famous writer, once remarked, "Wherever you go, there is always a Hoosier doing something important there."

A Flame Called Indiana features 65 writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry who have all had the pleasure of being Hoosiers at one time or another. Curated by the Indiana University Bloomington creative writing department, this diverse anthology features everything from the immigrant experience to the Indianapolis 500 to science fiction. Altogether, the work stands testament to the vibrancy and creativity of this Midwest state.

An excellent gift for your favorite reader and an important resource for creative writers, A Flame Called Indiana serves as both a chronicle of where Indiana's writing is today and a beacon to those who'll take it where it's going next.

About this title

About the Author

Doug Paul Case is author of the book of poems Americanitis and four chapbooks, including Contemporary Aesthetics. He is Academic Specialist of English and Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Indiana University and lives in Bloomington.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Introduction

Almost daily I find myself amused that in the decade I've lived in Indiana no one I've met has been able to definitively tell me where the moniker "Hoosier" originated. Theories abound, of course, and have been catalogued by organizations as disparate as the Indiana Historical Bureau and the United States Forest Service. They include an unusually large woodsman, an unusually adept flatboatman, and an unusually truculent elder militiaman. In almost all the versions I've heard there's reference to something atypical―if not downright odd!―about the Hoosier, long before comedians and St. Louisans started using it as a pejorative for uncultured people.

These etymological possibilities are at the heart of what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the Indiana imagination, because at bottom "Hoosier" originated wherever the last Hoosier asked said it might have. Indiana is a tall tale type of state. The thrill is in contemplating why each particular story took the direction it did, and what interests me most about these possible first Hoosiers is how they were all in the middle of getting something done. Whatever else Hoosiers have been, we've historically been great doers. As Kurt Vonnegut, our most famous homegrown writer, once remarked, "Wherever you go, there is always a Hoosier doing something important there." And what have we been doing? Painting. Inventing. Racing. Dribbling. Moonwalking. And, of course, writing.

While imaginators everywhere transform what is into what could be, for many Indiana storytellers the act of developing that could seems intimately and situationally tied to their audience. We're not concerned with telling people what they want to hear, but what we hope will expand that audience's perspective. When the sky is so big and the corn so tall, how could we not want to share that grandness, to enrich our neighbors' inner lives with our dreams, our lyrics, our sagas? Writers in Indiana understand implicitly how narrative shapes perspective, how the more one reads the more one comes to understand about the world and the incalculable number of varied perspectives living in it. Our state isn't nicknamed "the crossroads" because people are passing through it, but because they're stopping on their way, showing and telling. It's true, there's something in the air here, some urge to fill in space with song. There's always room for another writer's tale, always for a new image. I read to learn, to experience the passage of time in new ways, to delight in clever turns of phrase. . .and I get to do all those things with the pieces in this anthology. There is very little as stimulating to a writer as a strong collection of their peer's work; this is what's happening around me, this is with whom I'm conversing! Anthologies like this one are events, celebrations of our imaginations and drive.

Historians have previously dubbed the turn of the twentieth century the "golden age" of Indiana literature, when many of the United States' most popular authors, including Booth Tarkington and James Whitcomb Riley, hailed from Indiana. Lew Wallace's 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ was the best-selling book of the nineteenth century. By numbers alone it would be difficult to assert that we have recently entered a new golden age―there are, of course, a dozen additional states to compete with, and the publishing industry has largely entrenched itself in New York―but in the last one hundred forty years (and doubly in the last twenty!) we've seen a widening of what our writing looks like and what it addresses―a trend I'll happily dub golden. While Ben-Hur, for example, chronicled the life of an enslaved Jewish nobleman-turned-charioteer who witnessed the crucifixion, and the most famous of Whitcomb's poems introduced the world to the little orphan Annie, our state's recent writing is more likely to imagine what the world will look like after trudging through the Anthropocene thirty years or to deeply consider the uses of beauty in a time like ours. To use the image of a limestone quarry: our fiction continues to take unusually imaginative leaps, our nonfiction unusually vivid dives, and our poetry unusually full-bodied splashes. While not every piece in this collection is set in Indiana―Buffalo, Puerto Rico, a Pennsylvania train station, a field just over the border in Ohio―all these authors show the commitment to possibility I've come to expect from Hoosier writers. Often all it takes is a few years in a town like Bloomington to appreciate how language's possibilities seem waterborne here, and perhaps another to cement that wondrous feeling into your writing.

My hope for this anthology is that it will serve as both a chronicle of where our state's writing is today and a beacon to those who'll take it where it's going next. Somewhere in Kokomo or Gary or Fishers or Hobart a young writer will catch in these pages the spark of what language can do when you're least expecting it, then pick up their pen or open their notes app to give writing the time-honored Hoosier try.

Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253066808
• ISBN 13: 9780253066800
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 300