Austin Smith
Photo by Holly Mulder-Wollan
Bio
Austin Smith grew up on a family dairy farm in northwestern Illinois. His first collection of poems, Almanac, was selected by Paul Muldoon for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. His second collection, Flyover Country, was selected by Susan Stewart for the same series and is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in September 2018. His stories have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Glimmer Train, Kenyon Review, Sewanee Review, ZYZZYVA, and Threepenny Review. He received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in fiction at Stanford University, where he currently teaches courses in poetry, fiction, environmental literature, and documentary journalism. In addition to teaching, he is currently working to found Driftless Artist House, a lending library and literary event space in a hundred-year-old farmhouse located in Jo Daviess County in northwestern Illinois, just to the west of the farm he grew up on.
I can’t exaggerate how important this grant has been to me. My teaching career has brought me to California, but my writing is focused in the Midwest. In the past few years, it’s become increasingly difficult to connect with the source of my work. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes of writing about Michigan while sitting in a café in Paris, and how his distance from that place in the flesh had the effect of making it seem closer in his mind. I’ve experienced this myself, writing about Illinois while living in Oakland. But at some point it becomes necessary to return to our origins and refill the aquifer from which we draw our work. This award has already made it possible for me to return to the Midwest for extended periods of research and writing, something that would have been out of the question had I not received this grant. And so, in addition to the time that this award has given me, it has quite literally allowed me to reconnect with my subject matter.
This grant has also encouraged me to continue writing about rural America at a time when I had begun to despair of this mission. Before the 2016 election, I felt that the Midwest was often ignored, an ignorance epitomized by the condescending term “flyover country.” And after the election, I began to wonder whether I really knew the place as well as my poems and stories might suggest. But the day I learned that I had received an NEA fellowship, I felt as if my very identity as an artist had been affirmed. I’ve written more since receiving this grant than I wrote in the two years prior. Moving forward, I feel it’s even more important than ever to write of this region, to identify the trends that have led to the decline of small towns and small family farms, and to celebrate the people and the land so that no reader of mine will ever think of the Midwest as flyover country again.
from “Friday Night Fish Fry”
They talk of the rain as if it were an old friend coming towards them through the night, who will have to be fed at an odd hour. They talk with the quiet ease of tired people who know that they have a wealth building even as they drink thin beer and eat fried fish, a wealth different from the wealth of stocks. Their fortune is the milk building in the bodies of their grazing herds, the corn growing at night like the bones of boys. They speak with the ease of people who are finally sitting down after a day of labor and crunching numbers and watching the sky. When, after such a day, a woman who knows your name because she knows everyone’s comes up to your table and asks what you’d like to drink, it’s enough to make you cry. This woman, who will never quit smoking and who will have a drink named after her after she dies (the “Jen and Tonic”) brings Budweisers for the parents and Shirley Temples for the kids. She hasn’t even bothered bringing them menus. She knows what they’re here for. The kids haven’t even eaten their cherries before Jenny comes out of the kitchen carrying all four baskets balanced on her forearms, her eyes pitched down on the floor, a look on her face like someone sewing their own wound. The steaming baskets are full of fish battered in beer, with sides of coleslaw and fries. They say the prayer and begin to eat as Jenny brings out basket after basket to other tables. The fish is infinite. It is downright biblical. It is like the mural in Our Lady of the Farmer, showing Jesus praying over a few loaves and fishes on the banks of the Pearl River. In the woods behind him, hungry people wait for him to work his miracle. He looks nervous, as if He isn’t sure it’s going to work this time, but no one is going to be turned away. No one is going to go home hungry. When they’re finished eating he pays the bill, tipping Jenny extravagantly, and the four of them grow quiet, almost solemn. But just when the kids think there’s nothing to look forward to now, he leans back from the basket of fish he couldn’t finish and says, so softly they can hardly hear him, “Well, how about some ice cream?” Now this is too much. What have they done to deserve this, the kids think. He leans back, watching them, grinning at his own munificence, a little high on the two Budweisers and all the tavern talk and the last light falling through the window onto his wife’s unused knife. She decides to be the reasonable one, mutters something about it being a little late, but then she caves, shrugs. Ice cream. Of course, why in the world not? They walk down the street to the Union Dairy and tell the high school girls scooping ice cream which flavors they want. Then they sit outside the Union Dairy, in the leafy square where Lincoln debated Douglass, licking their cones, their tongues flickering pink and blue. The ice cream makes them slightly sick and sad, but they had to have some. With aches in their heads like little pieces of tin hung in an orchard to keep birds away, they leave town even as others are streaming in. It is growing dark now. In the hollows of the fields, fireflies and fog. No one knows what the fireflies mean, but everyone understands them.
("Friday Night Fish Fry" first appeared in Narrative Magazine)