The Kiddo spent Spring Break visiting grandparents in Ohio, and last Easter weekend, I drove down to pick him up. When I got into the car at our home in Michigan, it was 38 degrees. When I arrived at my family’s home in Ohio three hours later, it was 70 degrees! We then spent the next hour pulling out warm-weather decorations from the garage and setting them up in their sprawling yard. Birdhouses, rain catchers, flowerpots shaped like cats. At some point, the Kiddo wandered off and just laid on a saucer swing by himself for a good twenty minutes. This felt like a feat because this kid hates solitude.
I spend a lot of time outdoors when visiting my Ohio family. Summer mornings spent reading on the back porch before the temperature gets too hot. Afternoons spent splashing around in the pool. Vacations spent hiking through Hocking Hills or traipsing through living farms or picking apples in an orchard. I always leave feeling rejuvenated and inspired to embrace nature back home. (This is usually short-lived though. For some reason, my buggy backyard makes me feel anxious while their buggy backyard doesn’t. There is probably something to unpack here, but that’s another post for another day. I digress…).
I also find myself craving to read nature writing after these visits. I’ve been known to spend hours curating nature writing reading lists (that I of course never actually get around to reading). This week was not much different, except this time, I searched specifically for books rooted in Ohio.
You might be surprised to learn that my search so far as yielded few results. Or maybe not. Ohio is a state many people complain about driving through while on the way to somewhere else. (Driving 65 mph for an hour down US 23 is a drag.) So, I suppose for the unfamiliar, it’s understandable why this state doesn’t draw the attention of Muir-esque or Thoreau-esque writers. Which is shame because Ohio is much more than rustbelt towns and farmland (and honestly, Kentucky writer, Wendell Berry, has an awful lot to say about farmland). To the north, there is Lake Erie shoreline, the Erie Plain, and Magee Marsh, the Warbler capital of the world. West of that laid one of the largest interior wetland systems in the United States, the Great Black Swamp, until it was nearly entirely drained for agriculture by the late 1800s. To the south is the Appalachian foothills. And bisecting all of it is the glacial boundary stretching diagonally from the northeast to the southwest. Northwest of the boundary, the earth was scraped flat and enriched with glacial till that produced some of the most fertile farmland in the United States. To the southeast of the boundary is the Unglaciated Allegheny Plateau, which reveals ancient shale walls, deep gorges, and sandstone cliffs.
A landscape this diverse and historied has to have a trove of creative science and nature writing available somewhere, right? Sadly, the major publishing companies seem to be largely sleeping on Ohio. I had better luck with university presses within the state. I may have to tweak my search terms (or how I search at all. Since when did Google return such bad results?), but this is what I’ve dug up and added to my TBR so far…
Resurrection of the Wild: Meditations on Ohio’s Natural Landscape by Deborah Flemming – a collection of essays by Flemming that focuses on natural and human history on the Allegheny Plateau and Ohio’s hill country in the east. Flemming writes about farm life, the impacts of the mining and drilling industries, fox hunting, and naturalists like Louis Bromfield and John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed, that is). This collection of essays won the 2020 PEN/Diamonstein Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay.
Ghosts of an Old Forest: Essays on Midwestern Rural Heritage by Deborah Flemming – a collection of essays about Flemming’s farm, Ohio’s agricultural history, and the extraction industries that threaten Ohio’s rural areas.
Every River on Earth: Writing from Appalachian Ohio edited by Neil Carpathios – an anthology of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction about family, land, industry, and what it means to call Appalachia home. (I’m not entirely sure if this will scratch the nature writing itch).
A Sanctuary of Trees: Beechnuts, Birdsongs, Baseball Bats, and Benedictions by Gene Logsdon – a tribute to the woods and human connection to trees from the perspective of a lifelong farmer from Upper Sandusky.
Letters from Eden: a Year at Home in the Woods by Julie Zickefoose – paintings and essays based on Zickfoose’s daily walks and observations in the Ohio Valley.
The Inland Island: a Year in Nature by Josephine W Johnson – Johnson writes about the year she and her husband tried to revert their 37-acre farm in Ohio back to wilderness, reflecting on social and environmental issues along the way.
More recently, I spent a morning walk contemplating Ohio nature writing, and really Midwest nature writing as a whole. I thought about someone I followed on instagram ages ago that curated a reading list featuring novels set in Midwest states. I thought it would be cool to do the same, with nature writing, but also with fictional novels too. Maybe not curate but certainly explore.
Do you have any favorite books, fiction or nonfiction, that are set in the Midwest?
By Golly, Ollie! 