Some of the smallness of small town Ohio had qualities that were great comforts to me as a child, even though the more I grew into adolescence and adulthood, the more it grew to feel too tight a fit for who I was becoming. How did your perception of the Midwest change once you returned to the U.S.?ĬB: While I was living in Japan, after enough time passed for me to be able to look over my shoulder and see how far away from home I was living for a still unknown period of time to come, I began to look homeward to the Midwest and to see the things I hadn’t known I liked about it. LS: You spent a few years abroad teaching English in Japan. In a town of around three thousand people, where everyone knew one another, where my graduating class was around sixty, and where, whenever you happened to look up and notice a plane etching white trails in the sky above, you were reminded that you lived in that broad landscape others dismissively call Flyover Country, it was a quintessential Midwestern upbringing, including 4-H, the semi-crazed fervor of deer hunting season, and Homecoming parades. Lauren Stachew: What’s your connection to the Midwest?Ĭhristopher Barzak: I grew up on my grandfather’s beef farm in northeastern Ohio. Midwestern Gothic staffer Lauren Stachew talked with author Christopher Barzak about his novel Wonders of the Invisible World, the socioeconomic reality of the Midwest, the importance of reading as a writer and more.
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