Place Births a Braided Novel in Erin Flanagan’s New Book Deer Season

Of all the starting points available to writers of fiction, setting has always confounded me the most. Landscapes and cities have always felt neutral. There’s a cliff, a river, a mountain. There are buildings and streets. But they have no meaning compared to cliffs, rivers, buildings, and streets elsewhere. And a place’s inhabitants have always felt too varied and complex to ascribe them meaning. Thus, I was thrilled when the opportunity arose to talk to author Erin Flanagan, whose new novel Deer Season began with setting. I was eager to find out how place drove Flanagan’s imagination and how she used it to populate a novel that still felt character—not author—driven.

A quietly subversive story about a small town in Nebraska in 1985, Deer Season features three perspectives: Milo, a twelve-year-old boy whose sixteen-year-old sister Peggy has gone missing; Alma, a native Chicagoan in her mid-fifties who now drives the local school bus and works begrudgingly on her husband’s family farm; and Clyle, Alma’s husband who convinced her to move to his hometown to take care of his ailing mother, then pressured her into staying. After Milo’s sister Peggy goes missing, an employee of Alma’s and Clyle’s on the farm comes under suspicion, ostensibly due to blood in the bed of his truck and evidence of damage to his fender. Hal is intellectually disabled, though, and Alma and Clyle come to his defense, feeling him vulnerable to scapegoating.

But without Peggy’s body, no one can say for sure what happened. Milo and others wonder if she ran away. And so we arrive immediately at how place can drive a novel. Why would Peggy run away? Because she lives in a small Nebraska town and feels stifled by it. Immediately place has become both motive and stakes. If Peggy stays, her life will be about local football games, school plays, and weekend parties in cramped basements. If she goes, her life will be about very different things. What exactly those might be her brother Milo can’t say, but he does know that he too feels like he belongs somewhere else.

For her part, Alma feels like she needs to be someone else—namely a mother, a role that is the organizing principle of her neighbors’ lives. Not taking part in high school sports, bake sales, and PTA meetings leaves Alma firmly on the outside of everything meaningful in Gunthrum, Nebraska, and while Clyle recognizes that not being able to have children has been a big disappointment for his wife, he can’t see how living where they do—a place which is so familiar to him as to be invisible—makes it far worse.

Deer Season, like its writer and its setting, has no pretensions. The language is clear and precise. The pleasures and difficulties of small-town life are looked at straight on, with neither exaggeration, romanticism, or arch judgment. Instead, this is the perspective of an insider, someone who knows this place and these people at this time and has the great skill and compassion to let us sit beside her and watch how life happens to them—and how they make it better or worse for themselves.

Now Flanagan lives in Dayton Ohio, where she teaches writing at Wright State University, but she grew up in a small town in Iowa, and when I talked to her, she identified place as her starting point immediately.

I had always wanted to write about small-town life in the 1980’s, so I started with the setting, then moved to characters. Some of that came out of my parents’ experience. When I was four or five, we were living in a suburb of Chicago and my dad was taking the train in for an hour in the morning and an hour at night. For a while he had a room at the “Y” he’d stay at during the week. He decided he had a farm in the family and would like to move there. My mom was like, “Say what?” It ended up being the best thing they ever could have done.

Though Alma and Clyle were based on Flanagan’s parents initially, the characters quickly diverged to serve her interest in portraying the darker side of small-town life. Shut out of community concerns because she’s not a parent, Alma has closed up into a hard shell, and in response, Clyle has turned to other sources of connection.

I’ve looked back and realized that Sanborn was not what I thought it was as a teenager. There were a lot of affairs and drama I wasn’t aware of. There was also a grisly murder about an hour and a half away from my dad’s farm. The murdered woman had been emailing with a man my father knew. The police came to talk to the man and found blood in his truck, but he had an intellectual disability like Hal and couldn’t easily communicate that it was from a deer he’d shot.

The novel might be mistaken for a mystery when described this way, but Flanagan takes it in a psychological and emotional direction, exploring how Peggy’s disappearance and the suspicion Hal falls under drives the characters to face uncomfortable truths they’ve been ignoring for years.

Setting also drove Flanagan’s structural choices. All three point-of-view characters represent different aspects of the rural/city divide. Milo grew up in a small town and longs to leave. Alma grew up in a big city and feels (at best) ambivalent about small town life. Clyle was raised in a rural community, tried a big city, and ultimately chose to return home.

I wanted the town to be central to the story, so I wanted more than one point of view. Milo is closest to who I would have been in Sanborn at the time. He’s shadowed by his sister, who’s hitting a lot of the markers for what makes a successful teenager. My sister was like that, very popular, beautiful, athletic, honor roll. I always felt in her shadow, had the sense that I wanted to get out of that town, but no idea how that would happen.

Flanagan didn’t consciously switch the gender though. Like many aspects of writing, instinct took over, and she only understood in retrospect how Milo being male benefited the story.

A sister is more mysterious to a boy. Throughout the novel, Milo wonders what Peggy’s been up to when she sneaks out of the house at night, and what makes her tick. He ruminates on it, but he’s not thinking, “That’s what I’m going to be in four years.” There’s tension because she’s athletic and he’s not, so even the things he’s supposed to excel at, she’s better at, but there’s also distance.

Creating distance so that the novel remained focused on the town’s culture is also why Flanagan chose not to use either of Peggy’s parents as point of view characters.

If your child goes missing, that’s all consuming. I wanted Milo to have his own life still going on so that he’s processing in that self-centered twelve-year-old way.

Place also drove subtler aspects of the plot and characters’ personalities. Flanagan was aware that Alma and Clyle are limited by the culture of the rural Midwest at that time, and it shows as much in what they say as in what they don’t say. Neither Alma nor Clyle seems to recognize how big a sacrifice Alma made in moving to Nebraska from Chicago, and neither entertains the idea that it might be time for Clyle to return the favor and move back to a more urban environment.

That’s one way that my mother is very different from Alma. She would not have put up with that sexism, not even in the 1980’s, but in the town I grew up in, what the men said went, and people didn’t question it. I didn’t question it. I remember when I was nineteen someone asked me what my future looked like, and I said get married and have five kids. It was a long time before I questioned that.

It’s not just Alma and Clyle who demonstrate embedded sexism. As everyone tries to figure out what happened to Peggy, she is refracted through their speculations, viewed as a temptress and troublemaker while the men who orbit around her go uncriticized. And in a spectacularly deft, quiet series of scenes, Flanagan shows how Peggy’s mother is crushed by the old trope that it’s always the mother’s fault. She went back to work, leaving her children unsupervised, and when Peggy went missing, she deferred to her husband’s desire to keep up appearances and waste precious time carrying on as if nothing were wrong—thus whatever harm Peggy may come to is laid at her mother’s feet.

To me the novel is about how people don’t get the life they sign up for. Every single character is dealing with the question of what you do when this is not how you thought it was going to go.

Another way the place and time drove the story was in Hal’s drinking. Much of the suspicion and confusion around where Hal was the night Peggy disappeared and whether or not he intentionally or unintentionally may have hurt her centers on his habit of drinking to excess, driving under the influence, and not remembering all his actions while drunk. This too spoke of small-town habits and attitudes in the 1980’s. No one, including Alma and Clyle, considers that driving while intoxicated is wrong, or that Hal in particular may not have the good judgment necessary to drink.

Small towns are weird that way. Hal hangs out with guys in their twenties, and they do look after their own, but also, they might make fun of him. It turns on a dime in small towns, especially in the 1980’s.

I won’t tell you anymore about the surprising ending of this lovely novel about disappointment, compromise, tragedy and new beginnings. It’s too subtle, surprising, and complex to summarize or spoil. It’s also a useful lesson on the interconnectedness of people and their place, proving that story can begin with setting and blossom from there to contain the whole world.

Oddities and Pleasures: An Interview with Rick Bailey

EF: One of the things I admire most about these essays is how you’re constantly making unexpected connections and leaps. For instance, in “Don’t Wait,” you bop between your faltering hearing, the “what it is” salutation from a former student, a problem with your foot, the article your wife sent you on fashionable hearing aids, and reading The New Yorker. Can you talk a bit about how you create an essay? Where do you start, and how do you know what paths to follow? How do you know when it’s “done”?

RB: Where does an essay start? With a tidbit in the news, with something my wife says, with a piece of music that triggers a memory or arouses a curiosity. Why is this important? Why is it funny? What does it remind me of? Where does it lead my thinking as I walk through the day?

“Make the subject of the sentence you’re writing different from the subject of the sentence you just wrote.” That’s what Richard Hugo recommends in Triggering Town. Introduce multiple subjects. I followed that advice when I wrote poetry and then began to apply it writing essays. “You get 3-4 balls in the air,” a teacher once said. The trick is to keep them from falling on your head. In the piece you mention, “Don’t Wait,” failing hearing, that curious “what it is is…” locution I hear so much lately (reminding me of an eighth grader I taught in 1980), the thing on my foot. . . . It’s all-at-once-ness. When you think about it, that’s consciousness, right? We walk around thinking 10-15 things at once. They’re related and unrelated, random and connected. 

I was driving my son to get his wisdom teeth removed the morning it was announced that Encyclopedia Brittanica would cease publication. That news triggered an essay in which I told the story of my son’s experience under the knife while also reflecting on those tomes I was so familiar with when I was a kid, which drove me to do some fact hunting about Brittanica, how long it was in publication, its shortest entry (woman: female of man), how it has been supplanted by information technology. What often happens when I’m managing multiply subjects is discovery in one thread triggers ideas and possibilities in the another thread I’m working on. I feel like I’m “done” when the two or three threads begin to converge, when I can weave them together in a satisfactory way.

EF: I love the idea of so many balls in the air, of so many different nodes of connection. Along with all these disparate ideas coming together, I see you’re writing a lot about finding balance too, for instance balancing purity and gluttony, health and desire. Having spent so much time in Italy, do you think this is a particularly American phenomenon?

RB: Yes, I think it is an American phenomenon. Especially if you’re from the Midwest. I grew up in a meatloaf family, in a farm town, where we went to the Methodist church and became very wary of sin. Very taciturn. Very modest. One mustn’t call attention to oneself. Then I married into an Italian family that was garrulous and noisy and very big-hearted. “We keep fast on Fridays during Lent,” my wife said of her home, where we sat down to a voluptuous feast that was a fast only in the sense that there was no meat. And after dinner, when we pushed back from the table, her mother and father told family stories and laughed until they cried. It was a different universe. I was (and am) so lucky. I’m still a child of the Midwest, somewhat modified.

EF: Yes! I see that as another kind of balancing here: your Midwestern upbringing and your ties to Italy. Your time in Italy figures prominently in the book, and especially your interest in the language. You mention learning Italian through reading women’s fiction, and how there’s a humility to it. Can you speak to what learning other languages has taught you, and how it’s maybe changed (or not) your relationship with English?

RB: “You seem like a different person when you speak Italian.” One of my colleagues said that to me one night. We were in a restaurant in Florence. At the time I was doing 7-day excursions in Italy with small groups involving what I called “heroic eating.” His remark called to mind something I had been thinking about.

I was lucky to learn Italian in the home, from my wife and her parents. Over time I learned what my wife likes to call “the song,” the rhythm and intonation and phrasing of a language that’s not accessible on the page but alive in your ear. When I said to wait staff in a trattoria, “What do you have that’s good?” I said it the way my Italian family would say it, loading the question with enthusiasm and passion. There was a performance aspect to it, a kind of impersonation. If you have an immersion experience, for me 44 years of marriage, you gradually get the song right. But you have to be willing to get things wrong, to appear foolish. On a train over there years ago, I said something to a nun that made my wife and her cousin howl with laughter. Another time I announced I was going to become the Pope. In a bar I told someone I first came to Italy in the 15th century. 

EF: I haven’t yet hit double-digits in my marriage, but am continually learning that lesson about the willingness to be wrong. Forty-four years married, wow. Obviously you and your wife have grown and changed a lot over those years, and I see that aging comes up throughout the book. I love that you talk about it in so many different ways—sometimes positively, sometimes negatively, sometimes matter-of-factly. One of my favorite lines in the book is when you mishear your wife and write “a word can be Rorschach test . . . you make of it what you will.” There’s something so charming and positive about this. Aging has obviously entered as a subject you write about, but I’m wondering, has it also changed your writing process?

RB: On one hand, I sometimes feel a sense of urgency. In her 80’s my mother disappeared into dementia. I think about that. I think: I should write every day. I should capture memories and the fleeting oddities and pleasures of right now. On the other hand, that urgency, that decision to write, is just part of daily life. All the years I taught writing online, I wrote every day, with and for my students. Since then I’ve blogged for a number of years, which is part of the daily practice, the regular regimen.

EF: What a wonderful thing to have made a practice. Along with aging, I noticed technology and its advancements are a thread through the book. You say in “We’re Melting” that “humans are at war with the natural world.” You mention this in relation to the weather and the hardships of being outside when it’s less than pleasant, but I kept thinking of it in wider terms. Can you talk a bit more about your idea of humans in conflict with nature and how technology comes into play?

RB: Well we certainly have the sense of a ticking time bomb, right? We try to manage nature, all along with a sense of dread. Nature is going to come back and take a terrible vengeance. I read a story the other day about chicken in a test tube: lab-created chicken-ish meat that will be nutritious and environmentally friendly. Just think how excited those lab technicians and food engineers must be, how geeked by the tools they are using, for the betterment of human kind, to be sure, but also with deep engagement and satisfaction with the tools at their disposal. You just think, what about that oops moment. Will that come? We make mistakes, we flub, we cannot anticipate all the consequences of our actions. With tech we alter the world and we alter ourselves. My grandkids are born into a device-ified world. They will not learn to read the way I did. They will not read the way I did. I no longer read the way I did. What impact is tech having on deep cognitive structures and habits of mind? It has always been the case: the world we occupy is thick, complex, evolving, and we have always engaged with whatever tools we have available. My gosh, the sextant, the telescope, the microscope, enlarged understandings and greater human capabilities. I remember reading Rime of the Ancient Mariner, asking the question, Why does he shoot the albatross? Because he’s holding a crossbow. The tools make us do it.

EF: And yet I’m thinking back to your first answer, about how you make those connections between ideas to form an answer, and it gives me hope the computers and lab chickens won’t complete make us obsolete. I’m sure there’s no specific answer for this, but I’m wondering how long you go between living and experience something and then writing about it, or how you know when you’ve got the narrative distance to tackle a subject.

RB: My wife and I were taking one of our long Covid walks a few weeks ago. We were discussing—I should say arguing about—whether it’s safer to step off the sidewalk into the street when another walker is coming toward us or merely move a few feet off the edge of the walk and turn our heads to avoid the contagion. What are the chances of getting hit by a car vs. inhaling the virus? Over the next day or so I wrote on that what-are-the-chances theme, which caused me to remember crossing the Irish sea in 1974, from Hollyhead to Dublin, arriving the morning after a bomb went off. What were the chances? That experience in Ireland had been sitting there, in memory, for decades. It was a pleasure to examine it, to tell that story, and to frame it in the present moment.

I probably tend to lounge around a subject rather than tackle it. In The Enjoy Agenda, my second book, there are a couple essays in which “tackle” might apply, one essay going all the way back to high school (how’s that for distance?), another addressing “shortism,” the size-related bias humans seem hard-wired for, like racism or sexism. I needed distance on that subject. Still do.

EF: Like above, I noticed these discussions or “arguments” with your wife set off a lot of your wonderful tangents in your essays. Your wife figures prominently in many essays, and I read her as somewhat of a long-suffering woman who both loves you and is annoyed by you. Is it difficult to portray someone you know so well when there’s no way to fully incapsulate them on the page? How do you go about turning a real person into a character in your work? 

RB: I’m a very annoying person. She is long-suffering. She is also extremely private, so I take a minimalist approach to presenting her in my writing. My capture mode is mainly dialogue. People who know us will say: In your books, that’s just what you two sound like. In my writing you will know her by her reading and our ordinary interactions that pack married life. She reads everything and she remembers everything she reads. And she is a great summarizer and explainer. Sometimes it’s hard for me to get a word in edgewise. So in many of the essays, she’s kind of a straight man for me. My three collections, I’m getting my edgewise words in. 

Rick Bailey grew up in Freeland, Michigan, on the banks of the Tittabawassee River. A small-town Midwestern guy, he married a woman from the Republic of San Marino and over the ensuing decades became Italianized–avid about travel in Italy, the language, food, and history. He taught writing for 38 years at Henry Ford College. Since retiring from teaching he has published three collections of essays, all with University of Nebraska Press: American English, Italian Chocolate (2017); The Enjoy Agenda (2019); and Get Thee to a Bakery (2021). He and his wife divide their time between Michigan and the Republic of San Marino.

Materializing the Promise of Change: A Review of Toni Jensen's From the Hilltop

In From the Hilltop, Toni Jensen’s first short story collection, Jensen shapes worlds where grief births silence and mourning accompanies shifts in weather and landscape, making land a character, one who can feel and act humans do. Rainfall accompanies a teacher/student relation in “Learning How to Drown”; a cornfield moves from place to place, arriving near the twelve-room Blanco Canyon Hotel, right after the death of the owner’s wife in “At the Powwow Hotel.” The land is as hot and dry as a choked throat in the beginning of “Flight,” where a teenage girl goes to live with relatives in South Dakota.

Jensen’s characters are aware of these weather patterns to some degree, their awareness strongest in “Sight and Other Hazards,” where a woman deals with her dying mother while overseeing an apartment building that used to be the Holcomb hotel. Hotels are also a character in From the Hilltop — whether abandoned or lived in as much as a hotel can allow others to “live” in it, materializing the promise of change present in all these characters’ lives.

While some of Jensen’s characters share her Métis background, (a mixed Native American and European ancestry from the Northern U.S. and Canada), many of her characters are men. Not only does Jensen craft both male and female voices realistically, she lets them sing, creating a sharply grounded view of life “off the rez.” This sharpness comes from her use of details — a pony-like dog near a canyon, fruit-bearing trees rooted unnaturally on the high plains of West Texas. The experimental, loop-like structure in “From the Hilltop” shares qualities with the shifts in time and clustering/threading of detail present in Stephen Graham Jones’ work, whom Jensen thanks in the acknowledgement section of her book. Like the fluxuation of weather (present in the book), the language cycles as the narrator’s mind cycles, each section of the story beginning with a different lead in, such as “If,” “Because,” and “Given.”

Jensen’s stories open with impact and close in a wonderfully subtle way, putting a tiny weight in your lungs — one forgets to breathe for a moment, and then realizes these characters will be alright, life continues for them. You will learn from “Still” how to cradle infertility, how to nurture it with silence. From “Butter” one learns about statistics and beauty and butter-headed replicas of local Dairy Queens. In “From the Hilltop,” one learns about the highest point in West Texas and, at the same time, through the honest voice of a man, how to lose a brother when you’re just a rebel kid, how to grow old with a story, telling a story again and again, hoping one day to get it just right. And you will feel as the character already has.