Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell

by Lisa DuRose (Editor), Ross Tangedal (Editor), Andy Oler (Editor)

Overview

Michigan Salvage is the first scholarly collection on celebrated writer Bonnie Jo Campbell, the author of two novels and three short story collections, including National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009). Her writing captures a diverse and bustling rural America, brimming with complex characters who struggle with addiction, poverty, and land degradation—issues that have become, undeniably, part of the southwestern Michigan landscape that she calls home. The essays in this volume demonstrate many rich ways to approach Campbell’s writing, from historical and cultural overviews to essays examining the class and gender implications of her stories and novels, to teaching essays highlighting how to use her work in the classroom and beyond. Along with each essay, Michigan Salvage also features lesson plans and writing prompts meant to spark discussion and encourage further investigation into these stories and novels. This essential and teachable collection makes plain Campbell’s contributions to contemporary American literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628954951
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Lisa DuRose is an English faculty member at Inver Hills Community College in Minnesota, where she teaches courses in composition, the novel, and the short story. She has published essays in the Journal of College and Character, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies. Her work on Bonnie Jo Campbell has appeared in Midwestern Miscellany, in Rain Taxi, and with Macmillan Learning. She is currently preparing a biography of Campbell.
 
Ross K. Tangedal is associate professor of English and director of the Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point, where he specializes in American print and publishing culture. He is the author of The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century (2021) and coeditor of Editing the Harlem Renaissance (2021). His articles have been published in multiple journals, including The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, South Atlantic Review, TheHemingway Review, The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, Authorship, and MidAmerica, and in numerous essay collections. He serves on the editorial team of the Hemingway Letters Project.
 
Andy Oler is the author of Old-Fashioned Modernism: Rural Masculinity and Midwestern Literature (2019) and the editor of Pieces of the Heartland: Representing Midwestern Places (2018). His writing has appeared in Hyped on Melancholy, The New Territory, Essay Daily, Cleveland Review of Books, College Literature, and Queering the Countryside. He is departments editor at The New Territory, where he edits the online series Literary Landscapes, publishing contributors’ personal stories about sites of Midwestern literature. He is associate professor of humanities at Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Florida.
 

Table of Contents

Contents Acknowledgments Books by Bonnie Jo Campbell Introduction Part 1. Critical Essays Carp, Mud, Poison, and Stench; or, Once Upon the Kalamazoo River | Jeffrey Insko Indigeneity in Once Upon a River | Heather A. Howard-Bobiwash The Radical Class Politics of American Salvage | Charles Cunningham The Cultural Critique of American Patriarchal Capitalism in American Salvage | Alejandra Ortega Power Tool Mishaps: Women and Alcohol in “Playhouse” | Ellen Lansky Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Millennium and the Infrastructure of Failure | Garth Sabo Mothers, Daughters, and Rape Culture in Mothers, Tell Your Daughters | Laura Fine Up the Road, Down the River: The Novels of Bonnie Jo Campbell Side by Side | Monica Friedman Part 2. Teaching Essays Kalamazoo County: Nurturing a Community of Readers | Marsha Meyer Entering the Current: Connecting High School Readers with Once Upon a River | Becky Cooper Fiction Friction: Teaching Chronic and Acute Conflict in Bonnie Jo Campbell’s Short Fiction | RS Deeren The Expatriate Midwesterner: Teaching Bonnie Jo Campbell to Second Language Writing Students | Doug Sheldon American Weirdos on Parade: Reader-Response Journals and “The Smallest Man in the World” | Jenny Robertson Appendix. Teaching Activities Contributors

Editorial Reviews

In a time when teaching our literary truth tellers is critical, Campbell’s deeply rewarding novels and stories offer insights into the nature of human beings under unanticipated, often unjust stresses. In this collection of essays about Campbell’s work, critics, teachers, writers, students and thinkers will discover abundant analysis, relevant inquiry, inspiring prompts, and a rich array of pedagogical approaches. I’ve long wanted to bring the power of the Great Lakes Midwest voice to the forefront of the new cannons in our classrooms and consciousness. This lively focus on Campbell’s work compels us toward that. I couldn’t be more grateful for this incredible resource.
—Anne-Marie Oomen, author of A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction, and The Lake Michigan Mermaid: a Tale in Poems, both Michigan Notable Books, 2019 and As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book, winner of AWP's Sue William Silverman Award for Creative Nonfiction.



Bonnie Jo Campbell’s fiction is extraordinary. The contributors to this first book about her work offer wide-ranging insights into her vision of “the tangled uncertainty of promise and pain in ordinary lives.” They enlarge our understanding of Campbell’s stories and novels in many contexts, and offer inspiring examples of how to teach them in many settings. Michigan Salvage lives up to its topic—and that is high praise.
—June Howard, professor emerita at the University of Michigan, and the author of The Center of the World: Regional Writing and the Puzzles of Place-Time

From the Publisher