The Agriculture Hall of Fame: Stories

by Andrew Malan Milward

Overview

These powerful stories limn the complexities and dilemmas of life in Kansas, a state at "the center of the center of America," as a billboard in one story announces. Andrew Malan Milward explores the less visible aspects of the Kansas experience—where its agrarian past comes into conflict with the harsh present reality of drugs, fundamentalism, and corporatism, relegating its agrarian identity to museums and amusement parks.

Presented in a triptych, the stories in Milward's debut collection range across a varied terrain, from tumbledown rural barns to modern urban hospitals, revealing the secrets contained therein.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781558499485
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	04/12/2012
Series:	Juniper Prize for Fiction
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

A native of Lawrence, Kansas, Andrew Malan Milward is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He has served as a McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, a Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose State University, a Writing Fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and a Resident Artist at the Santa Fe Art Institute. His fiction has appeared in many places, including Zoetrope, The Southern Review, Columbia, Conjunctions, and Best New American Voices 2010. He lives in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he is a Visiting Writer at the University of Southern Mississippi.

Table of Contents

Quail Haven, 1989 1

Skywriting 4

The Agriculture Hall of Fame 23

John 45

Two Back, 1973 52

Birthday 65

Ulysses 84

The Cure for Cancer 90

The Antichrist Chronicles 113

Silver Creek, 1969 136

Acknowledgments 143

What People are Saying About This

Lauren Groff

Andrew Malan Milward is a subtle writer with an unsparing eye and a heart as vast as a prairie. The ten stories in his first book, The Agriculture Hall of Fame, are graceful evocations of loss — of fathers and first loves, of lakes and sisters, of the rusting midwestern heartland one sees from a bus window as it pulls away. An evocative debut from a writer to cheer for.

Stewart O'Nan

The Kansas of The Agriculture Hall of Fame is brokedown, hardluck country. Andrew Malan Milward's precarious, paralyzed people are lost in place, and know it, alternately circling and fleeing the center of the center of America. As one says, 'Out here, everybody's crazy with looking for something.' Wry and sad, this is a fine debut collection.

Chris Bachelder

Andrew Malan Milward is an exceptionally gifted and mature storyteller, attentive to the intricacies of character and place. There's no showing off here, no macho posturing, no coy evasion, no attention-demanding voice or ploy. This debut collection is wise, patient, vivid, and deep. One gets the impression that these stories were written slowly and with great care. Further, one gets the refreshing impression that the author sincerely needed to write them.

Naeem Murr

Two sons struggle to understand their Vietnam Vet father. A mother rejects her meth-addicted son. A farmer's life becomes tied — fatally — to his barn. A brother and sister speak with heartbreaking humor about everything but the cancer killing her. These beautiful stories, ranging the cities and towns of Kansas from Ulysses to El Dorado, are as intimate and compassionate as they are unflinching. Andrew Malan Milward has made of the Sunflower State a doorway into the American soul.

Preface

Introduction

Editorial Reviews

The 10 gorgeous stories that make up this Juniper Prize-winning debut collection from Milward, a Kansas native and Iowa M.F.A. graduate, offer unique glimpses into Midwestern calamities and the folks who find themselves affected by them. Set in Kansas, these sensitively painted tales collectively evoke the prairie life in shades of gray, with the characters becoming the only splashes of color on a purposefully muted canvas. Two sons struggle to lessen the gap between their young lives and that of their father, an emotionally scarred man who retreats to his barn to recall better days, in “Quail Haven, 1989.” The title story beautifully marries the hopes and delicacies of animal husbandry with the impermanence and sadness of life and love. Elsewhere, two Wichita State college buddies wistfully reunite as adults, in “John” and a brother struggles to make peace with a sister navigating a terminal disease in the crushingly poignant “The Cure for Cancer.” In the moving “Ulysses,” donating blood floods the narrator’s mind with memories of his childhood friend, a fat, sensitive boy “who was sick with diabetes and had to prick his fingers a dozen times a day.” Ulysses is both the boy’s name and the town’s, and Milward in this brief story effortlessly distills so many of the traumas of youth. In Milward’s world, there’s nary a sunny sky in sight, with characters who are “all reversed in some ways, our lives shading backwards like the shadows on the moon.” But this gloominess is greatly buoyed by the author’s poetic prose and a pitch-perfect eye for detail, resulting in one tender, tragic portrait after another. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"The 10 gorgeous stories that make up this Juniper Prize-winning debut collection from Milward, a Kansas native and Iowa M.F.A. graduate, offer unique glimpses into Midwestern calamities and the folks who find themselves affected by them. In Milward's world, there's nary a sunny sky in sight, with characters who are "all reversed in some ways, our lives shading backwards like the shadows on the moon." But this gloominess is greatly buoyed by the author's poetic prose and a pitch-perfect eye for detail, resulting in one tender, tragic portrait after another. STARRED REVIEW—Publishers Weekly

"The ten stories in Andrew Malan Milward's The Agriculture Hall of Fame are set in "the center of America": Kansas. And they are all, in their own unique ways, wild, hopeful, and devastating. So much is communicated in so little—a story that barely makes three pages packs a gut punch or two along the way."—ForeWord

"Two sons struggle to understand their Vietnam Vet father. A mother rejects her meth-addicted son. A farmer's life becomes tied—fatally—to his barn. A brother and sister speak with heartbreaking humor about everything but the cancer killing her. These beautiful stories, ranging the cities and towns of Kansas from Ulysses to El Dorado, are as intimate and compassionate as they are unflinching. Andrew Malan Milward has made of the Sunflower State a doorway into the American soul."—Naeem Murr, author of The Perfect Man

"Andrew Malan Milward is an exceptionally gifted and mature storyteller, attentive to the intricacies of character and place. There's no showing off here, no macho posturing, no coy evasion, no attention-demanding voice or ploy. This debut collection is wise, patient, vivid, and deep. One gets the impression that these stories were written slowly and with great care. Further, one gets the refreshing impression that the author sincerely needed to write them."—Chris Bachelder, Juniper Prize contest judge and author of Abbott Awaits: A Novel

"The Kansas of The Agriculture Hall of Fame is brokedown, hardluck country. Andrew Malan Milward's precarious, paralyzed people are lost in place, and know it, alternately circling and fleeing the center of the center of America. As one says, 'Out here, everybody's crazy with looking for something.' Wry and sad, this is a fine debut collection."—Stewart O'Nan, author of The Odds

"Andrew Malan Milward is a subtle writer with an unsparing eye and a heart as vast as a prairie. The ten stories in his first book, The Agriculture Hall of Fame, are graceful evocations of loss—of fathers and first loves, of lakes and sisters, of the rusting midwestern heartland one sees from a bus window as it pulls away. An evocative debut from a writer to cheer for."—Lauren Groff, author of Delicate Edible Birds: And OtherStories and Arcadia

"Milward's characters are so colorfully drawn, so carefully and deliberately described, that there appears always to be hope; a second chance is just around the corner, there is some glorious redemption just beyond the pages we are given."—The Rumpus.com

"I'm clearly biased about the 'place' of these stories, but the stories stand up. They're not just good Kansas stories; they're good stories period. I can't wait to see what Milward does next."—TheStoryIsTheCurse.blogspot.com

"With The Agriculture Hall of Fame, Milward often embraces the archetypes of Midwestern life while at the same time refusing to be defined by them, and in the end, the collection feels Midwestern, yet at the same time, it feels like an incredibly strong group of stories, no matter where they happen to take place."—Word/Sound

From the Publisher

With The Agriculture Hall of Fame, Milward often embraces the archetypes of Midwestern life while at the same time refusing to be defined by them, and in the end, the collection feels Midwestern, yet at the same time, it feels like an incredibly strong group of stories, no matter where they happen to take place.

Word/Sound

I'm clearly biased about the 'place' of these stories, but the stories stand up. They're not just good Kansas stories; they're good stories period. I can't wait to see what Milward does next.

TheStoryIsTheCurse.blogspot.com

Milward's characters are so colorfully drawn, so carefully and deliberately described, that there appears always to be hope; a second chance is just around the corner, there is some glorious redemption just beyond the pages we are given.

The Rumpus.com

The ten stories in Andrew Malan Milward's The Agriculture Hall of Fame are set in "the center of America": Kansas. And they are all, in their own unique ways, wild, hopeful, and devastating. So much is communicated in so little—a story that barely makes three pages packs a gut punch or two along the way.

ForeWord