Terese Svoboda, author of Bohemian Girl, is a Nebraska native who often finds herself writing about her home state. Now a New Yorker, Svoboda will return to Nebraska for a book launch party in Omaha this Saturday evening, October 15. There will be a discussion at 7 p.m. followed by a reception and exhibit from 7:30-8:30 p.m. at KANEKO (11th and Jones). On Oct., 14, catch her on Friday Live on NET Radio (91.1 FM in Lincoln) at 9 a.m. She will also be in town for the Omaha Lit Fest.
Below is a guest posting by Svoboda, in which she explains why the Nebraskan landscape is so often the backdrop for her stories.
Okay, well, I grew up in Nebraska. Doesn’t that say it all? The landscape one is born with is tattooed to the brain in foggy, mysterious psychological importance. It does help that Nebraska’s treeless countryside offers a Rothko blankness ready for inscription. Sparsely populated with Swedes with wide cheekbones, tall Sudanese with scars, black Irish, and red-cheeked Bohemians, it’s farmed to an endless green under cloudless skies (occasionally the Missouri floods!), with Interstate that runs straight into an empty perspective. More than occasional spectacular sunsets punctuate this, sunsets caused by farm grit, not the radioactivity of the South Pacific, its only competition. With all that gorgeous emptiness, I declare Nebraska: the state of imagination. It ought to be on the license plates.
In Son of Morning Star, Evan Connell writes that the first Nebraskans imagined a flooded, underwater state. These Native Americans saw seashells embedded in the limestone and told a story about a man who built a boat and was saved during the time when everywhere was flooded—long before the missionaries arrived. Elsewhere in the book, Connell notes that Ogallala—my hometown—means wanderers in Sioux but because on one government treaty it was spelled O’Gallala, there are those who suspect the Indians must be Irish.
More imagination.
My imagined Ogallala is riddled with souped-up Chevys, restaurants with homemade burgers delivered by girls on roller skates, lurid drive-in movies, the battery-winding lethal TRW plant, endless hail-pocked wheatfields, huge grasshoppers that jumped at your mouth, and The Lake. Lake McConaughy is where you can still see stop signs at the bottom from the town that was submerged when the dam was built, as featured in Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply. On its beaches we—Dan remembered too--burnt huge fragrant bonfires of sage and ice-skated across its surface during the winter, fished in it for mythological giant bass in the summer, sailed Sunfish into the sunset of dust storms and in general goofed off there in the middle of the night, more than once ending up with cars almost pushed over its wheat-planted cliffs into its dark waters. Mari Sandoz, the feistiest and most original of dead Nebraskan writers wrote about the neighborhood: “Some saw (the grain) as a great sea caught and held forever in a spell and were afraid.” Yes.
In my new book, Bohemian Girl, I imagine Nebraska around the time of the Civil War. I’ve always been intrigued by how people could live through a war--a civil war no less--milking their cows, selling yard goods, and teaching their children to behave themselves. Nebraska hardly figured in the fight but perhaps it’s only at the periphery that people still have perspective. It’s where Jayhawkers, the men who pretended to be on either side, ransacked the little pioneer towns, and where slaves were easily smuggled. Of course this periphery could just as well be North Dakota’s for the few battles fought there but for me, it had to be Nebraska’s. Landscape is character, to rephrase Willa Cather’s “identity might be conditional on place.” She’s the one who made regional literature national. If I prefer the plains for dreaming--after living in New York City three times as long as I’ve lived in Nebraska, with long periods in Sudan, Cook Islands, Kenya, New Zealand, Europe, Mexico, and Canada--I’m no longer penalized for it.
Landscape is not eternal, however. Setting the book in the 19th century required more than just removing the plow lines from the fields. Nebraska’s blankness was more blank then, making up a large part of Major Long’s “Great American Desert.” It was an obstacle during the frontier period, and the sour reward for millions of settlers lured there by colorful broadsides. Nonetheless, settlers soon began defacing it, resurfacing it for modern use. How did they talk about it? They carried their home landscapes in their heads and were forever making comparisons. Where did they really live? I’m thinking about Clifford Geertz’ theories of displaced Carribean workers and their huge telephone bills which reflected all the time they spent calling home. It took courage to imagine such bare land habitable, and sometimes the settlers lacked the courage, they just had imagination.
Maybe it was the wind—which hasn’t changed—blew Nebraska into them.
That’s my imagination.
