When at twenty-four I declared my intentions to be a writer, several of my peers and my professors told me that if I wanted to be a serious writer, I had to move to New York. I had no particular bias against New York, except that I am not an urban dweller at heart. I had grown up carrying my library books into a sunny field or flopping down with them in the woods. My sense of adventure and discovery was and is more about landscape and less about current culture and fashions. Although at that age I was inclined to go West of the Mississippi instead of East, for open space and a less dense population, the conviction in the voices of my peers and teachers made their message loud and clear: Real writers were not from here. And if some of them, like F. Scott Fitzgerald or Sinclair Lewis, were from here, they had escaped from the Midwest. I would have to do the same. Not only would I have to leave Flyover Land. I would have to be cleansed of my history, my past, and my geography to reach my goal.

Like any woman of my generation, I was already fighting the daily battle not to be discounted because of my sex. Yet to be told that my place of birth, my family history, and the history of the region I grew up in was not "good enough" was advice I had not anticipated. I was hurt, bewildered, angered, and amazed. My reaction forced me to identify who I am based on where I am from.

And where am I from? That question took me many years to answer. I was born in the Northern Midwest, a region with distinct immigrant and Native American cultures and nurtured by a land of harsh weather changes, of thick pine and birch forests, a land framed by two of the largest lakes in the world. A region of exquisite physical and spiritual beauty, with a powerful human and natural history of its own. A region populated by people with the same comic and tragic flaws and strengths and uniqueness of human beings elsewhere. A region that, once I could identify it for myself and give voice to it, rose up vigorously to challenge the massive national stereotype that was working against me as a writer and still does.

I was then living in Minneapolis/St. Paul, an urban area with a rich, vibrant literary and political culture and history. Those around me who said I had to leave revealed a sad regional lack of self-esteem and even a bizarre self-hatred. As Margaret Atwood discovered in the early 1960s of her identity as a Canadian, Midwesterners had swallowed the stereotype and parody of themselves as dull and uncultured. We have been good sports at tolerating and even making fun of ourselves under the canopy of this stereotype. But it often goes too far. The unspoken sentiment, which was strong in my twenties but still resonates today to anyone graduating from college, was and is "anywhere but here."

So Midwesterners are guilty of passively contributing to the infamous New Yorker cartoon depicting the Midwest as a Big Cow in the center of the United States. It may be amusing, but it is also tiresomely inaccurate and irritatingly persistent. I would feel more irritated if I came from what might be called Big Cow country: Iowa, Illinois, southern Wisconsin, and southern Minnesota. My region of birth was different. I grew up with logging, and small and marginal dairy farms in northern Wisconsin, not the large dairy operations found much further south. The only Big Cow I retain in my memory is that of a neighbor's Holstein who broke through a fence and trotted into our cedar swamp about 200 feet from the house. She meandered too near the floating bog shoreline of our kettle lake. Inside the house we heard her distressed bawling. Running down the wooden slats to the lake, we saw this large Oreo cookie of a cow, helplessly floating on a thick mattress of sphagnum moss and swamp grass while her legs treaded water underneath. Our neighbor roped the cow to a truck waiting on the edge of the field. I listened with fascination as the truck's engine strained to pull the dead weight of the exhausted cow. One by one, her legs popped free of the bog and she was dragged on her side until she could stand upright on firm ground. Then she was herded home via truck.

My home state of Wisconsin, despite having fallen in rank behind California as a major dairy producer, is still considered the Dairy State. Minnesota has major cropland and more with its ten thousand lakes. Iowa is largely agrarian but it is also home to the first national and still very prestigious graduate writing program. Michigan is famous for its orchards, its extraordinary natural beauty, and Detroit, an industrial city known for the Fords and Chevys and home to the Motown Sound. Yet we have been a region of both simplistic and schizophrenic interpretations to outside eyes. We are seen as agrarian but simultaneously a region of wilderness. We "don't have culture," a particularly puzzling assessment since we have such urban and cultural centers as Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, and the Twin Cities. I had thought, maybe, that those stereotypes had diminished. But I was reminded of them — most often comically but sometimes rudely — with the recent publication of my first novel. And it turned out that those stereotypes thrive as much here in Flyover land as on the coasts.

Perhaps sensitive to the sneer of being hicks, Midwestern families with money send their children to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley, and other notable East and West Coast colleges and universities. A general but subtle cultural directive blankets kids bound for state schools. If your family doesn't have the money for such a premier education, then you should at least move to the East Coast after college, even if it is to work a blue-collar job. It is thought that some of that Eastern sophistication will rub off on you and more importantly, you will finally experience some cultural diversity.

I felt this cultural directive more keenly after I went to college. My family believed strongly in education but considered being well-read, formally educated, and self-educated as equally valuable. I also kept hearing something my mother had said in a casual but meaningful moment: "We should look at the history and cultures in our own backyard."

I didn't understand what she meant, and for a long time I balked, because I had grown up in a "little Europe," among many ethnic groups and in particular, Old World German Catholics. The only racial group that was familiar to me was the Ojibwe kids I'd gone to school with, but European immigrant culture dominated the area and thus dominated them. So I steered my college education away from what I did not believe was the true American experience. I studied the lesser known literature and history of North and South American women, and of people of color, defying what was then the standard degree in English literature.

In my senior year, after reading such writers as Eduardo Galeano, Tillie Olsen, James Baldwin, Leslie Marmon Silko, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, the New Zealander Janet Frame, and finally Meridel Le Sueur, I had a glimmer into what my mother meant. It was Le Sueur's documentation and celebration of the middle part of the United States that brought my mother's words into focus.

Years later I gained greater insight into her reference from reading Robert Gough's Farming the Cutover: A Social History of Northern Wisconsin, 1900-1940. Through interviews with very old people and then archival research, Gough stripped off the glossy veneer from the written history concerning northern Wisconsin. He documented the untold stories of what the lumber industry did to the land, the displacement of its native inhabitants, and the "lure" that brought specific groups of immigrants to that part of the state, including my own people. The moment when it all congealed for me — place, nationalism, identity, and history — was when I listened to a lecture by the Irish poet Eavan Boland in April of 2002. Her words brought tears to my eyes and, with them, the realization that I was one of those cultures in my own backyard. The history and experiences that created me were formulated somewhere in between what Boland describes as the difference between recorded history and the past. History, Boland said, was the official version of things with names, places and dates. But the past, she continued, is full of stories where people have no names, no definition and a vague reference to time. In her book Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time, referring to her place as an Irish woman and poet, Boland says, "I have never felt I owned Irish history. I have never felt entitled to the Irish experience."

I understand Boland's lack of entitlement. My mother was not ashamed of where she was born, rooted as she was in an immigrant culture full of stories that ranged from the hilarious to the tragic, sometimes containing a good deal of both. She revered and was passionately attached to the physical land onto which she was born, loving it and its natural history. Thinking of her now, I know that she understood the difference between the recorded history and the past. Given that she heard and lived stories that would never be documented officially, she would not have believed that the past was invalid because it was not "official." Her words to me were a call to look deeper at where I had been raised and to claim the history and identification of a region that was taunted, discounted, misunderstood, and mostly ignored. A region with its own cultures within the United States that was in danger of being belittled into nothing or worse: typified as a cultural wasteland. I grew up in isolation partly caused by this national indifference which only intensified my immigrant roots and my identification with a region that often felt like its own country. It now explains why I struggled to think of myself as a Midwesterner as we were defined. But in fact, my conflict over identity went even further than that.

When I was growing up, I did not think of myself as an American.

Most of the children I went to school with did not say "I am an American" in identifying themselves despite our reciting the pledge of allegiance every morning. Until I was about twelve, one of the most pivotal questions asked on the playground was "What is your nationality?" My various schoolmates (mostly girls but a few boys) would answer that question with a momentary pause in which they became noticeably taller for a few seconds. "I am German," "I am Polish," "I am Norwegian," "I am Finnish," and "I am Czech" were among the more common answers. Several children whose ethnic backgrounds contained a mix of Eastern European origins such as Croatian, Hungarian, and Czech referred to themselves deprecatingly as being "bohunk." A lesser but still common answer was to have two nationalities such as "I am half German and half Norwegian" or "I am half Irish and half French."

Then there was that very small minority that swelled with even greater pride because they could claim several nations of origin. For them, being a human Heinz 57 did not have the same meaning as it does in the breed of dogs commonly known as mutts. Although I can no longer recall the little girl's name, I do remember her smugly reciting her percentages of national origin while counting them off on her fingers. We were impressed. I was in awe of the randomness of her people and their nations and how they miraculously got together to eventually create the exotic stew of nationalities that produced this girl. I would stare at her from time to time, thinking of all of those countries in her one small body.

The Ojibwe children or Métis children (of Native American and European descent) usually didn't say much. It is quite likely that their families impressed upon them the need to stay silent about their racial or ancestral identification. Or maybe they instinctively didn't say anything out of self-preservation, knowing the sometimes vicious politics of children that often reflect the vicious politics of their parents. They didn't have to say anything. If they were predominantly of Ojibwe ancestry, it was obvious. If they were Métis, then their racial identity tended to announce itself physically, pentimento-like through their European features. There was, of course, the liberal use of the term "black" as it was applied, for example, to being "Black Irish." That adhesive quality of black welded to a normally white European background went on to explain some inexplicable darkness in a child's features — "Black German" being one of them. There was also always some kid who claimed that her great grandmother or great, great grandmother was an Indian princess. The Indian princess in question was usually Cherokee as though no other Native American tribe could boast of having royalty, especially the Ojibwe of my area. The only image I could conjure up as to what an Indian princess might look like was the Anglicanized Indian maiden on the Land O'Lakes butter carton.

This intense identification with one's European or Native American origins also occurred in northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and northern Michigan because of a tragic history. The Native Americans suffered displacement first. As Europeans deforested and settled the East Coast, they pushed tribes such as the Huron, Oneida, Ojibwe, and Potawami further west in the 1700s and 1800s. These former Eastern tribes, in turn, clashed with and eventually pushed out Midwestern tribes such as the Lakota and Dakota. This historical domino effect made the Dakota and especially the Lakota move west to become part of the Great Plains cultures.

The lumber companies, however, didn't finish their clear-cutting of massive white pine, hemlock, and other pine in these areas until the late 1800s and early 1900s. They held much of the land in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan until they exhausted it of its viable resources. As Gough illuminates, they then struck an unholy deal with the Secretary of Agriculture to unload this severely deforested and scarred land by advertising it in Europe as being the next agricultural paradise. This was no small con job, and the deception it caused was heartbreaking in many cases. Immigrants poured in, settled down, and slowly realized that the boreal forest and land were not suited to big crop farming, and the growing season was short. But more of their countrymen were arriving and settling close to those of their kind, thus creating settlements that mimicked the homogeneity of their home countries. Forest towns such as Brantwood, Wisconsin, remained nearly totally Finnish for decades. The hardships of having been cheated only served to solidify their nationalisms and their determination to survive because, for many, going home was not an option. Just as the displaced Ojibwe, Huron, Oneida and other Eastern tribes had done to survive, the immigrants quickly learned to do a little bit of everything: hunting, subsistence farming, and logging. Those waiting to purchase land immigrated anyway and were drawn into working the copper and ore mines in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota.

The tribes that successfully fought against being relocated were given reservation land. On these remaining allotments, they tried to form a protective isolationism. Even when economics forced many of them to move off of the reservations to work, they still tended to congregate just as the white immigrants had done, within neighborhoods. They carried a justifiable caution towards whites. While there was some racial and cultural mixing, the racial divide still remained very close to the surface. They did not get along with the whites so much as they tolerated them in order to survive.

The various European groups tended to coexistent in relative harmony, taking a few ethnic jabs every now and then at each other. They were distinct and proud of their distinctness. Many of the later immigrant groups spoke their native language at home and used English for business exchanges. My great Aunt Martha occasionally spoke a phrase in German and recited a German folk rhyme to us at bedtime. My mother frequently invoked the help of God in German. Even politics were argued with the perspective of national origins. For example, Finns were among the latest of the ethnic groups to move to northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, emigrating well into the 1900s. They brought with them a well-justified hatred of oppression and authority, having endured at least two terrible famines in Finland in the late 1800s and Sweden's boot on their necks. They were, by and large, social anarchists with a smidgeon of libertarianism, believing more strongly in self-rule and also in "you mind your business and I'll mind mine."

Not only were the cultural groups of my youth distinct, but the land is distinct as well.

When I am asked where I come from, I have tried to explain exactly this: that I belong to a rather unique strip of the United States that encompasses northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, and northern Michigan and that hugs that huge body of water known as Lake Superior. It suffers from as many misinterpretations as do the people of the region. I was taken aback when one reviewer of my novel described the land as desolate and wind-blown. It may be hard to farm but it is not desolate, and wind-blown is a term more accurate in describing the Dakotas. The land I come from is North but not so much North as to be Canadian. The growing season is short and precious, and the land in some areas bears a striking resemblance to parts of Alaska and Canada because of its stumpy pine and cedar swamps. It is pastoral in some parts due to the sparse human habitation and the clearing of land. Upon closer inspection, however, one can see that the soil is thin and that the forest is forever trying to claim those cleared fields. The remaining fields in production mostly produce animal feed of some kind: hay, or oats, or even barley.

Because of my birthplace, I identify myself as a Northerner, not a Midwesterner. There is a clear cultural and geographical distinction within Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan between northern and southern. The major urban areas in these states are in the southern or central part of the states. The bigger and more prosperous farms are in the south, while the northern part of these three states initially relied upon logging, mining, and subsistence living; now it is tourism, which waxes and wanes with the economy. The immigrants who arrived earlier generally had more money than the later groups of immigrants and populated the southern half of these states. Those who arrived later and often with less money populated the northern half. The two halves of these states are related like cousins, you might say. But land still determines culture. My own cousins from southern Wisconsin do not share my same land reference. They were shaped by a land filled with big crop and dairy farms, hardwoods and prairies, and an enviable growing season. Their lake was Lake Michigan and they lived much closer to an urban area, Milwaukee. The difference is dramatic enough so that southern Wisconsin fits more accurately into what is identifiably Midwestern while northern Wisconsin, northern Minnesota, and northern Michigan could arguably belong more to Canada.

In addition to falling under the Big Cow parody, those northern parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan suffer from a second stereotype: that of the beloved Northwoods or Laura Ingalls Wilder land. This stereotype hits especially close to home for me and could explain some readers' and critics' reaction to my novel, The Turtle Warrior, because I depict that life isn't always so idyllic in the Northwoods. This rosy image of life in the woods took a whack in November 2004 when the tragic murder of six hunters near Rice Lake, Wisconsin, made national news. Newsweek's purple prose began, "It was a crisp Sunday afternoon in the Northwoods of Wisconsin, soaring trees naked in a falling autumn, the fields cleared by harvest, and white-tail deer in abundance. For sportsmen, it's a slice of heaven." Then it plunges into the real-life slaughter of six hunters with some emphasis on the fact that the killer was trespassing and had trespassed before on private land. While it is almost unheard of to have a hunting season crime of this magnitude, trespassing is in fact very common during hunting season and finding a stranger in one's deer stand happens occasionally. Those incidents generally don't end in death. Deer hunting season goes by relatively peacefully in this part of the country. Most hunters obey long-held taboos and silent rules of what they can and cannot do in the woods while carrying a firearm. Occasionally there are the demented or greedy who kill far beyond the legal limit, or who kill, maim and torture game and non-game wildlife. There, also, have been tragic hunting accidents and cardiac failures while hunting, but miraculously those are small in number, given how many men, women, boys, and girls are out hunting during deer season. But life in the Northwoods is still economically difficult for many. Hunting season may be a sport — and it generates revenues for the Department of Natural Resources — but it also remains an opportunity for many families to harvest what is an annual food source.

This recent hunting tragedy only served to prove that the Little House in the Big Woods stereotype was still alive and well. This stereotype also magically covers an area it does not belong to. Laura Ingalls Wilder land is not part of the Northwoods. It is much further south in Pepin, Wisconsin, where the big woods are not pine but hardwoods and in a transitional prairie zone known as oak savannah. I suspect that the Wilder imagery contributed heavily in the Newsweek article's implication that the Northwoods would never be the same again, i.e., innocent and safe. In truth, the Northwoods has never been the "same" and neither are its inhabitants. Not now. Not ever.

Just as large urban areas on the East and West Coasts have news-making scandals and tragedies, we have had our share of bizarre crimes and criminals. We have unemployment, racism and ethnic tensions, numerous social ills, environmental troubles, corporate greed and so on. The Big Cow has produced its share of hideous killers who have made national headlines such as Ed Gein (the inspiration behind the movie Psycho), cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy, the man known as the "Killer Clown," who raped and murdered thirty-three men and boys in Chicago. Some despicable politicians have been produced here as well, one of the most notorious being Senator Joseph McCarthy, a man who deeply harmed the nation as a whole and many individuals with his wildly irrational hatred of Communists and his now infamous "lists" of suspected Communists which were revealed later to be blank pieces of paper. We have pockets of homegrown terrorists groups that, if not directly a northern branch of the KKK, then they bear a frightening resemblance under another name such as the Michigan Militia and the Wisconsin Posse Comitatus. We have gang wars and gang shootings, and illegal trafficking of drugs. AIDS has reached even the smallest towns in Big Cow Land.

Although the East Coast and West Coast are considered to be the almost single source of high culture in the United States (ignoring the South as well), Big Cow Land, too, has contributed a chunk of high culture. Minneapolis and St. Paul have long been home to the arts and music. The Twin Cities has a rich literary heritage and is still a hotbed for writers, readers, and literature. Big Cow Land has among the highest literacy rates in the nation, and it has produced its fair share of distinguished writers and poets, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Bly, Louise Erdrich, Gwendolyn Brooks, Garrison Keillor, Philip Levine, Thorton Wilder, Jane Hamilton, and Studs Terkel.

To counter the nasty McCarthyism of the 1950s, Big Cow Land has put forth such progressive politicians as Robert La Follette, Gaylord Nelson, William Proxmire, Paul Wellstone, Walter Mondale, and Hubert Humphrey. Hailing from Wisconsin, Robert La Follette voted against World War I, and Gaylord Nelson was one of three Senators to vote against the ground war in Vietnam; and in Minnesota, Paul Wellstone followed in his footsteps by following his conscience and voting against the war in Iraq. Not even their harshest critics could deny that those men truly desired to serve their constituencies and worked hard to do so. Madison, Wisconsin, remains on the map for its 1960s political demonstrations and riots, sharing the spotlight with Chicago in relation to the political unrest of that time.

It isn't just in our urban centers either. Midwesterners have historically been raising the roof politically in the woods and down on the farm. As writer Meridel Le Sueur pointed out in her famous essay, The Ancient People and the Newly Come, "It is not unusual here that four or five generations have stayed where they were, being dissidents, radicals, mavericks, abolitionists, red republicans, and antimonopolists. These movements have deep and meandering roots like alfalfa."

We are also well known throughout the nation for our work ethic, thus making Midwesterners marketable throughout the nation. Of course we have our lazy louts just as anywhere else, but they still tend to be a minority. While American culture is rapidly becoming one in which personal responsibility and accountability is nearly nonexistent, I would argue that culturally, much of the Midwest and northern Midwest still hold responsibility and accountability essential to good citizenship.

The other strong attribute given to Big Cow land people is that we are "nice," although in Minnesota there is what is referred to as "Minnesota nice," a euphemism for passive-aggressiveness and definitely not a compliment. In the latter regard, I have not been offended when I've been mistaken for being a New Yorker because I was assertive. Despite that well-earned euphemism, pleasantness is a predominant trait. Here where pockets of ethnicity have been and still are separated by geographical space, not crowded together as in a large city, there is a strong sense of community manners. You may need that neighbor who lives two miles away from your farm, or down the block, even if he or she is a jackass sometimes.

But in the stereotype of Midwesterners, having manners and being "nice" have been translated as being dull and naive. Being "nice" or kind isn't correlated with being sophisticated or worldly. This wrongful disconnect in thinking is especially prevalent in higher education. I have worked with some professors who behave atrociously and are incredibly rude in and out of the classroom. Yet when confronted with their bad behavior, they defend it, considering such behavior to be the hallmark of sophistication and intelligence. Throwing adult tantrums, demeaning students in the classroom and staff in the office, personally attacking colleagues, and destroying them and others with malicious and undeserved sarcasm is hardly the signature of a great person. Being "nice" is not something to be embarrassed about, ashamed of, or made fun of. Iowans, in particular, get this slam all too often. In our current world of human brutality, kindness is a rare gift.

I am reminded of the overall pleasantness accorded to Midwesterners whenever an outsider moves to the region, especially from the East Coast. Some years ago I worked for a Harvard professor who relocated to Minnesota straight from Boston. For weeks after he and his family moved here, he could not get over the quality of service he received at the post office, at the grocery store, and at the bank. He repeatedly commented and pondered aloud on how pleasant people were in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. It is always lovely to hear that about one's own region, but the truth is we also have rude people, homegrown jerks, and socially inexcusable people who are not mentally ill. We have ignorance like everywhere else on the planet.

Still the stereotypes persist like buckthorn and they remain largely this: we are homogenous, not diverse ethnically, racially, or religiously; we are devoid of sophisticated culture and therefore bland; we are hicks or rednecks or we are salt-of-the-earth people; and we aren't as connected as we should be to the rest of the world (psst... we have the Internet, too). It isn't necessarily a coastal problem of interpreting this region, as I have encountered people here who believe in the stereotype as well. I was told not long ago, "We have no racism here." I was dumbfounded and after a few minutes of recovery time, I disputed that statement as kindly as I could. The tragic killing of those six hunters is a case in point. While it sent most of the general population reeling, it carried a secondary impact. Since the killer is of Hmong ancestry, it put the Hmong community at risk for the irrational verbal backlash that occurred and that would not have existed if the killer had been a mentally ill and angry white man.

I have often wondered if the Midwestern stereotype is a secret desire, from within Big Cow Land and from the outside, to keep alive the bucolic image of the peaceful family farm or the cozy north woods cabin free from a life dominated by stress and technology. While it is under pressure and shrinking daily, we do have geographically a large amount of open space. It may frighten some urban people in reality but in the collective imagination, that perceived space could be an indication that there may be some place "safe" to go. Perhaps making fun of the Midwest as banal is a quiet longing to make sure such a part of America still exists and that there is land not yet covered with cement, a place where you can actually see the sky and not skyscrapers. Or perhaps the Midwest may appeal to a contrived aesthetic notion born from the Wizard of Oz and very much alive in the public imagination. After all of your travels and living in places more worldly and exotic where you have taken in, metaphorically and literally, too much rich food and drink, you know there is a place where, after clicking your heels three times (a non-stop flight?) and chanting "there is no place like home" (Xanax mantra?), life is familiar and simpler. Big Cow land is that comforting slice of homemade bread, beautifully basic and sustaining and easy on the stomach. Maybe Big Cow Land is a secret and embarrassing carnal desire that is in danger of being killed with what Thomas Mann called "erotic irony." Perhaps it is similar to Esquire magazine's article on "The Women We Love and Women We're Ashamed to Love." To put it in the singular and remove the gender reference, Big Cow Land is "The Place We're Ashamed to Love."

While I am weary of facing down Big Cow Land stereotypes and worry about their eventually becoming a perverse mythology, I live with a constant contradiction. I would like the region to be better understood, yet I don't want hordes of people descending upon it. I want to protect and conserve its natural beauty. This includes protecting it from other Big Cow Land people. Two years ago, a staff member at a St. Paul hospital said to me in a lightly sarcastic tone, after noting my address in Wisconsin, "Oh. You are a CHEESEHEAD."

I smiled but only because he had a face that looked like a large wheel of cheddar.

"Watch it," I said, kidding. "I'm not from southern Wisconsin. I'm from northern Wisconsin."

"OHHH," he commented with even more sarcasm, "you're a Jackpine Savage." He then said, "Well, I'm from Chicago, and you all wouldn't be able to make it up there without Chicago money."

It doesn't matter how many times I've heard it. The condescension and sarcasm produces a knee-jerk reaction of recent historical anger. I was a "native" of northern Wisconsin. And he clearly announced himself as was one of the hordes of pompous Chicago tourists who, if we are lucky, just visit rather than buy up vast amounts of land in northern Wisconsin. Fortunately for him, I was tired and afraid that I might lose all civility at that moment. I also wanted to get home before rush hour. So I refrained from calling him what northern Wisconsin people called Illinois summer tourists and people with his attitude. A FIP: Fucking Illinois People. I left the hospital thinking how much better it was to be a Jackpine Savage than a FIP.

I am sure that people from Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire have a similar resentment against Boston and New York summer people as do those from Washington and Oregon against Californians. Such resentment often involves the rich exploiting the poor who try to maintain a tenacious hold on their land despite rising property taxes, the scarcity of jobs, and the ensuing attitude towards the "natives." One does not have to go to another country to find colonialism. It is right here in America and colonization is happening in other obvious ways.

The belief that the Big Cow symbolizes farmland and deep forests would be amusing if it weren't so painfully untrue. Prime farmland is being eaten up by mindless and poorly planned development, and individual family farms will soon become extinct. Our beautiful northern woodlands are being divided into city size lots for large and expensive pleasure homes still referred to as "cabins." Lake Superior's shoreline is getting massively junked up with those same homes. Now Minnesota is beginning to experience the wealthy and the celebrity factions that overran Montana, only to run farther east into the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes. Because money has become God in America, economics takes precedence over protecting our natural environment. Subconsciously it is a way for us to show our "wares"; we invite that sought-after "high culture" in because we still cannot believe we have a worthy culture of our own. Development is proof to our beleaguered regional self-esteem that we are no longer a place to "flyover." We are a place to stay.

Ironically, the massive consumption of land into suburbia will indeed turn the Midwest into the banal place it was purported to be. The New Yorker will soon have to improvise on that cartoon. Urban sprawl is not sprawling so much as it is running. The Big Cow is being pushed in the rear and shoulder from the West and East Coast. We will soon be compacted into the Little Cow. And what will it have left to graze on?

I doubt the advice handed down to me over twenty years ago is given to younger writers in this region now. Although my decision to stay may have derailed me in the sense that it has been tough for Midwestern literature to break into the Big Market, that well-intentioned but misguided counsel drove me back into a landscape with its many cultures that is anything but boring. My people and those who draw me are not the Jay Gatsbys of Fitzgerald's world, desperate to move eastward in an effort to recreate themselves into more fashionable beings. As Fitzgerald's novel proves, a wiping out of one's past also endangers one's life in a myriad of ways. My mother knew this and her advice, finally comprehended and understood by her stubborn daughter, awakened me to the other writers I loved who had stayed put in their regions. Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Emily Dickinson produced great literature and poetry based on their intimate knowledge of their own backyards.

To the late scholar, storyteller, and nonconformist Joseph Campbell, there was no region, no country, no culture unworthy of his attention in his study of mythology and its power. What if I had had a teacher like Joseph Campbell who told his mostly female students at Sarah Lawrence College to follow their bliss? Who told me that where I stood was my center and that I could go or stay put because my bliss had to come from within? To be advised that I was entitled to my own personal history and vision based on who I was and where I was from? Joseph Campbell could give such advice because he followed it. Rather than obey the strict and oppressive curriculum needed to complete a doctoral program, he said, "To hell with it."

Then he did what I had done so many times as a child. He went into the woods to read.