You Can Take the Girl Out of the Dirt
The first dispatch from A Little Local News, a new column by Amy Barnes
Hi. Today we welcome new columnist, Amy Barnes. I’m lucky to have her for a while. You’ll be hearing from Amy monthly. Regular readers will have noticed an uptick in new work published here, outside the confines of the print issues. It’s a threat to my posture of extreme less-is-more-ness, but I’m finding a pace to keep things tight.
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🖤 Adam
I do not eat dirt. I have occasionally eaten crow. My words. A lot of fried foods. Many sweet things. So many unearthed potatoes. But not dirt. As a rule, southerners don’t eat dirt. Midwesterners don’t either. I’m a little bit of both. My flat accent from flat Kansas betrays me often in Tennessee, where single syllable words often become charmingly multi-syllabic-hilly. In Nashville, I’m grounded by mountain-adjacent dirt embedded with limestone and neighboring Alabama-red dirt that turns my footprints rusty.
Perhaps there’s something in the colloquial “south in your mouth” that leads people to think southerners eat dirt. One of my favorite Designing Women episodes focuses on the misperception that southerners are all back-woodsy, mountain people that occasionally take a soup spoon and dine on their front yard. In the episode, Julia Sugarbaker/Dixie Carter schools The Atlanta Journal on the stereotype in her inimitable way. Dixie signed a headshot for me at a mall opening, after singing opera on a temporary food court stage with Hal Holbrook holding her purse in the audience. Her soaring soprano echoed into the ‘90s glass ceiling, no hint of Georgia soil down her throat. She’s dead and buried now; I think that mall is, too.
My life has split between the middle of the country and the South. I buried most of my midwestern childhood in the prairie when I left, but have carried parts of it with me to Georgia, North Carolina, and now, Tennessee. Even after living in the South for decades, my flat newscaster accent wins out; there are words divulging my background. Dirt clods that I can’t swallow away. Milk. With three syllables. Wash. Warshington. Warshing machine. On the way back from AWP, my husband and I discussed my four days in Missouri and I discovered I can’t quite say the “r” in ironic, which feels like a missing Morissette chorus.
When I lived in Kansas as a kid, I had no idea that certain foods were hyper-regional. I moved to the South as an adult and assumed the food would be similar, even if the terrain wasn’t. While I love the South’s sweet and fruit teas, Waffle Houses, and visible mountain ranges, I desperately miss bierocks, kibbe, steamed ground beef sandwiches, and being able to stand on the prairie with enormous waving sunflowers for miles.
I hadn’t been back to Kansas in nearly three decades, so going to AWP in Kansas City, Missouri was an odd homecoming. I’ve written about leaving Kansas for the South, interspersed in essays and fiction. My sister and I on a Greyhound bus, the day after the Oklahoma City bombing, going past the still-gaping federal building overshadowed by a Wizard of Oz vibe. Farm reports about midwestern corn and abortions. A new food review (100% All Natural Sweet Corn Crunch Dried Kernels) that’s really about sliding down a Western Kansas silo with a 10-year-old who drove a rusty truck.
My mother recently sent a long, unexpected list of Kansas People that: are dead now. Twenty-two of them; several text bubbles worth. I think I told them goodbye when I left Kansas. I don’t know where they’re buried, except that it’s somewhere flat, underneath dirt and snow and years, maybe with sunflowers left by a cemetery caretaker.
Blocks from the convention center hosting AWP, there’s a museum I visited as a teenager shortly after it opened. I’ve only been to two of the conferences, but in Philly my museums du jour were the Mutter, and the Barnes Museum (no relation.) The history of the Arabia Steamboat Museum in Kansas City is: steamships with gigantic paddle wheels sunk in the 19th Century when parts of Kansas and Missouri were underwater. The terrain and river path changed, and the steamboats were left buried under 50 feet of prairie dirt. I took the Barbie-themed Dream Streetcar for a return visit.
Before the unearthed boat, I perched on a picnic bench outside of River Market’s Bloom Baking Co. with some of my favorite writers for a quiet lunch away from the conference’s hubbub and broken escalators, enjoying a favorite midwestern food: the bierock. Unwrapping the foil, it smelled like my childhood. Hamburger. Cabbage. A yeasty exterior. Simple. Full of Czech culture. Accompanied only by a hearty mustard, no fava beans.
Like that bierock, the museum looked and smelled like the early-‘90s. Looming dark wood. Rows of teapots and buttons. An 1880s cargo of shoes, saws, and bottles. A working steamboat wheel whirled water over its paddle. Docents worked in windows to the past. One was cleaning dirt off a giant wheel; the other one cutting and sewing fabric into late-19th Century suits. The seamstress curator told me another AWP writer had visited the previous day. She also told me she wouldn’t step foot downtown. Her story started with an agent and a two-book deal but ended with only one published and bad feelings. Ten minutes away, ten thousand writers scurried around the bookfair. As we stood there chatting near thousands of buttons and shoes and saws, I wondered how many of those writers felt the same way.
I haven’t read for an in-person audience since I was in my 20s–in Kansas, ironically–when I was a college student quaking in a workshop setting. I buried those creative writing courses when I left the state. Unlike the bierock and museum, the reading was different as a 50-something. Second guessing myself, I switched up my plan for what to read at the Little Engines event. Instead of a sentimental piece on motherhood and childhood from Child Craft, my pink-covered collection, I went with a satirical piece published in McSweeney’s (still about motherhood, ironically). I thought it might fit better; sound edgier, or younger. There were laughs, but I could have stuck with my original choice. Among the other readers, there were vulnerable stories about raising children, aging parents, and insecurities. The invisible map lines between states and states-of-mind vanished as other readers whipped out big-font printouts and reading glasses. It took returning to my childhood to discover I write more dirt lit than pink; Child Craft is full of once-buried stories.
Next to a pile of new books, I packed something else in my suitcase: a tiny container of excavated prairie dirt from the steamboat museum gift shop. The next time I get homesick for Kansas, I’ll uncork the vial and down that dirt like a Pixie Stick.
Such an epic last line...!
(Fun fact: The author of this article alludes to being the inspiration for that part of the Designing Women episode. https://bittersoutherner.com/eat-white-dirt )