Midwest Lit: Wisconsin Writers On The Landscape Of Home

People in New York, Los Angeles, and London are used to reading books set in their hometowns—or at least some fictionalized version of it. But what about those of us in smaller places far from the coasts and urban centers? Does a familiar setting make a book more appealing or change the way you read it?

Here are a few passages about Wisconsin places compiled from the delightful Wisconsin Literary Travel Guide that may ring true for you.

Appleton

Edna Ferber lived in an apartment on Appleton’s College Avenue as a child. Early in her career, she was a reporter for the Appleton Post-Crescent and later the Milwaukee Journal before moving to New York City to write plays and novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “So Big” from 1924. She described Appleton in her autobiography “Peculiar Treasure” 1939:

Perhaps pioneer families of many years before, coming upon a cool green oasis after heart-breaking days through parched desert and wind-swept plains, must have felt much as the Ferber family did as it arrived in Appleton, Wisconsin and looked about at the smiling valley in whose arms the town so contentedly nestled. A lovely little town of sixteen thousand people; tree-shaded, prosperous, civilized.

Big Bend

For 20 years, Melvin Richard Ellis wrote a nature column “Notes from Little Lakes” for the Milwaukee Journal. He also wrote books, including “Wild Goose, Brother Goose” and “Flight of the White Wolf.” Much of his work reflected his observations around his home:

When you live on a piece of land you leave an imprint; but probably equally important, the land leaves an imprint on you.

Portage

Novelist and playwright Zona Gale was born in Portage and, aside from stints as a reporter in Milwaukee and New York, spent most of her life there. Gale based much of her writing on life in Portage, known as “Friendship Village.”In “Portage, Wisconsin and Other Essays” from 1928, she wrote of her hometown:

May it not be that one born and bred in a town, and rooted there by ties, by houses in which one has lived, by childhood, by first school, and by a grave-may it not be that such a one does actually see that town heightened, drawn through into deeper perception, adjusted to contacts not only of the eye and the memory, but of other and far more sensitive cells and powers?

Antigo

Illustrator and author Marie Hall Ets spent her summers as a child in Antigo, time that inspired her animal stories.

The happiest memories of my childhood are of summers in the North Woods of Wisconsin. I loved to run off by myself into the woods and watch for the deer with their fawns and for porcupines, badgers, turtles, frogs …and sometimes a bear or a copperhead or a skunk.