Jessa Crispin

"Jessa Crispin melds personal narrative with history and current events to explore the dark side of Kansas, where she grew up. She meditates on why the American Midwest still enjoys an esteemed position in the US's imagination about itself, why its foundational myths are the myths of what it means to be "American." And while we may romanticize aspects of Midwestern life-the nuclear family, the pioneering attitude, the small town friendliness-the realities, she argues, are harsher: so-called Midwestern values cover up a long history of oppression and control over Native Americans, over women, over the economically disadvantaged. Her subjects range from The Wizard of Oz to the White race, from chastity to rape, from radical militias and recent terrorist plots to Utopian communities; from the murders of the Clutter family made famous in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, to her own horror when a beloved art teacher inexplicably one night slaughtered his wife and three daughters and killed himself. Her pursuit takes her back to the Civil War, John Brown, and the immigration of German religious communities to the Midwest; she then ferries across the Atlantic Ocean to Amsterdam to visit a lay seminary for women where, since the Reformation, they have found sanctuary from violence and domestic abuse. Yet, despite the darkness, which is Crispin's stock in trade, there is a kind of bleak redemption at the heart of this project, the insight that, no matter where you go, no matter how far from home you roam, the place you came from is always with you, "like it or not.""--