When a friend sent me a copy of Keith Pilapil Lesmeister’s chapbook, Mississippi River Museum, along with the message that she thought it might be up my alley, I didn’t know what to expect. It’s hard to be aware of one’s own literary alleys, or at least what others perceive those alleys to be, so I was curious to find out.
Turned out she was right. And I’m grateful for it.
Lesmeister’s chapbook—really a longish short story—is a throwback to an American tradition of dirt-under-the-fingernails story-telling. At the same time, it’s a thoroughly modern tale of broken people navigating their way through a world that either doesn’t see them or doesn’t care.
The story centers around thirty-year-old Joe Patterson, who’s returned to Lansing, Iowa, after his father’s death to fix up and sell off his father’s old cabin along the Mississippi River. While there, he encounters twelve-year-old Christian, abandoned by his parents and being raised by his abusive stepmother. The two form a bond over catfishing, and Joe finds himself getting drawn—despite his resistance—into Christian’s world. Mississippi River Museum is a story about family—the one you lost, and the one you forge. It’s about playing the shitty hand you’ve got, and bluffing your way into a bigger pot and better cards.
Once I was finished this gem of a story, I reached out to Keith to ask him a few questions.
Giano Cromley: One of the many things this story does so well is capture—at a granular level—the lives lived out in the forgotten Midwest. So I’ll start by asking how much does the region affect you as a writer? How much do you consciously set out to depict this region? Do you ever feel a resistance to regionalism in your writing?
Keith Pilapil Lesmeister: I once heard Ron Rash describe landscape/setting as destiny. We can’t escape it. I think this is true for both writers and their characters. I mention this because the setting and landscape, along with the language, mannerisms, and quirks of the people who live here in the upper Midwest are ingrained in me in the same way snow geese fly south every winter. It’s simply who I am as a writer. So yes, the region is very much a part of my writing, on both a subconscious and conscious level. The latter involves an attempt to depict the place and its people with just the right detail or line of dialogue so that someone from, say, New York or Houston, might be able to imagine for a moment what it’s like: the hills, valleys, bluffs, rivers, streams, steep ravines, and of course the characters. I love the region, the landscape, that makes up the upper Midwest, and I’m happy to embrace the regionalist label, so long as I’m not falling into stark stereotypes or caricatures.
GC: I once heard someone describe a Flannery O’Connor story as being “sweated,” and this story feels very much of that storytelling lineage. Do you prefer to weave your settings out of whole cloth? Or do you prefer to model your settings on places you’ve already been and know? I’m curious because everything here is so well rendered I feel like if I drove to Lansing, Iowa, right now I would expect to run across these places and people.
KPL: Thank you for saying so, and I’m glad you mentioned the one-and-only Flannery O’Connor, whose birthday was just yesterday (or was it the day before yesterday?). I’ve been re-reading her work the past few months, and I’m enamored with her inclinations toward the dark. Her ability to conjure setting, the south, and its rural menace, is unmatched. As for your question, I definitely prefer writing about settings with which I’m intimately familiar. I live near Lansing, Iowa, and I’ve been there dozens of times, but I wasn’t there when I wrote the story. And I took liberties with locations, places, and the names of establishments within the town. In other words, I fictionalized parts of the place to better serve the story, but at its core—and what I hoped to render on the page—is a place of immense beauty walled off from the rest of the world by the bluffs, hills, and of course the Mississippi River itself. A place of seclusion. A place where if one wants to visit, they must be very intentional. A person, in other words, doesn’t just happen upon Lansing, Iowa.
GC: Joe and the boy he befriends, twelve-year-old Christian, are both viewed as “others,” by the people in Lansing, mostly because neither of them is white. Yet the racism manifests in this almost blasé fashion that I found so interesting and authentic. What do you think are people’s misconceptions of small town Midwest when it comes to their understanding of race?
KPL: This is an interesting question, though tough to say what people’s misconceptions might be. Perhaps, though, it might be the degree to which racism plays out. It’s often—at least in my experiences—nonthreatening from a physical standpoint. I think almost without question the constant “othering” can be whittled down to some form of who belongs in or owns this space—an implication that you can’t be from here, Iowa, the Midwest because you don’t look like us. And these implications are embedded in the questions I get asked. I meet a person in town for the first time who’ll say, “So where are you from?” And I tell them I live here. “How long?” I tell them over twenty years. “Oh, I see,” they’ll say, perplexed. Pause, pause. “So where are you from originally?” I tell them Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and then it dawns on them that I’m not an immigrant or from a big city or one of the coasts. This obsession people have with needing to know extends beyond where are you from? Often, if the person asking the questions feels brave enough, they’ll follow up with a question about ethnicity/race. I’ve been asked this question dozens of times in one form or another. I assume you speak Spanish. I thought you were Lakota. What’s your … heritage or race or whatever? The instances I’ve described are absent the threat of any physical danger, but there is an emotional toll—this sense that despite making a home here, I’ll be perceived as an outsider based on my appearance (I’m not white) by those who might not know me.
GC: Joe and Christian are also both, essentially, fatherless. How important is that detail to the story and to you?
KPL: From my vantage point, it’s essential. And not only are they fatherless but also motherless. They’ve been orphaned in some fashion or another. For Joe, his parents are deceased. For Christian, both parents have abandoned him. The easiest though grossly inadequate comparison of their relationship is when a person listens to a song they haven’t heard in years and almost right away that person is transported to a familiar time and space associated with that song (a feeling, like, I didn’t know how much I needed to hear this song!). Similarly, I think once Joe and Christian find each other, their co-existence in this small town harmonizes in a brotherly or father-son sort of way that feels right and familiar. There’s a line in the story that hints to this. Something about how Joe had always hoped to have a family of his own one day, and he’s quickly realizing that the notion of “family” doesn’t need to be in a traditional sense. In Joe’s mind, a kind of nontraditional family structure starts to emerge.
GC: Yes, I found that passage to be quite moving. In that vein, the protagonist of this story, Joe, is 30 years old, yet his body is falling apart from a series of childhood sports injuries. Meanwhile, he’s trying to fix up a broken down cabin, as well as piece together the shards of his own life. Come hell or high water, he refuses to give up trying to fix the broken things in his life. How much of this informs the relationship he forges with Christian?
KPL: Toward the end of the story, Joe is described by his former basketball coach as someone who best performs under pressure. He’s a thinker, but mostly he’s someone who acts on instinct, intuition. I like to imagine that when Joe meets Christian for the first time, he finds solace in the fact that he can quickly identify a solution to Christian’s problem—getting the chain back on the dirt bike and applying oil to it. After that, the pressure around Joe (and Christian) builds to an extreme intensity, and Joe starts to act on behalf of himself, but also the kid—operating on the instinct his coach claimed, will never steer you wrong. That, plus his refusal to give up on the broken things in his life inform almost every aspect of the story and Joe’s relationship with Christian.
GC: This is such a unique length for a story—longer than a traditional short story, shorter than a novella. Did you intentionally choose this length? Did you feel any sort of desire or pressure to stretch it into a full-length novel?
KPL: When I first start a story, I try not to think about how long it might be, but for this one, I had a pretty good sense right away that it’d be a longer story. I think originally it was around 8,000 words (still long for a short story), but the final version is around 11.000 words, and those last few thousand words came through revision and allowing the characters to move and breathe and be themselves. And the truth is, I love the long short story. I’ve read quite a few lately: Jimena by Andrew Porter, originally published in Narrative, is included in his latest story collection The Disappeared.Ethan Rutherford’s story Angus & Annabel originally published in Cutleaf (where I serve as fiction editor) is included in his latest collection Farthest South. Each of these stories must push 10,000 words, and they’re fantastic. As far as stretching this story into a novel, I never felt any pressure to do so. In this iteration, the characters weren’t asking for more time on the page. Perhaps in the future they might come knocking. If that’s ever the case, we’ll see what happens.
Giano Cromley is the author of two YA novels and a short story collection. He’s been a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, and received an Artists Fellowship from the Illinois Arts Council. He’s an English professor at Kennedy-King College in Chicago, where he’s the chair of the Communications Department. And he’s a fiction editor with Identity Theory.
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