Tales from the Middle Border

The place is the middle border, the Midwest borderland remembered in the writings of Hamlin Garland. Richard Quinney’s autobiographical essays begin with his birth and early years on the family farm in southern Wisconsin, continue through a lifetime of movement away from the farm, and document a return to the farm. Along the way, there are the tales of the years of living and writing in a prairie town across the border.

In the most recent telling, Quinney is still moving between town and country. But it is always to the farm on the middle border that he returns. Autobiographical reflection allows the narrator to move in time and space across a geographical landscape. The impulse to write autobiographically is to know the present and, at the same time, to apprehend what is yet to be. Lives are saved and renewed in the telling of these tales. Such is the good fortune of the storyteller.