This week’s other featured book, “Chronicles Of Cosmic Chaos: In The Fourth Dimension,” by Sophia Falco, can be found by scrolling down below this post, or by clicking the author’s name on our Authors page.
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THE BOOK: Scenes from the Heartland: Stories Based on Lithographs by Thomas Hart Benton
PUBLISHED IN: 2019
THE AUTHOR: Donna Baier Stein
THE EDITOR: Walter Cummins
THE PUBLISHER: Serving House Books, publisher of international prose, poetry, and literary hybrids, was founded in 2009 by award-winning authors Thomas E. Kennedy and Walter Cummins.
SUMMARY: When a contemporary writer turns her imagination loose inside the images of an iconic artist of the past, the result is storytelling magic at its best. Here are nine tales that bring to vivid life the early decades of the 20th century as witnessed by one of America’s most well-known painters. Thomas Hart Benton sketched fiddlers and farm wives, preachers and soldiers, folks gathering in dance halls and tent meetings. Though his lithographs depict the past, the real-life people he portrayed face issues that are front and center today: corruption, women’s rights, racial inequality.
In these stories we enter the imagined lives of Midwesterners in the late 1930s and early 1940s. A mysterious woman dancing to fiddle music makes one small gesture of kindness that helps heal the rift of racial tensions in her small town. A man leaves his childhood home after a tragic accident and becomes involved with the big-time gamblers who have made Hot Springs, Arkansas, their summer playground. After watching her mother being sent to an insane asylum simply for grieving over a miscarriage, a girl determines to never let any man have any say over her body.
Then as now, Americans have struggled with poverty, illness, and betrayal. These fictions reveal our fellow countrymen and women living with grace and strong leanings toward virtue, despite the troubles that face them.
THE BACK STORY: Like Benton, I hail from Kansas City. My father had been given a Benton lithograph many years ago and it now hangs on the wall of my office. One day as I was figuring out what to write next I stared at the lithograph and started describing what I saw. My first published story collection had included stories that were somewhat autobiographical and I wanted to write about something other than my own life. I figured that setting a story in Missouri in the 1930s would accomplish that but lo and behold, some autobiographical themes came through. After that first story was published in Virginia Quarterly Review, I used a book I owned that compiled other Benton lithographs to write more stories. I loved doing the research for these pieces!
WHY THIS TITLE?:
See above
WHY WOULD SOMEONE WANT TO READ IT? I think anyone interested in how people live can enjoy these stories – so many issues we face today were present in the past too.
REVIEW COMMENTS:
“Scenes from the Heartland is an unforgettable collection, as lovely as it is honest, refusing to sentimentalize, transcending nostalgia, and looking directly at the riven, triumphant, glorious hearts of its characters. Donna Baier Stein provides a necessary reminder of everything we share, no matter how distant we may be in time or place.” — Lee Martin, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Author of The Bright Forever
“In this gorgeous collection, Donna Baier Stein teases out the depth and humanity hinted at in Hart’s two dimensional art, using each lithograph as a portal into a vivid, fully fleshed out world. Scenes from the Heartland is brimming with marvelous, generous scenes that truly do come from the heart.” — Gayle Brandeis, The Art of Misdiagnosis
“Inspired by nine iconic lithographs, Donna Baier Stein indelibly imagines the forgotten lives of rural men and women in the early, backbreaking decades of the Twentieth Century. These stories of hardship and survival, of passions simmering under a roughshod surface, of alcohol-fueled cruelties and simple acts of kindness, both capture an era and transcend it. Scenes from the heartland, indeed.” – – Dawn Raffel, The Strange Case of Dr. Couney
“If Thomas Hart Benton’s artwork could talk, I believe it would sound like Donna Baier Stein’s prose–plainspoken, vivid, generous, and honest. The nine stories in this collection–which use Benton’s lithographs as imaginative springboards–form a vibrant patchwork quilt of small towns, county fairs, and rural dance halls peopled by fiddlers and farmers, gas jockeys and traveling preachers. To read this book is to be transported, by Baier Stein’s masterful storytelling, to the American heartland of a bygone era. I, for one, did not want to leave.” –Will Allison, What You Have Left and Long Drive Home, finalist, Forward Reviews Award
AUTHOR PROFILE: As a little girl, I wrote a story called “Melissa in Book World” about a little girl who lived underwater in a world of books. I think that life had come to pass. After publishing many individual stories and poems while raising my children, I finally published my first book at age 62. Now I am the author of
The Silver Baron’s Wife (PEN/New England Discovery Award, Bronze winner in Foreword Reviews 2017 Book of the Year Award, more), Sympathetic People (Iowa Fiction Award Finalist, IndieBook Awards Finalist), Sometimes You Sense the Difference (poetry), and Letting Rain Have Its Say (poetry) as well as Scenes from the Heartland (Foreword Reviews Finalist). I was a Founding Editor of Bellevue Literary Review and founded and publishes the interfaith literary journal Tiferet. My work has been published in Virginia Quarterly Review, Writer’s Digest, Saturday Evening Post, New York Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and anthologies.
AUTHOR COMMENTS: I wanted to show, as Thomas Hart Benton did, the variety of people that make up America…how we are all in this together. One of the stories, “A Landing Called Compromise,” has been turned into a play that was read in NYC’s Salamagundi Club. It confronts the issue of divisiveness in this country directly. Two other stories, “Morning Train” and “Pointing East” have also been turned into plays and read at the same NYC venue.
SAMPLE:
Back in the church, Martha saw that the tall man in the Coast Guard jacket now sat near the pulpit. Someone had wrapped him in brown wool blankets. A cup of coffee sat steaming beside him.
Martha moved toward Carl, who still stood in the crowd at the long table, bent over the list to the far right, his finger scrolling down the long rows of names. She’d been so foolish to not go to an eye doctor; she couldn’t see well at all with these cheap things. “Which list is that?” she asked when she came up behind him, heart pounding. He didn’t answer.
She stood hip-to-hip with him now, holding her breath as he moved his finger down more names. She took her new glasses off, wiped them, and glanced across the way where she saw, as though at a long distance that had suddenly shortened, Zula Blix, standing across the way in her fine emerald suit. Martha didn’t know if she’d had a chance to read the list to find Ralph’s name or not. Or what their sons’ fates might be. But she caught Zula’s eye squarely, nodding curtly in recognition of all they both had to lose. excerpt from “A Landing Called Compromise”
WHERE TO BUY IT: Amazon, 50% off at Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or signed and discounted by emailing me at donna@donnabaierstein.com.
PRICE: As low as $7.50 plus s&h
CONTACT THE AUTHOR: I think it’s very important to open the door to writer/reader interaction. You could post your e-mail address, Facebook page, or Twitter handle, or all of the above.
Website: https://donnabaierstein.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/donnabaierstein/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DonnaBaierSteinAuthor2020
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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donnabaierstein/
Threads: https://www.threads.net/@donnabaierstein
Email: donna@donnabaierstein.com
I’d love to hear from you!
Snowflakes in a Blizzard 