The #Midwessay: Claire Wahmanholm, Get In Loser, We're Going Corn-Pitting

  

Get In Loser, We're Going Corn-Pitting

Claire Wahmanholm

*

I want to tell you something about corn pits. And in so doing, tell you something about myself. And essays. And the Midwest. And maybe, even, life.

     If you are from the Midwest, you probably know what a corn pit is. Unless you’re like me, an urban Midwesterner whose parents had low tolerance for Americana in any of its forms, and for whom “fall festivals”—with their corn mazes, pumpkin cannons, “touch-a-tractor”s, grain trains, rubber duck derbies, giant jumping pillows—were verboten. We were not that kind of family. You know the kind. The kind you picture when someone says “Midwestern family.” 

     So I only learned about corn pits eight months ago, as a grown-ass adult. 

     The corn pit obviously owes something to the ball pit, but has none of its cultural, Millennial, cachet. Googling “the history of the corn pit” directs you to “corn maze.” No one seems to have thought corn pits worth much ink, digital or otherwise. 

     And eight months ago, I would have agreed. 

*

September: some friends of ours, who have recently moved to St. Paul from The East Coast, suggest we go to a farm. They are eager to have an Authentic Midwestern Fall Experience. I am eager to distance myself from any associations they might have with an Authentic Midwestern Fall Experience. I find myself saying, multiple times, that though I am Midwestern, I have never been to a fall festival. That it is just as foreign to me as it is to them. I hear myself, and I wish I could stop, but it’s too important for them to know that there are so many kinds of Midwestern! That I am not tacky! That I don’t even like the outdoors! (why is that coming out of my mouth all of a sudden?? Sure I do!) That I have never owned any pieces of scarecrow art! That I have a sense of humor! That I know how irony works! 

     Our friends are nodding politely now. They are looking at each other uncomfortably, but I am not done.

     I’m not Midwestern, I’m Minnesotan! We created the Honeycrisp apple! St. Paul has the best Wordle scores in the country, and the second best park system (after Washington D.C.)! Our drinking water is impeccable! We are politically progressive and heavily invested in even the smallest local elections! Our food scene is righteous! O captain my captain! 

*

Back in 2014, a group of Minnesotan artists, business leaders, and academics spearheaded a tongue-in-cheek (kind of!) initiative to extricate Minnesota from The Midwest. Instead, we should be known as “the North.” They wanted to attract young, innovative, cool people to the state, and the idea was that no one thinks the Midwest is any of those things. It was time for Minnesota to stop undercutting itself. We have a lot going for us! For example, proponents of the re-branding insisted that Minnesota is an “urban state” (a state with the vast majority of its population concentrated in urban centers, as opposed to a state with a more evenly distributed population); that we are more racially and ethnically diverse than our neighboring states; that we are also the most eco-diverse of any Midwestern state, with three distinct ecological regions (Great Plains, Eastern Temperate Forests, and Northern Forests); that our public transportation is better and our standard of living is higher etc., and so that we should start our own club for cool kids only, no hicks allowed. So long, losers!

     The project ultimately failed to go anywhere, but it did give us some neat hats and something to talk about in the middle of our six-month winter.

     Truth be told, I was all for the re-branding. I would have loved to say “I’m from the North.” It felt more accurate. It would have distanced me from the parts of the Midwest I wanted to be distanced from. 

*

I am mostly a poet who, lately, has been writing essays. Early on, I was interested in writing lyric essays. You know the ones, with their fragments, their intimations, their leaps. I would be delicate, wispy, graceful, poignant, devastating, breathtaking. It would be easy. It would be like writing a poem, which, by this point, I was pretty good at. I would remove the line breaks, and the essays would write themselves.  

     They did not. It was utterly grotesque. Outside of the form of a poem, my voice sounded precious. It was trying too hard. It was insecure. I would need to use a different voice. But I didn’t have another one! This was my writing voice! 

     So I tried emulating the voices of other essayists I admired. I would lean into quirkiness. I would lean into the surreal. I would be surprising! and a lil’ experimental! but also charming! (at the time, none of my favorite essayists were from the Midwest. I know.)

     It was embarrassing. This is all very embarrassing. 

     You can do lots of stuff in an essay. You can give advice. You can tell a story. You can work out a theory. You can make an argument. You can instruct. You can surprise. You can speculate wildly. But you cannot lie. This means that sometimes, you (I) have to look like an idiot. 

*

The night before the fall festival, I scroll through the farm’s website to see just how the rest of the country sees us. The farm is advertising something called a “corn pit” (“now BIGGER and BETTER than ever! Minnesotas [sic] largest Corn Pit! Make a corn angel or bury your friends and family. You will not find a corn box like this anywhere else”). 

     The fuck is a corn pit, I mutter. 

     The pictures aren’t of the highest quality, so it’s hard to see, but it looks like a sandbox filled with corn kernels. There is nothing more Midwestern than corn. I once took a quiz called “How Midwestern Are You?” and one of the questions was “how do you cook your corn”? (as if there were more than one way, which is to place it firmly in the compost bin.) You won’t catch me supporting the corn agenda. Neither as a food product, nor as an entertainment medium. I can’t believe I’ll be paying $12 for this hokey shit. 

     But we drive thirty-seven minutes out of the city, we pay our $12 apiece, we navigate our way past the 12’ Wooden Rocking Chair, the Skyhigh Slides (“Kids will be able to see all over our 160 acre farm from the top!”), and the Kritter Korral, and we are standing in front of the Corn Pit. The sky is blue, it is 78 degrees.

     The corn pit is not a sandbox. It is huge, maybe 30 x 50 feet, bordered on all sides by waist-high hay bales. It is canopied by a generous tent. 

     My daughter and I climb on top of the hay bales. 

     There are so many people in the pit—babies, children, parents. They are swimming in the kernels. They are burying themselves up to their ears. They are scrambling up the bales to jump, over and over again, into the pit. I have never seen anything more joyous.

     My daughter and I jump. 

     I am up to my thighs in corn kernels and I am aghast. I did not imagine it would be this deep—easily three feet. And it is—dare I say it?—even better than a ball pit. I am reminded of the scene early on in the movie Amélie, where the narrator takes us on a brief tour of Amélie’s small pleasures, among them “dipping her hand into sacks of grain,” which we then see her do at the market, slyly, all the way up to her top knuckles, her head turned away from the camera. And it does feel like a secret that I’ve been let in on. I swivel around in the corn pit and look from face to face. Does that child look as if she is tasting heaven for the first time? Does that woman? That grandpa? Or is it just a Saturday for them?

     Just to see what it feels like, I push my hands through the corn. I do the twist and wedge myself deeper into the kernels. The corn is a waist-deep meadow. I hear the ks ks ks as I wade through it on my way back to the hay bales, from which I will once more jump into the corn pit. 

*

The first successful essay I wrote was one that I sent to a friend for feedback. I still didn’t know what I was doing. The essay was sort of funny, sort of serious, sort of narrative. It was very honest. It did not make me look quirky, interesting, graceful. I was surprised by how easy it had been to write. 

     Amazing, she wrote back. I can totally hear your voice in my head when I read this! It sounds just like you.

     Of all the various voices I had tried out, I hadn’t thought it would be valid to use this one—the voice of my inner monologue, the voice I use to talk to my mom, the voice I use when I’m telling a story. It is not the voice I use for my poems. This one is, I think, a Midwestern voice. I don’t mean that the rhythms, the pacing, the diction can be categorized as x, y, or z. If I were to say that my voice is Midwestern, and my diction is colloquial and sharp, you could say nuh-unnnnnh, nuh-unnnnnh, lookit so-and-so, they’re Midwestern and their diction isn’t colloquial and sharp! And you’d be right. Everyone’s Midwestern voice is going to sound different, because the definition of the “Midwestern voice” is the one that sounds most authentically like you. 

     It’s not that I’m lying in my poems, or that I’m performing, per se. And I don’t think it’s necessary for every piece of writing to sound “just like you.” But writing that essay, and the ones that followed it, felt like plunging my arm, pit-deep, through thousands of kernels of corn. It felt like coming home. 

*

The rest of the fall festival is delightful. My children and I split a funnel cake. We watch a machine shoot a pumpkin more than 1/3 of a mile out across a field. The kids bounce forever on a jumbo jumping pillow. The sky gets gold, then pink. We fold ourselves back into the car, our legs still powdery from corn dust. 

     I am ready to make amends. I am ready to share The Good, Corny News as far and fast as I possibly can. It’s okay to be tacky! It’s okay to be stereotypically Midwestern! I will be a much-praised, much-beloved, ambassador. I will change lives. 

     When I get home, I do a Google Trends search for “corn pit” to decide where I need to focus my gospel.

     I knew corn pits were a Midwestern invention. But I did not know that, since 2004, the state with the highest interest in corn pits is Minnesota.

     Nor did I know that there is only one metro area in the entire nation with enough data to show up on the search. And that area is Minneapolis-St. Paul.

     What is this feeling? Satisfaction? Pride? Sure. But beneath that, embarrassment. I had been insisting so hard on the non-Midwestern-ness of my hometown, which has quietly been the corn pit capital of the nation all my adult life. I’ve been an outsider in my own state. Everyone has been having fun without me, and for years. It’s a good thing I know how irony works.  

     I am chastened. I have been full of shit. If there is anything worse than trying too hard to be cool, it is being seen for what you really are. It is being seen, correctly, as insecure. 

     Minnesota is averting its eyes. It’s going into the kitchen for some more coffee. It’s going to give me a minute. 

*

Essays are about trying—about trying to figure something out, about using the form to work through something, with the idea that you could always try again, that any one essay isn’t definitive, isn’t the final word. There are lots of ways to be a person. There are lots of ways to be a writer, a Midwesterner, a Midwestern writer. Here are some metaphors. The corn pit is an essay. The Midwest is an essay. The Midwest is a corn pit. It takes all kinds. There’s room for everyone in the corn pit. Get in.

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Meltwater (Milkweed Editions 2023), Redmouth (Tinderbox Editions 2019), and Wilder (Milkweed Editions 2018), as well as the chapbook Night Vision (New Michigan Press 2017). Her poems have appeared widely, including in Best New Poets, New Poetry from the Midwest, Washington Square Review, Triquarterly, The Missouri Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, and Copper Nickel. She lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Find her online at clairewahmanholm.com.

What is the #Midwessay? What is the Midwest? What are the characteristics, if any, of the #Midwessay (the Midwest essay)? What gathers us together? What pulls us apart? Springing from a twitter conversation, we started asking writers and readers what they imagine (or would like to reimagine) as the Midwest and the Midwessay. The #Midwessay is a series of reports from the Midwest (whatever that is) by and/or about Midwestern essay and essayists (whatever those are). Essay Daily will be publishing these, sorted (loosely) by state, in February 2021 and beyond.  These #Midwessays will be collected here and on a separate site at a later date. If you'd like to submit a report / essay, send it our way. Details and coordinators for each state are listed here. You can also ping Ander (link at the upper right) if we don't list a coordinator yet for your state. —The Editors