The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere: A Memoir

Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere: A Memoir

Plot

North Dakota is best known to outsiders as a spectacularly cold and inhospitable place that anyone with sense must leave. But how can a person who is born of such heart-stopping, occasionally cruel beauty truly escape its singular pull? Though Debra Marquart would be the first to admit that for a long time her favorite view of her home state was the one in the rearview mirror, she will also fiercely defend that land and the rare strength of the people who stay behind. Rising from Marquart's need to make sense of her struggle to reconcile such disparate feelings, "The Horizontal World" blends autobiography, geography, and mythology as it reveals the tension between the keepers of the land and those who cut themselves free. From the earliest age Marquart knew she wanted out -- out of the milking barn, out of the nearly empty nest her farmhouse home had become once her four older siblings moved away, out of the harvests and the blizzards and the long dusty summer days filled with nothing but hard work. Surely life had more to offer than this unyielding daily grind. But even after she got good at leaving, she kept coming back. It is this process of flight -- from both the landscape and the family -- and return that Marquart writes about so exquisitely. Drawing on the classic literature of the Midwest, as well as land surveys, death certificates and many other pieces of anecdotal evidence, Marquart weaves together the meaning of native grownd as she ruminates on the forging of identity. Whether she is writing about her great-grandmother dying in childbirth, Lawrence Welk's early days, the glaciers that shaped her back yard, or her father's quiet struggle with heart disease, Marquart's sense of the absurd and her graceful poeticism combine to make "The Horizontal World" a captivating read. About the Author____________________ Debra Marquart is the coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Iowa State University and a musician with a rhythm and blues project, The Bone People. She is the author of ''The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories'', and the poetry collections ''Everything's a Verb'' and ''From Sweetness''. She lives in Ames, Iowa.