Lit Du Nord: Minnesota Books and Authors

By Nick Healy

In his debut collection of short fiction, Brett Biebel assembles 48 stories to provide a perspective on Midwestern life that looks past the cliché and the familiar — endless cornfields, prolife billboards and so on — and focuses instead on characters whose circumstances are as particular and complex as anyone’s anywhere.

Biebel, who received his MFA in creative writing at Minnesota State University, chose Nebraskans for his subjects in “48 Blitz,” and he finds plenty of drama and humor in a land that outsiders generally dismiss as flat and dull — flyover country in its purest form.

“I wanted to present a more complicated picture,” Biebel said. “The Midwest is full of all these powerful contradictions. It’s friendly but closed-minded, hard-working yet stubborn and wide open yet insular. I’ve always thought contradiction made for great stories.”

The pieces in “48 Blitz” are compact. Most run two or three pages in length. Some are longer, while others can be contained to a single page. This makes the reading fast and often fun, and despite their brevity, the stories never feel disposable.

Biebel’s characters include a good mix of oddballs. We meet a U.S. Senate candidate who tries to capitalize on his bowling prowess by staging campaign events only in bowling alleys, a photographer who roams Nebraska highways to capture images of roadkill, and a death-row inmate whose passion for Cornhusker football wins him some public sympathy in his final days.

That last scenario comes from “Big Red Nation,” in which the doomed man is scheduled to die a day before the biggest game his beloved Huskers have faced in years. Moments ahead of his lethal injection, he wastes his final words on a joke about the game he’ll never see. And then, Biebel writes, “At the very end, according to one of the media observers, he ‘turned the deepest red you ever saw,’ though exactly what kind of omen this was nobody could quite figure.” Some of the book’s most memorable and affecting moments arise when Biebel zooms in on personal relationships.

In “Kansas City Blues,” a pair of newlyweds travel to the City of Fountains for a two-night honeymoon. The author reveals the humbleness of their circumstances and modesty of their expectations in understated ways, and although we know precious little about them, we wince when things keep going wrong during their trip’s final night, and we smile when the bride suggests a sweet solution to a stressful predicament.

In “Old-Fashioned Rustlers,” three teenagers sneak some horses from a relative’s barn and tear off on a ride through the dark.

They thunder along the shoulder of the interstate freeway, then through the ditch and along some railroad tracks. Hanging around a grouping of abandoned box cars, they talk through the night, and one of them finally expresses a wish many people like him might share — to go back in time, to have been in that spot before it became merely a place to pass through.

Regarding that story, Biebel said, “I read something about the railroad ending at North Platte, Nebraska, for one year in the mid-1860s, and

“48 Blitz” by Brett Biebel

I thought about how the characters living around there now might long for that time, when they were the literal end of the line, how there’d be this romantic nostalgia about that, but more so this longing for a moment when everything wasn’t solved. They don’t necessarily miss ‘the good old days,’ though that’s part of it. They miss possibility, the idea that there was somewhere to go, some places still left to explore.”

Biebel will visit Mankato on Feb. 3 as part of the Good Thunder Reading Series.

The schedule for his visit includes three events — a 10 a.m. workshop at the Emy Frentz Art Guild, followed by a 3 p.m. craft talk and 7:30 p.m. reading in Room 245 of the Centennial Student Union at MSU. For more information, check out the Good Thunder Reading Series website (gt.mnsu.edu).