Emily Brisse

 I'm going to put on my teacher hat here for a moment. It was during my third semester in grad school that much of what I thought about and everything I wrote began to revolve around the notion of place. My classmates and I crafted critical theses that term, and mine focused on Minnesota writers and how these men and women rendered my state so convincingly. That paper was a labor of love, time, and too many notecards, so I'm grateful that a revised (and much shorter!) version of it is being shared with other writers and teachers of writing in the most recent issue of Minnesota English Journal .  If you're into that kind of thing, then by all means give it a read. Here are the first few paragraphs: "Landing: Writing About Place in our Flyover State" When I went off to college, I knew about Toni Morrison and Ernest Hemingway and  Harper Lee. I loved literature, so much that I wanted to both teach it and write it for the rest of my  life. But it wasn’t until I t...

Today I have returned to my students. I'm always surprised, after the exhaustion of spring, to discover how much I've missed them, how excited I am to be back in the classroom, teaching. I've spent the past month preparing for the next nine, and somewhere between notes on A Farewell to Arms  and rethinking my lead-in lesson on perspective, I reread the critical thesis I wrote two summers ago. I called it "Landing: A Focus on Place in Flyover Fiction." In it, I examined first place--how it's created in writing, effective techniques, etc.--and second those writers from my flyover state who seem to have a handle on such things. I wrote it as a writer for other writers. But this time, because of the headspace I was in, I read it as a teacher, and my planning from that day on changed. Later, I read in the most recent issue of Orion  Erik Reece's essay "The Schools We Need." He talked about many things, but the paragraph that stood out to me was th...

. I read Sinclair Lewis' Main Street (1920) one year ago, and I can easily say that it was the book that got me roving down this "flyover land" road. It filled me with so many thoughts. Many times I wanted to reach into Lewis' Sauk Centre grave and shake the man awake, ask him if his Minnesota hometown was really that bad. Other times, I had to stay quiet, admit that his less-than-glowing observations were (from my own small-town experience) spot on. It's an interesting and important question for a writer: what do you choose to show? I guess, if you're honest, the best answer is "all of it." But we each see the world so differently. The moment you stop writing for yourself, you are bound to get something for someone else wrong. So, just tell the truth, then, in the ways you know how: an image, an emotion, a character, one word after another. I've always thought of you, Mr. Lewis, as the sullen boy at the back of the classroom, and I doubt if...