Episode 03: Heartland

In this episode, Ryan is joined by four of his WT colleagues: Dr. Alex Hunt, Dr. Tim Bowman, Dr. Ashley Pinkham, and Dr. Christopher Macaulay. Together we discuss Sarah Smarsh’s bestselling 2018 book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth. Smarsh was born in 1980 and grew up poor in southern Kansas, the daughter of generations of wheat farmers on one side and generations of teenage mothers on the other. Her memoir, a National Book Award finalist, reads as a corrective to the mystification of the struggles of the rural working-class in America. It is also a rhetorically complex work of literature, written as a letter to the unconceived daughter Smarsh promises herself she will never deliver into a life of poverty. The episode begins with a discussion of the panelists’ initial reactions to the text, both critical and celebratory, followed by a more focused discussion in which they draw on their unique perspectives as scholars of literary studies, history, developmental psychology, and political science. Over the course of the conversation, we talk about a range of issues, from where the book fits into the tradition of Great Plains literature, to what it says about rural America’s ambivalent relationship with the two-party political system, to how we might imagine using this book in a college classroom in the Texas Panhandle.