Deep Routes: The Midwest in All Directions

Before moving to the Mythological Quarter, we lived in the Midwestern United States. While there we worked with an amazing group of people, spread out across several states, on creative ways to rethink a region. That means looking critically at everything from how to run local utilities, understanding the food supply chain, developing new social infrastructure, and thinking about how people understand and relate to the places in which they live. As a group we discussed organic farming, watersheds, worker owned co-operatives, map making, how to organize a neighborhood, and many other ways beyond and around the dominant culture. Together this group of people has now made two books, an exhibition, a couple of Drifts, and is working on a people’s theater performance and video project: The People vs. Monsanto.

Working with this group of artists, activists, writers, and thinkers as always been both a challenging and rewarding adventure in collective process. We are proud to announce the results of our latest efforts in this magical, frustrating, but ultimately rewarding process Deep Routes: The Midwest in All Directions.

Along with two inspiring and tough ladies, Sarah Ross and Rozalinda Borcilă, I helped edit this book.

From the back of the book:

Deep Routes: the Midwest in All Directions is a collection of stories about learning where we are – by inhabiting, traversing, and exchanging narratives in the expansive region that some people call the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor. Emerging from a geologic territory shaped by retreating Pleistocene ice sheets and further carved by generations of plant, animal and human habitation, these essays contemplate another planetary shift that has transformed our very existence: global neoliberal capitalism. The authors critically reflect on the nature of territory, citizenship, mobility and the possibilities for a more just and egalitarian society. Drawing from sites within the the Midwest (such as parts of Minneapolis, Detroit, Rockford, Madison, Southern Illinois) and excursions far beyond it (locales as distant as Togo, China and Argentina) the twenty-seven contributors explore the wealth of associations these many journeys have nurtured.

With contributions from: Phil Bellfy , Jen Blair, Rozalinda Borcilă, Nicholas Brown, Alan Corbiere , Jill Doerfler , Bonnie Fortune, Ryan Griffis, Abbilyn Harmon, Brian Holmes, Sarah Kanouse, Nicholas Lampert, Sarah Lewison, Jenna Loyd, Don Lyons, Dylan Miner, Faranak Miraftab, Shiri Pasternak, Claire Pentecost, Ryan Rice, Matthias Regan, Sarah Ross, Kristin Schimik, Heath Schultz, Daniel Tucker, Dan S. Wang, and Mike Wolf

Compass Collaborators grows from an association of 14 artists and activists who have been exploring the ties and relationships between global economic trends and on-the-ground lives in disparate neighborhoods, cities, and rural regions. This book is our second editorial investigation of the radical Midwest, a record of encounters, regional knowledge production, and gestures toward reciprocal self-recognition.

This book is available from Half Letter Press and via Paypal from the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor website.