The virus arrives, the world shutters, and in Washington, DC, the homesick journalist Christopher Vondracek--recently relocated from South Dakota--starts scrolling through digitized oil paintings by the Midwestern nostalgia artist Terry Redlin. Vondracek traces Redlin's coming-of-age during the Farm Crisis as well as his own fleeting memories of a small-town wracked with upheaval from farm foreclosures and a shifting political perspective on the prairie. The author takes an inside-out look at the entrenched cultural tropes and portraits of rural, rustic nostalgia in an age of global grain markets, collapsing rural communities, and changing heartland values. Vondracek often asks of this land, "Is it a Redlin?" seeking to reconcile the idyllic portrayal of his American heartland with the reality unfolding on TV and social media channels. In Redlin or Rodin he looks to understand how the romantic palette of a farm country pastoral scene can obscure the industrialization of the very same land.
Christopher Vondracek is the author of Dancing with Welk: Music, Memory, and Prairie Troubadours and the poetry collection Rattlesnake Summer, featuring a poem for each of South Dakota's sixty-six counties. He is the Washington correspondent with the Minnesota Star Tribune and former agricultural reporter for the newspaper.
"An engaging, lyrical love letter to the Midwest. . . . Writing with an earnest, humane eye, Christopher Vondracek serves as a thoughtful docent to Midwestern art. . . . Along the way, he illuminates the lived realities of farming communities in the Great Plains and Upper Midwest; their long, slow drift toward precarity, and their persistent cultural attachment to place."--Gretchen Marquette, author of May Day: Poems "With enviable insight and humor, Redlin or Rodin brilliantly examines the forces that seek to define our own landscapes, reckoning with the effects of images and memories that comfort, deceive, and idealize us."--J. Ryan Stradal, author of Great Kitchens of the Midwest: A Novel "You don't quite read Christopher Vondracek's latest memoir--you hold on. Redlin or Rodin is a Sunday sally down a washboard road, the driver--a journalist by trade, a philosopher at heart--searching for the meaning of his denuded Midwestern roots in the most unlikely of places: the saccharine landscape paintings of Terry Redlin, 'our strip mall Seurat.' These probing, witty, and ever-companionable essays herald the arrival of one of the most exciting new voices of the plains."--Carson Vaughan, author of Zoo Nebraska: The Dismantling of an American Dream
