With Heart from Middle America: A Portrait of Nebraska in Jim Reese's "Bone Chalk"

Jim Reese | Bone Chalk | Texas A&M University Press | 2019 | 160 Pages

Jim Reese’s new essay collection, Bone Chalk, is as wide and open as the Midwest he depicts in these by turn delicate, moving, and hilarious pieces of creative nonfiction.

Though the essays range from recollections of teenage memories (and a lively recreation of the 80s) to a meditation on our penal system, Reese’s central subject is his family and the people who orbit it. Wise, often uproarious, and always warm and generous, Reese wants to understand as well as present the people who have formed his life.

A number of essays in Bone Chalk explore the largely unknown terrain of rural Nebraska, country Reese calls “tough [...] unflinching and unapologetic.” It’s a country and a mindset that Reese straddles; at once an outsider and an insider, he is alert to the attitudes and regional idiosyncrasies that he grew up with—and apart from. Reese himself never fully outgrew rural Nebraska: He’s a city slicker who built  “street cred” in marginally urban places like Wayne and Omaha, and he knows he’s at best half a smirk wiser than rural folk. Indeed, often enough he entertains readers with self-effacing stories that reveal his own ignorance. This perspective provides readers with a unique view of the Midwest of which Reese is a part. He is at once the naïve “bucket calf” who almost took out the wall of a garage when he first touched a tractor and the well-educated writer and a college professor who brings a Nebraskan discernment and sensibility to his writing. The combination makes for a compassionate and wise book.

Many of these pieces will linger with readers long after the book is concluded. Who could forget the image of young Reese agreeing to become Wayne State’s mascot because of the young women in short skirts jumping about the sidelines? At the tryout his directions are simple. As Kari the squad leader explained:  “The key [...] is to keep Willy’s [the mascot’s] head from falling off during stunts and routines.” And one more thing “Willy can’t talk.” Now get out there and “excite the audience” she implores him. Readers will laugh, and cringe, as Willy and his sidekick CatMan show up at beer blasts, meet women and contend with mascots from other colleges.

Reese’s other essays are funny precisely because they share this authentic quality—in detail and in language. After being fired from a bartending gig at the Spanked Dog Pub, Reese took up a post at The Wayne Herald. In his first story there, Reese had occasion to write—in the third person, of course—that “No one cares if you ate goulash with the guy.” Soon thereafter he plunged into the true intricacies of small-town journalism. For a different assignment at the Herald, the local print shop supervisor, Randy, explained the ins and outs of stacking, bundling, labeling and delivering the news. As Randy said while giving Reese a tour of the shop:

Now over here you got your bags. Hook ‘em here. It makes it easier so you don’t have to mess with throwing ‘em by hand. Each bag’s got a label, too. You got your Pilger Rouute, Pilger City, here. You got your Hoskins, Randolph, Crofton, and Wynot over here. And you have to circle Wynot’s. Don’t ask why—all’s I know is they’ll send them back, and then you’ll have to drive them out there in the morning and they’ll already be late. LaVerta Hughes—she’ll bitch because she didn’t read it first-hand.

Oh, and Reese also learned how to hypnotize a chicken.

The most hilarious (and one of the delicately constructed) essays might be an account of the author’s mother-in-law, a woman who, shall we say, pays attention to details. As Reese puts it, “If you need something—a blow torch, nunchucks, twist-ties, marbles, propane, a chandelier, suspenders, a curtain rod, spare tire, a putter, basin wrench, bell bottoms, a bowling ball—anything; she’s your woman.”

Reese’s mother-in-law would forward him group emails on the weather, J.C. Penney’s watch repair department, and Plantar Fasciitis. She stored ninety russet potatoes in a clothes dryer and, Reese claims, he once “saw her pull a tarp for a pickup bed truck from underneath her dresser.”

Despite the somewhat odd preoccupations, this is a gentle and loving woman. Reese writes that her “faith in good company is what I admire in my mother-in-law. Faith in all things that matter.”

An entirely different tone is struck in Bone Chalk’s longest essay, a reflection on Reese’s twelve years of teaching writing in prisons, including the maximum-security prison San Quentin, the South Dakota State Penitentiary, and Yankton Federal Prison Camp. Reese’s central concern is nothing less than the nature of evil and how best to deal with it. 

Reese’s school-boy experience of city-wide panic in Omaha during a wave of killings, and a few years later the murder of a friend leaves no room for naiveté or Hollywood-style glamorization in Bone Chalk.  Intensely aware of his own daughters’ vulnerability, Reese wonders what he would do if someone harmed one of them. He knows nearly everyone is capable of deeds they can scarcely imagine.

What Reese also knows is that the difference between a man on the street and a man in a jail cell is most often one bad decision. Reese approaches the nature of crime through a sort of panopticon—getting to know inmates through class discussions, their writing, their casual comments on an exercise track, even their tattoos. These are the strangers parents and teachers warned about and, Reese makes clear, they are also the normal people who populate our lives. Reese’s narrative is loaded with incidents that remind us of our common humanity. For example, one man describes how, upon being moved from a more restrictive prison to the minimum security Yankton Prison Camp, he hurried to touch a tree: “I grabbed a hold of it and squeezed [...] I haven’t seen a tree in three years. And I wrapped my hands around its trunk. Squeezed so tight. I’m a country boy. To be denied the outdoors was like a death sentence for me.”

Reese gives no quarter to inmates who show no remorse or refuse to accept responsibility for their incarceration. He also knows that some of the inmates he faces need to work through emotional conundrums and self-defeating patterns of thought if they are to leave prison behind them. This effort to change the lives of these men charges Reese’s teaching. And it will charge readers of this book.

Reese closes the collection with a return to its heart—family. In a series of affecting vignettes, Reese presents glimpses of the developing and maturing relationship between him and his wife. They get to know each other’s likes and dislikes (she doesn’t like the term “Hunky-Dory”). They squabble. They figure out how to arrange their meager belongings in a “shoebox of an apartment” with “our wool socks snagging on the splintered wooden floor.”

Children arrive and life expands in ways not imagined until they appear. Soon enough dad is coaching, watering the lawn, delighting in his daughters. And, still learning to appreciate his wife. She has seen babies die and scraped “dead flesh from burnt living bodies.” She has stood by her husband. She is unafraid to give him feedback on his writing, some sobering—“Your books will sell when you’re dead. That’s the way that works.” Always, however, she has had faith in him, and them. Reese closes the book with a poignant memory of his young wife leading him out of a moment of desperation to a downtown bar where they danced the night away. 

This collection of short non-fiction is pure, unadulterated Midwest. It is also straight from the heart. And that makes it sing.