A Midwestern Memory Book: On Richard Quinney's "Of Time and Place"

Richard Quinney | Of Time and Place: A Family Farm in Wisconsin | Borderland Books | 2019 | 105 Pages 

Richard Quinney’s Of Time and Place: A Family Farm in Wisconsin is very much a midwestern memory book. Quinney, a retired sociologist, returned to his native state, reconnected with his home farm, and devoted careful attention to its physical details. The resulting book is lovely in itself, populated with spare text, sepia shots from his family’s albums, and some of his own photos.

But Of Time and Place may be best understood within the wider context of Quinney’s imprint, Borderland Books, created in 2005. Aside from a dozen of his own photo books, Borderland’s catalog includes literary classics by wrongly forgotten Wisconsin authors like August Derleth and Glenway Westcott, and a grouping of other works based in Wisconsin or with Wisconsin connections. I confess that this includes my own anthology, Comics in Wisconsin. 

Most unusual among today’s publishers of anything but stratospherically priced volumes for collectors, Borderland’s productions have the feeling of old fashion design, including a characteristic hand-sewn binding common generations ago. They are lovely to the touch, designed as if the publisher is delivering a personal message to every reader. Quinney’s message: that regional memories and regional books matter.

In fact, the “local book”—most often detective books, children’s books, and cookbooks—has become commonplace in university press catalogs across the past two decades, and for good reasons. They attract readers who show up at public book events, and also journalist-reviewers and radio hosts interested (or, at least, they seem to be interested) in the texts and the authors’ own connections. This admirable audience effort is not so strongly shown for the scholarly offerings of university presses, including those on state history, political murals of the 1970s-80s, along with other works heavily graphic in nature and often expensive.

Borderland Books has seized a creative niche. Publishing mostly nonfiction, Borderland seeks to compel readers toward a deeper take, a pause and a rumination on the secrets that a specific history may hold for anyone sufficiently interested to dig in. Of Time and Place is a particular entry here. Quinney’s rural origins near Delevan, on a family farm several generations old, offer a close look at the human landscape as a kind of natural landscape itself.

He carries to his work, as he tells us in the prologue, the sense that he was at the end of the line. The photos that he took (on display heavily in his other books) capture what might be his final look at the farmhouse, the barn, the machine shed, and the chicken house. He begins this text properly with a photo of his grandfather’s shadow as he slowly makes his way across the fields a few years before Pearl Harbor, a photo taken not long before his grandfather would die. The “Old House” on the property yielded to a “new house,” the one where the author grew up with his brothers, father, and mother, and where he stayed until leaving for nearby Carroll College.

Quinney’s family was not far, in fact, from Lake Geneva, with its tourist excitements, its grand Chicago families and their mansions. His parents owned automobiles, and his father traveled all the way to California before settling down to the family place. The family photographs and the scrapbook clips carry the reader forward toward the present, including the one-room school where Quinney took his lessons.

Of Time and Place is a fine reminder of how non-insular rural life, at least rural life in easy traveling distance to the outside worlds, can be. The “new house” had the look of a bungalow, an idea set into his father's mind almost certainly by the homes he had seen in California.

Quinney turns, as he has done in his other works, to his childhood sense of cowboy dramas, a constant presence on the radio and the low-cost “B” Hollywood films of the 1930s-40s. Country music on the radio, especially the “Saturday Night Barn Dance” on station WLS in Chicago, reinforced the strange romances of rural life, cowboy or otherwise.

Late in the book, Quinney describes the labor involved with planting and cultivation in his grandfather’s era—just before the heavy use of pesticides changed this work’s nature—and the cooperative use of threshing machines cooperatively by farm neighbors. After the threshing season came the Walworth County Fair, with 4-H competitions, pig sales and real rewards: enough money to go to college, that is, to get off the farm.

The last pages reprise the photographs he has taken for other works, what we might call a last look around the farm. Some acres were transferred to sustainable agriculture, now making enough money to pay the taxes and for necessary repairs. After Quinney’s brother died, the farm passed to other hands, but the surrounding wetlands will, with luck, be preserved in public trust.  

Of Time and Place is truly a midwestern family farm story, shared so tenderly with readers through photography and prose, that leaves readers wondering at the fate of the land and its inhabitants.