Contemporary Authors

• We Could've Been Happy Here - 2017 MG Press, https://smile.amazon.com/We-Couldve-Been-Happy-Here/dp/1944850058/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1516579684&sr=8-1&keywords=Keith+Lesmeister

• Keith Lesmeister - https://keithlesmeister.com/about/

  About
  keith-lesmeister

  Keith Lesmeister is the author of the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here (MG Press 2017). His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, North American Review, Redivider, Slice Magazine, and many others. His nonfiction has appeared in River Teeth, Sycamore Review, The Good Men Project, Tin House Open Bar, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. He received his M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He lives and works in rural northeast Iowa.

  To contact Keith directly, please email him at keithlesmeister@gmail.com.

Lesmeister, Keith: WE COULD'VE BEEN HAPPY HERE
Kirkus Reviews.
(Mar. 15, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Lesmeister, Keith WE COULD'VE BEEN HAPPY HERE MG Press (Adult Fiction) $15.00 5, 16 ISBN: 978-1-944850-05-0
A debut story collection about hard-luck denizens of rural and exurban Iowa.The heartland, as captured in Lesmeister's debut, is a downcast place, replete with meth shacks, mortality, and regret. The narrator of "Burrowing Animals" is a recovering addict who's desperate to prove he's worthy of seeing his children again; in "Lie Here Next to Me," a young woman tries to protect her dying mother from her grandmother's interventions; in "A Real Future," one of the few black residents of a rural county endures a series of headaches and humiliations from everyone from DMV workers to people judging his marriage to a white woman. Lesmeister's vision of Iowa isn't exclusively somber, though. He can bring wit and lightness to these dirty-realist tales, as in "Today You're Calling Me Lou," in which the narrator ferries his foulmouthed, no-nonsense grandmother to a garage sale. ("She laughs and it sounds like motor oil gurgling around her lungs.") He can also craft tender characterizations, as in "Between the Fireflies," in which two fifth-graders are charged with shooting rabbits approaching a neighborhood garden, a task lightly in parallel to the girl's father's deployment in the Middle East. And like any good short story writer, he can deliver an eye-catching opening ("Elbow and I ducked out of our nephew's birthday party and drove to Walmart to check on ammo prices"), though a broader canvas might improve some of these stories, which sometimes close on notes of pat ambiguity. But for a first- timer, Lesmeister has developed an admirably concise style and a knack for capturing people during difficult coming-of-age moments or dispiriting processes of decline. Like the amateur cowherds in the title story, they're recognizing that life is often disorderly, with help hard to come by. A gritty, emotionally sensitive clutch of stories.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Lesmeister, Keith: WE COULD'VE BEEN HAPPY HERE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Mar. 2017.
PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A485105364/GPS?u=schlager&
1 of 2 1/21/18, 6:04 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
sid=GPS&xid=350d3858. Accessed 21 Jan. 2018. Gale Document Number: GALE|A485105364
2 of 2 1/21/18, 6:04 PM

• The Coil
  https://medium.com/the-coil/book-review-keith-lesmeister-we-couldve-been-happy-here-jen-corrigan-1ac7fe5dd2a3
  Word count: 1640

  Jen Corrigan
  Jen Corrigan is a prose writer. She writes book reviews for The Coil.
  May 16, 2017
  On Keith Lesmeister’s ‘We Could’ve Been Happy Here’
  Lesmeister goes deep beneath the Midwestern stereotypes, proves characters don’t have to be likable, and creates balance in his debut stories.

  Keith Lesmeister
  Fiction | Short Stories
  211 pages
  5'’ x 8'’
  Trade Paperback
  Also available in eBook formats
  Review Format: Electronic ARC
  ISBN # 978–1–944850–05–0
  First Edition
  MG Press
  Des Plaines, IL
  Available HERE
  $15.00 print / $4.99 eBook

  When people from other U.S. regions think of the Midwest, particularly Iowa, they think farms, cows, tractors, and wholesome, simple families with fat cheeks and thick, glossy hair. Traveling to different states, I’m often asked by residents where I’m from. They can tell that I’m out of place. When I answer, “Iowa,” they immediately quip, “Iowa! You guys have a lot of corn there.” And I always nod and fake-smile and tell them that, yes, we do have a lot of corn there, how very perceptive of you, good job.

  In his debut short-story collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, Keith Lesmeister explores the less-than-picturesque narratives that simmer beneath the seemingly squeaky-clean veneer of Midwestern life: In three stories, Vincent, a recovering meth addict, tries to come to terms with losing custody of his two children. In “Blood Trail,” Eli goes deer hunting with his father, and the excursion becomes a competition of masculine control. In “Between the Fireflies,” Alice is tasked by her deployed father to protect the family garden by killing rabbits, a chore that becomes an obsessive emotional coping. Each and every story in this collection presents a Midwestern stereotype, expectation, or romanticized image and then interrogates it, shatters it, opens it up so that the reader has to look, really look, at what’s going on underneath the surface.

  “Dusk in Iowa is a slow process, the sun growing distant and weak, casting long shadows over the open countryside, airborne bugs taking flight from their daytime nests — everything feels calm and steady when the day’s demands are tucked away for the evening.”

  (“Between the Fireflies”)

  As each piece explicitly takes place in Iowa (We know this through the mention of the landscape, landmarks, and specific Iowa cities.), I have to believe that the author is not just providing us with quaint images for the sake of lovely prose but is instead directly contrasting reader expectations with the core reality of his stories. In the opening story of the collection, “Nothing Prettier Than This,” Vincent, the aforementioned recovering meth addict, is tasked with farm-sitting for a friend despite being a city guy with absolutely no idea how to take care of a farm. Although the story involves quintessentially Iowan aspects such as its rural setting, a scene at a church, and two runaway dairy cows, Lesmeister infuses these genteel images with more sinister elements. The death of his mother, his loss of parental rights, his unconsummated attraction to his friend Katharine, and his meth addiction percolate beneath the surface, creating a tension that propels the reader forward. Although the number of meth labs and people addicted to the drug is decreasing in Iowa, it’s still a substantial problem. It is a problem that reoccurs over and over again within the collection, which illustrates Lesmeister’s deep understanding of the state. It is evident in the frank authenticity of the authorial voice that Lesmeister is an Iowan and is not a writer from elsewhere attempting to evoke the feeling of the Heartland. By acknowledging both the pleasant, gooey stereotypes alongside the lesser-known political, environmental, and cultural concerns, Lesmeister creates a dynamic, multi-faceted, and often surprising representation of an overlooked region.

  Lesmeister does not construct stagnant images of the Iowa setting but instead uses landscape and location to further illustrate the themes contained within his stories. The natural world as depicted in “Nothing Prettier Than This” is different than the expected flat, golden fields and green pastures that grace each postcard in every Iowa gift shop; instead, the story takes place in northeast Iowa, a region that is characterized by rougher, more varied terrain. Through his depiction of place and setting, Lesmeister shows his reader that this is a different Iowa story, one that is uncertain and slightly frightening. It is a story that cannot be judged based on the surface but must be excavated and examined just like the untamed land beneath Vincent’s feet.

  “This was the Driftless region of northeast Iowa. The land looks alarmingly different than the rest of the state, which isn’t possessed by dramatic hills and valleys. Millions of years ago the glacial drifts settled and leveled most of the Midwest flat as a concrete slab but spared this region and left it full of mysteries.”

  (“Nothing Prettier Than This”)

  It seems important to discuss the character of Vincent, who appears as narrator in three of the stories and is briefly mentioned in at least one more. (It’s possible he is mentioned in many more stories, but I simply missed the references.) However, I found the stories that featured Vincent as protagonist to be some of the least compelling in the collection. Vincent’s privileged status as the only recurring character combined with the first-person narration made the stories feel too close and a bit stifling. The stories read as if they were limited to solely what was going on in his head, his perception taking an unearned precedence over the external narrative. And despite this character having three stories to himself, there was never any progression; Vincent was never any closer to seeing his kids or gaining any sort of footing in his life, which is perhaps an accurate depiction of how addiction feels.

  Instead of Vincent’s stories, I found myself drawn to two pieces that were written in third person and featured protagonists of demographics much different than the rest of the characters in the collection: “Lie Here Next to Me” about a queer female college student whose mother is dying, and “A Real Future” about an elderly black man who becomes a volunteer firefighter in hopes of finally feeling recognized in an otherwise all-white town. The technique of using third person to tell stories that deal directly with Otherness is intriguing, and I’d like to think that this was a conscious move on the author’s part and not just a case of the author inadvertently Othering his own characters. Regardless of intention, the distanced way these two stories are presented echoes the separation the respective protagonists feel between themselves and their communities; it is a technique that is employed subtly yet effectively.

  “As he drove, there were recognizable faces everywhere — acquaintances and shop owners walking and driving through downtown — but no one seemed to pay any mind to his new plates. Or to Gerald for that matter, and maybe, he thought, this was because like most things that become part of your everyday, you don’t notice them.”

  (“A Real Future”)

  In these two stories, the balance between the inside and outside of the protagonist’s head is much more precise; the use of third person forces the story out of the interior and into the physical space of the story. Throughout the collection, Lesmeister leans more toward diegesis than mimesis; this is a valid choice, as his “telling” style works well with his naturally conversational voice. However, part of what made these two stories stand out as the gems of the collection is the sense of urgency and necessity of existence within a physical space outside of the psyche.

  “Above us, a moonless sky. Stars so thick it looked like a smear of vanilla frosting. After we’d worn ourselves out, we sat down and watched as the fireflies continued their nightly conquests.”

  (“Between the Fireflies”)

  I cannot end this review without at least briefly mentioning the most ridiculous (and I use that word in a positive sense) piece in the collection, “East of Ely.” It is a story about a baby-boomer couple with a bizarre sense of entitlement who plan and execute the most outrageous gesture of a midlife crisis: they rob a bank. And what’s most interesting about this story, as well as in several others in the collection (“Today You’re Calling Me Lou,” “Company and Companionship”), is that the characters are wholly unlikable: the wife has been an unapologetic kleptomaniac her entire life and her husband, ineffective and enabling, agrees to help her in her quest to rob a bank located just outside of the teeny, tiny town of Ely. What makes the situation even more delightfully deplorable is that the couple bungles the whole deal, traumatizing the hostages, and the reader catches herself desperately wishing that the perpetrators get caught. Lesmeister proves the old adage true: characters don’t need to be likable to be interesting.

  Readers who seek a collection with a strong connection to place and setting would do well to pick up We Could’ve Been Happy Here. Lesmeister’s stories are all about balance between character and situation, with the Heartland environment reflecting the themes of each narrative seamlessly. With its sense of balance paired with its conversational voice, We Could’ve Been Happy Here proves an even and accessible debut collection.

  Short StoriesThe VoltReviewsMidwestIowa

  One clap, two clap, three clap, forty?

  By clapping more or less, you can signal to us which stories really stand out.

• Heavy Feather Review
  https://heavyfeatherreview.com/2017/09/28/happy/
  Word count: 1837

  WE COULD’VE BEEN HAPPY HERE, debut story collection by Keith Lesmeister, reviewed by Ray Barker
  Heavy FeatherSeptember 28, 2017book reviews, fiction
  Post navigation
  Previous
  Next

  We Could’ve Been Happy Here, by Keith Lesmeister. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Midwestern Gothic Press, May 2017. $15.00, paper.

  The characters in Keith Lesmeister’s debut short story collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, are populated with men stuck in the painful middle-distance of life, haunting the rural and lonely locales of the Midwest, the Iowa small towns serving as a microcosm of their weary worldview.

  The parameters of the physical geography are clear: fading horizons at sunset, wide-open skies, Indian summers, distant farms, pastures, and backroads on the margins. The emotional landscape is equally defined through these twelve stories, all dealing in various forms with the human heart: detailing heartache and heartbreak, in heart-wrenching pieces shared to elicit empathy, simply.

  And the subtle sentiment of the collection title (read it again) neatly encapsulates Lesmeister’s grand statement: a spoken expression of near-anguish, mourning the loss of an ideal never realized. His characters gain just enough clarity and insight to glimpse what they’ve lost, or could have had. Since few physical descriptions are given of the storytellers (so consistent is the language, style, tone, and setting, they could all nearly be told by the same person), we learn to know each character more intimately through what they’ve lost, and what they’re trying to reclaim.

  The collection is bookended by two parts of the same story: in the opening “Nothing Prettier Than This,” Vincent, the affable narrator, has been tasked by an acquaintance, Lyle, to watch over his farm. The piece deftly depicts two story lines against one another: Vincent’s desperate search to find two lost dairy cows under his watch, paired with the surprising news that Katharine, married to another man, is pregnant with their child. In both scenarios, Vincent is incapable of grasping the seriousness of each issue, and is equally unprepared to find a resolution for either. His good luck piece, the buckeye he rubs in his hand, never reveals the answers he needs—a childlike fumbling in an adult’s world.

  And in the companion piece that ends the collection, “We Could’ve Been Happy Here,” Vincent again is trying to corral escaped cows back to their pen. He strikes up an immediate and close friendship with a nearby farmer’s daughter, their innocent banter and imaginary games serving as a salve to the pain he ignores, suffering through withdrawal and the separation of his own kids—the same narrator again overwhelmed by circumstances partly of his own making.

  The more humorous, “Today You’re Calling Me Lou,” reads so authentically it could be autobiography. It begins casually:

  When I get to my grandmother’s assisted housing complex in downtown Cedar Rapids, she’s outside waiting for me in a lawn chair—the kind with webbing and rivets. She’s smoking a cigarette.

  “I thought you quit,” I say.

  “It’s my birthday,” she says. She laughs and it sounds like motor oil gurgling around her lungs.

  The frank, foul-mouthed grandma (who, by the way, wants to be called by her birth name, Lou, short for Louella) and he embark on a wayward journey to head towards a late afternoon garage sale in a worn out, burgundy-colored Buick Century, a gift from grandma given long ago. The narrator, on break from the local community college and a week off before starting on a landscape crew, is game, if only because he’d feel guilty about it if he didn’t see her at least once in awhile.

  What transpires is a random road trip, where all bets are off: She insists he purchase a bottle of vodka, and a pack of Kools. “Quitting was the worst mistake of my life,” Lou cracks, “next to having kids.”

  After a few more drinks and cigarettes, and a confrontation at the garage sale to claim a treasured kayak, they head to a nearby reservoir. Drunk and carefree, Lou seeks a bigger thrill, tragically, yet somehow inevitably, disappearing into the distance, riding the water in her coveted kayak, the landscape literally consuming his loved-one to end the story without further explanation, a soft, diminished note:

  Once again, I’m sitting on the beach, waiting. I rub my eyes and squint toward the darkness. Over and over, waves break on the shore. In the distance, I can hear something—maybe the slap of a paddle. I stare, hoping my eyes will adjust, but they don’t. And whatever I’ve heard eventually fades, moving out and away on the water.

  “Imaginary Enemies” is a little less successful. The two main characters embark on a different journey—a light jaunt to the nearby Walmart to check out “ammo prices.” Elbow—just returned home from time in the Marine Corps—and another unnamed narrator, skip out on his nephew’s birthday party. They return with a toy Uzi and pistol, much to the chagrin of others at the party, to enact play-fighting that’s perhaps too real. It plays out like a brief narrative exercise—at just a page-and-a-half—to show the effects of violence on young men in the military, and how it impacts their lives upon return to the U.S. Perhaps.

  In one of the more sly pieces, a husband and wife (yet another team) become an improvised Bonnie and Clyde, looking to spice up their bored and sedate lives in “East of Ely.” Their desire to escape their routines is repeated in most of the stories in the collection—those seeking to create structure in their lives, and those looking to break them. The husband begins explaining what lead to their escapade:

  We stopped caring about how we actually felt toward one another a long time ago because our feelings fluctuated like spring temperatures in the Midwest. Instead, we devoted ourselves to each other in the old-fashioned way of loyalty and partnership. It wasn’t a sexy, Hollywood endeavor—our marriage—but that was all about to change.

  After the robbery, they hide at an abandoned farmhouse outside of town. A slow dance followed by “reckless and desperate” sex, they’re united again as if for the first time, finding the shared intimacy and danger their normal lives were lacking: “… in the wee hours of the night, we lay in bed, sipping wine, whisper-talking about our dreams, how some of them had come true, while others had not.”

  In one of the strongest pieces, “Between the Fireflies,” an innocent, coming-of-age story begins in June 2003, detailing the bond only isolated children can share, where long summers weave their own kind of pain and sadness. Alice, the fifth-grade neighbor and classmate of the nameless narrator are assigned by her father to kill rabbits invading their property, as they have actively ravaged their cherished garden. Alice takes to it with tomboyish fervor, though thoughtfully allowing space for the main character’s hesitations and fears over taking another creature’s life. The first kills are difficult:

  Alice nudged it with the barrel of her pellet gun. Limp and still and lifeless.

  “Internal damage,” Alice said. “You must’ve hit it in the vitals. It takes a moment for that to kick in.”

  My head dropped. Alice placed her hand on my shoulder again. “It’s okay to feel bad,” she said. “You should feel bad. It means you’re human.”

  But there are passages in this story, and others throughout the collection, where the first-person narrator gets caught up in their own romantic nostalgia, like in this cliched observation: “It was a time in our lives when our commitment to authority—in this case her father—outweighed how we ourselves felt about the task at hand,” or earlier, a child-like attempt at poetically describing the night sky: “Above us, a moonless sky. Stars so thick it looked like a smear of vanilla frosting.” A description that’s so sweet it’s hard to swallow.

  Ignoring the sometimes awkward phrase, the parallel stories profoundly—if perhaps too obviously—relate to one another: the children’s obsessive hunt for and killing of rabbits, a blood-thirst that disturbingly grows beyond their neighborhood boundaries. This repeated activity—preferred over actually having to share their burgeoning emotions—culminates in a slightly grotesque and not insignificant graveyard. Their shared experience is contrasted with Alice’s father’s experiences (ultimately left to the reader’s imagination) while stationed far away in the Persian Gulf War, and his return as a changed man, having lost a “bounce in his step.” The story’s end arrives without much more of a weightier observation than “… there had been far more casualties in the past year than either of us wanted to admit.” That resigned insight attempts to impart more significance than it actually carries.

  But this story is so sensitively told and gracefully rendered, it feels as if Lesmeister somehow couldn’t arrive at a “real” ending. Despite the story’s imperfections, it’s to be commended for its honest intentions.

  In each individual story, and in even the lesser ones, Lesmeister’s exerts expert control over his proceedings, never needing to stray too far from the well-worn roads he knows—in both a literary and literal sense (Lesmeister was raised, and currently teaches in Iowa). The collection is the product of a young writer, and the stories are perfectly matched to young readers. In the end, these characters—familiar outsiders one and all—often stand on the outside of their own lives looking in, scratching their heads in confusion, and wonderment. Their hearts guiding them where their heads fail them.

  We Could’ve Been Happy Here is a quiet success—Lesmeister subtly and repeatedly reminding us that even the plain, and plain-spoken, deserve our praise.

  Buy We Could’ve Been Happy Here at Amazon

  Buy We Could’ve Been Happy Here at Powell’s Books

  Buy We Could’ve Been Happy Here at MG Press

  ***

  Ray Barker is an Archivist in the Special Collections department at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, the central library in Washington, DC. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Music & Literature, The Collagist, Full Stop, The Los Angeles Review, Gulf Coast, 3:AM Magazine, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Rain Taxi, The Colorado Review, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Washington, DC.

  What’s HFR up to? Read our current issue, submit, or write for Heavy Feather.
  Keith Lesmeister, MG Press, Midwestern Gothic Press, Ray Barker, We Could've Been Happy Here

• Sabatoge Reviews
  http://sabotagereviews.com/2017/05/17/we-couldve-been-happy-here-by-keith-lesmeister/
  Word count: 674

  We Could’ve Been Happy Here by Keith Lesmeister
  May 17, 2017

  -By Terry Melia-

  We Could’ve Been Happy Here is a collection of twelve bittersweet stories, all set in contemporary Midwest USA. This is a debut from Iowa-based teacher Keith Lesmeister whose gift lies in striking a fine balance between the tender and the tragic.

  Lesmeister writes with a lean concise style dealing with complex adult and coming of age issues that capture the characters in moments of decline. These are deceptively quiet stories that display a talent for wit and lightness sprinkled alongside a heap of angst.

  The main characters are all somewhat flawed. The opening, ‘Nothing Prettier Than This’ and the finale, ‘We Could’ve Been Happy Here’, feature a failed father who is in conflict with nature and himself. With little experience of ranching, he fails in his task of managing a herd of cows which wander off course and out of his control. His attempt at bringing them back seems as unlikely as his chances of rescuing his failed marriage. Along the way, he takes comfort in the companionship of a young married woman who is dealing with her own chequered past.

  Throughout the collection, we meet several men who have lost custody of their children, with a common theme of past failures undermining a path towards a brighter future. In ‘Burrowing Animals’ the main character is living rough out of his car. Tired, out of work and hungry, he turns to his parents as a last resort for help. Speaking to his dad on the phone, he tells him: “Things are getting kind of rough.” His dad responds none too kindly;

  “Rough… Jesus Christ. I slept in a jungle in Nam, gooks hiding out in trees waiting to blow your fucking head off. What you got? Couple aches and pains?”

  In my favourite, ‘Today You’re Calling Me Lou’, a drunken grandmother makes her grandson barter, seemingly on a whim, for a kayak at a car boot sale.

  ‘It’ll probably cost a fortune.’
  ‘We’ll Jew’em down,’ she says.
  ‘Lou,’ I say. ‘You can’t say shit like that anymore.’

  In ‘East of Ely’, a man and wife decide to rob a bank in order to put some spark back into their marriage;

  What wasn’t a thing any married couple might do was rob a bank. But that’s exactly what we did. On June 12th, the day of our twenty-fifth anniversary, we walked into the Ely Credit Union wearing masks, holding canvas bags, and clutching plastic pistols that we purchased at the Dollar Tree, and we used them to paralyze the bank staff while a teller–previously designated by my wife–unlocked the tills of money.

  ‘Lie Here Next To Me’ is perhaps the most bitter of the stories. A young woman, Sally, leaves school and sets aside any personal life of her own in order to take full time care of her dying mother. Inwardly, Sally gets off the toilet pondering the futility of leaving the seat up or down. Outwardly, she’s been wearing the same set of clothes for the last four days;

  She thought, what’s the point? It was only her and her bedridden mother who, with Sally’s assistance, got up once a day to pee.

  Teasingly Lesmeister doesn’t tell us how the stories end, leaving us with an essence of the characters strange and dark souls whose journey will take them to whatever destiny has in store. I’d like to read a companion collection, with the same characters maybe five years from where they are now.

  I found all of them a mixture of brutal and a laugh out loud. Delving each chapter and new character was as comfortable as an old pair of slippers. This is an author to watch out for.

• Atticus Review
  https://atticusreview.org/life-rattling-review-couldve-happy-keith-lesmeister/
  Word count: 978

  Life Rattling: A Review of We Could’ve Been Happy Here, by Keith Lesmeister
  0
  By Barrett Warner on July 10, 2017 Book Reviews

  We Could’ve Been Happy Here
  By Keith Lesmeister
  Midwest Gothic Press, 2016
  194 pages, $15
  Reviewed by Barrett Warner

  The tree of knowledge is a well-camouflaged shrub in Keith Lesmeister’s story collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here. The various characters are inexpert in their doings—a farm sitter has no livestock experience, an older couple amateurishly robs a bank to spice up the marriage, a drunk grandson chauffeurs his tipsy grandma to buy a garage-sale kayak. Each spells “awareness” in lower case. There is very little shame, although there’s plenty of old school regret and longing we’ve come to associate with a loss of innocence and Iowa

  The stories all take place in and around Cedar Rapids. Place is important to these people, but Lesmeister is wise not to obsess over it, saying only, “Millions of years ago the glacial drifts settled and leveled most of the Midwest flat as a concrete slab but spared this region and left it full of mysteries.” And halfway through this collection I was still feeling surprised at the mention of Cedar Rapids, one of those small towns where folk remember to invite exes to children’s birthday parties.

  People and places aside, Lesmeister can spin a tale, “I’d been farm-sitting out at Lyle’s for less than a day. This was late October, an Indian summer worth remembering.” Lesmeister is a master of the expanding universe, here moving from day to month to season. He opens up the blossom until the flower engulfs us. Occasionally, this writer has to break from his trance and make an assertion to move the story forward and he does so simply and efficiently: “And a person who sits and listens to you—I mean really listens—is there anything in this world more valuable?”

  It’s that listening quality which lets Lesmeister write from so many disparate voices and genders. Maybe we’ve all felt someone rest her head against ours and then brought our arm around her and pulled her closer. But only he would add: “She smelled like someone who’d been walking into the wind, with a hint of lavender.”

  We Could’ve Been Happy Here doesn’t shove the whole story at the reader. “Today You’re Calling Me Lou,” only has nine lines of back story buried in the first six pages. Lesmeister is not too interested and he figures we’re not either. Both the grandson and the grandma desperately want to feel authentic, and they must conjure this from an inauthentic past. There are no simple explanations for any of us and all trauma aside, there are loose cows to catch and the law to outrun and a big basketball game to win.

  Although he firmly roots life matters in front of “issues,” Lesmeister uses images in series to suggest infinity—“I flick my cigarette out the window and start driving. A gust of wind kicks up dirt. A plastic grocery bag kites by”—giving his prose an elastic quality. There’s a wonderful endlessness in these stories. Each story doesn’t begin so much as take up where an untold story left off. Literary tricks are secondary gifts to a writer whose primary concern is empathy and predicament and the bigness of a small town.

  Lesmeister is at his best when he identifies what a character cannot live without. Maybe a dad. Or a twin brother who is growing apart. Or a mother. And then he takes it away from that character and says, now what? And quite evidently falls in love with them. No wonder that some of these stories seem to tell several stories at once, like a flash novella, and I imagine Lesmeister doesn’t end a story so much as break up with it.

  In “Between the Fireflies,” the despondent young girl and her neighbor have just killed 100 rabbits, and she sings a song she learned from her mother:

  Life is beautiful like the darkness between the fireflies.
  “I like that,” I said. I set my arm around her in a friendly way.
  “But that’s not exactly how it goes,” she said.
  “I like your version,” I said.
  And she continued singing the wrong words to a beautiful song.

  I think just about everyone would have ended the story on that line, but Lesmeister goes much further. As charming is that moment, these stories are full of haunt. He roughly tests our comfort in “Burrowing Animals,” a story about a Vietnam vet with a hole in his back yard. The hole frightens him. It brings back memories. His son is homeless and needs a place to live, coming home in exchange for trapping and killing what creature made the hole. The son’s estranged children come to spend the weekend with their grandparents but the son is not permitted contact and so must sleep in a camper. Of course he catches the badger. Of course he bludgeons it to death with a shovel in a dozen sickening blows. And of course he wants to call his ex-wife after the struggle: “I wanted to invite her over. Come see me, darling, I’d say. Come see what I’m capable of.”

  Barrett Warner book review Keith Lesmeister Midwest Gothic Press Short Story Collections
  Barrett Warner

  Barrett Warner is the author of Why Is It So Hard to Kill You? and My Friend Ken Harvey. In May, he made his stage debut as the alcoholic burglar Selsdon Mowbray in Noises Off.

• Two Dollar Radio
  https://twodollarradio.com/blogs/radiowaves/the-wire-we-couldve-been-happy-here
  Word count: 224

  The Wire | 'We Could've Been Happy Here'

  We Could've Been Happy Here | Radio Waves

  An excerpt from Keith Lesmeister's story collection, We Could've Been Happy Here (Midwestern Gothic):

  When he got to the camper, twenty feet from the wood-pile, he turned around. My dad was medium-sized with no special characteristics. He wore jeans and his arms hung at his sides. At that moment he seemed distant, like was recalling some memory. Then he took off his baseball cap and rubbed his bald spot. "Here's the deal," he said. "You knew I was the smallest man on our crew in Nam?"

  "Yeah, you told me."

  "But I was also fearless and agile so they designated me as Tunnel Rat." He was talking to the ground. "Veit Cong had elaborate tunnels and underground hideouts, and I'd crawl into those burrows where there were poisonous spiders and ants, booby traps, scorpions. Sometimes humans." He set his hands on his head. A truck rumbled by, interrupting his thoughts. "Anyway," he said, looking back at me, "it's not a woodchuck—they're messy and careless." He put his ball cap back on. "Just trap the damn animal, and cover the hole."
  Posted by Brett Gregory on 06 June, 2017 Keith Lesmeister, The Wire, We Could've Been Happy Here | 0 comments

• Fiction Writers Review
  http://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/the-edges-of-town-an-interview-with-keith-lesmeister/
  Word count: 2411

  The Edges of Town: An Interview with Keith Lesmeister

  "Whenever I have 20–30 minutes free, I'm writing": Keith Lesmeister chats with Barrett Bowlin about his debut collection, We Could've Been Happy Here, out this month from Midwestern Gothic Press.

  by Barrett Bowlin

  If you’ve been reading any number of literary magazines the past five years, you’ve no doubt come across some stunning work by Keith Lesmeister. Starting with his first publication in 2012—the short story “Loony Bin,” published in Midwestern Gothic—Lesmeister has been exceptionally busy writing, publishing, and becoming an author whose impressive body of work creeps up on you like an early autumn frost. Since that first story five years ago, Lesmeister has published more than 30 other works of short fiction, in esteemed journals like American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, Meridian, Slice, Redivider, and the North American Review, among many, many others. But he’s been busy with so much more.

  Along with his dedication to the art of short fiction, Lesmeister has focused on building a wonderfully revealing set of essays and short memoir pieces in places like River Teeth, Sycamore Review, and the Tin House Open Bar, and he’s explored the impact of emerging authors’ stories in Life as a Shorty, a literary blog that touches on the craft and technique behind the works, and which frequently showcases interviews with the authors themselves. Combine this with the fact that he teaches full time at Northeast Iowa Community College, and it’s any wonder that Lesmeister’s found time to rev up a book tour through middle America.

  This May, the editors who first published Lesmeister’s short fiction are also releasing his outstanding debut story collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here. The group’s book imprint, Midwestern Gothic Press (which, like the original journal, was founded by Michigan-based James Pfaller and Robert James Russell), showcases “the very best in Midwestern writing” by writers either living in the region or whose work has been inspired by their time there, and the release of Lesmeister’s story collection is a perfect example of just how important the publishing group’s work is.

  A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to catch up with Keith at the annual AWP conference in Washington, D.C., and again in the middle of his book tour in April. We chatted on the phone and online after our children had gone to sleep for the night, pausing only to check up on the occasional sound in the nighttime.
  Interview:

  Barrett Bowlin: You’ve been absolutely prolific since 2012, man. How in the world do you find time to write? For that matter, what’s your writing schedule like?

  Keith Lesmeister: It’s no coincidence that 2012 was also the year I started my grad school program. Let me also say this: I wasn’t teaching in 2012. I was working an administrative (8 a.m.­–5 p.m.) role at the college, and that allowed me a lot of time both in the mornings and evenings to write. From 2012–2014, the years I was in grad school, I wrote everyday for at least an hour. And—to be honest, I think this was the best part—I was also reading everyday for at least an hour. The two informed each other in ways that I wasn’t expecting. Sheer output being one of them. On top of all that, I had monthly deadlines. Talk about a motivator. Now, with teaching, hell, I feel like I’m working all the time, and the writing is starting to take a backseat role. So to your question: when do I write? Whenever I have 20–30 minutes free, I’m writing.

  That is some solid discipline, no joke. For your grad school program at Bennington, you mentioned the monthly deadlines. What were the big tools you picked up from the program there? (And I’m talking in terms of reading, writing, discipline, structure, etc., or anything else that stands out.)

  When I first started at Bennington, I really felt brand new to writing. And one of the reasons I chose the program—in addition to their excellent faculty and beautiful location—was their emphasis on reading. There were major gaps in my reading, and I wanted that to be a focus. In terms of tools I picked up while attending, like I said, I felt pretty new to writing upon entering grad school, so everything I learned felt so hyper-important, and it was. I learned how to write scenes (get in, get out), dialogue, and where/how to start a story, and the list goes on and on. I had excellent faculty mentors—David Gates, Bret Anthony Johnston, Amy Hempel, and Wesley Brown—and each challenged and pushed me in ways that really helped my writing, and gave me reading suggestions to help inform my work. But I think the reading was what really helped my writing, at least in the longer term.

  Before the MFA, I attended the Iowa Summer Writing Festival where I worked with a great writer and just an all-around great guy, Andrew Porter. He was one of my earliest encouragers. In fact, he was the one who told me about low-res MFA programs. I didn’t want to up and quit my job and move, especially with kids and a full-time job, so the low-res option was perfect. During the actual MFA, I learned so much from each teacher. It’s tough to tease out one or two things, but let me try: David Gates taught me how to edit my own work, and Bret Anthony Johnston and Amy Hempel taught me how to find the “heart” of the story, which has to do with finding a character’s true desire and motivation.

  Along those lines—and this gets us into the story collection, as well—I have to say that there’s such a strong, clear voice in each of the stories in We Could’ve Been Happy Here. It’s a confident voice, not afraid of spending time in a character’s head and letting them build up problems and figuring their way out or through. So I’m curious: who were some of the authors you had to read in order to develop that voice?

  There are so many. When I was writing this collection, and even before writing it, I was enamored with several authors: Lorrie Moore, Ron Rash, Chris Offutt, Brad Watson, Mary Miller, Elizabeth McCracken, Denis Johnson, Charles D’Ambrosio, and the list goes on. Each has their own distinct style, certainly, and they also have a beautiful mix of poignancy and levity, at times. I love that, and each, in their own way, along with dozens of writers not mentioned here, have influenced my work greatly, not to mention the work of my former teachers.

  Were there any Midwest-specific authors who helped you figure out how to write these stories that focus on the “rural”? (And I say that last part in quotes because I don’t want to pen your entire body of work into that adjective.)

  I appreciate that word in quotes, and yet it’s true: most of my stories are set in the rural Midwest or on the edges of town. Denis Johnson’s collection [Jesus’ Son] takes place in and around Iowa City, for obvious reasons. He spent a good deal of time there. The others write extensively about rural locales. Take Ron Rash, for example, or Chris Offutt. I guess there weren’t any Midwest-specific folks I was reading at the time, but since writing the collection, I’ve been reading and rereading Jane Smiley. A lot of her work is set in rural Iowa, and the way she slowly and timely reveals character is so perfect up against the slow-paced life of an Iowan countryside. There’s a kind of patience that she demands of her reader, in the same way there’s a kind of patience in watching the landscape change through seasons, or the patience one might need while driving from one small town to the next while getting stuck behind a combine that’s moving from one field to the next.

  Let’s get into some details and talk about Midwestern Gothic. How did you come across the journal? And aside from the regional overlap, what made their adjoining book publishing imprint, Midwestern Gothic Press, a good fit for your collection?

  They published my very first story, and it does feel appropriate that they are also publishing my first collection. I really don’t remember how I found them, but I do remember thinking how great of a fit they would be for my work, and sure enough. In terms of my collection, MG Press publishes Midwest authors who write specifically about the Midwest. Their guidelines for MG Press are a bit more stringent than the journal, which publishes anyone with any connection, however loose, to the region. But my collection fits on all fronts. Plus, Jeff and Rob and the team at MG Press are just super fantastic to work with, and their laid-back style of enthusiasm was something I was drawn to right away.
  In all of these stories, I’m trying to write what I don’t know.

  Digging into We Could’ve Been Happy Here, there are, of course, lots of threads that tie the stories in the collection together. But what would you say is the overarching connective tissue in the works?

  I really didn’t have a clue what the overarching connective tissue might be outside of what we’ve already discussed, which is the setting, Iowa. But after putting the stories together and sitting with them a while, I think there are lots of things connecting the stories, not least is the motivation for writing each story, which all have some element of twisting the commonly understood writing advice: write what you know. In all of these stories, I’m trying to write what I don’t know. For instance, in the first story, a man is farm-sitting for a friend. He’s chasing down two rogue dairy cows while contemplating ways of getting his estranged family back; or, there’s the second story about a young guy who carts around his suicidal grandmother while getting drunk on screwdrivers. Part of the joy in writing these stories was allowing the characters to take over and make decisions that were wholly their own. That’s one of the wonderful things about writing what you don’t know. There seems to be more room for that element of surprise and discovery, which is like striking gold for a fiction writer.

  I guess what I meant to ask is: what was the connectivity you saw in these particular stories that made you choose to put them together into a collection? Take your story “Ice Silo,” for example. It was written during the same time period, it focuses on an Iowa scene in winter, but you made the decision not to include it in the collection. Out of all the stories you’ve written and published, what made these twelve stand out to you? What connected them in particular?

  So I always knew the two Vincent stories [“Nothing Prettier Than This” and the title story] would work as bookends. Outside of that, I thought about the stories synchronizing tonally. Which is to say, I wasn’t thinking of subject matter or themes as much as I was thinking of the sound quality of each—upbeat, somber, humorous, longing, etc. Another example: I always knew “Today You’re Calling Me Lou” would be one of the first stories because it’s fast-paced, feisty, and gets things moving (or at least I hope that’s the case).

  And on a side note, I would like to include some of the others stories in another collection, perhaps down the road at some point.

  Keith Lesmeister

  The stories in WCBHH go far back as Winter 2014 (“Today You’re Calling Me Lou”) to, most recently, this past winter of 2017 (“Lie Here Next to Me”). Over this stretch of three years, what would you say have been your obsessions? What’s been holding your attention, and what of that would you say has been showing up in your work?

  I’m not sure how to articulate this, other than to say raw, naked vulnerability. I want to see people—characters—in their most vulnerable states and how they deal with others and themselves in that stripped down state.

  So in terms of plotting out a story line, would you say you like to throw characters into situations and see how they respond, or do you normally have your endings and resolutions in mind beforehand?

  Definitely the former. I always start with situations—complicated, messy, unwieldy—and wait for my character(s) to say or do something. Once that happens—that action or piece of dialogue—we’re off to the races. Endings are difficult, but they usually reveal themselves at just the right moment, which comes after hours of spending time with that character.

  I like that sense of connection. Okay, one last question: now that the collection is coming out, what’s your next project? How do you want it to differ from the stories in WCBHH?

  I love reading and writing short stories, and that is still what I’m doing—what I’m working on—and what I’ll continue to work on for the time being. In terms of differing from WCBHH? I don’t think I’m far enough along to answer that question.

  Barrett Bowlin, keith lesmeister, Midwestern Fiction, midwestern gothic, Midwestern Gothic Press, short story month, we could've been happy here

  Contributor
  Barrett Bowlin

  Barrett Bowlin teaches literature and film classes at Binghamton University. Recent stories and essays of his have appeared in places like Ninth Letter, Hobart, Mid-American Review, The Rumpus, and Bayou, which awarded him the 2015 James Knudsen Prize in Fiction. He lives in upstate New York and writes inappropriate things on Twitter (@barrettbowlin).

• The Tack
  https://bvtack.com/29499/archives/iowa-author-educates-with-new-book-we-couldve-been-happy-here/
  Word count: 1807

  Iowa Author Educates with New Book: “We Could’ve Been Happy Here”

  Sarah Nicholson, Staff Writer
  October 13, 2017
  Filed under Arts & Life, The Archives

  Being a writer is maddening at first. You look for advice, tips, tricks, or anything that will truly grant you access to your own creative brilliance. That is, if you believe you have creative brilliance. Writers constantly seek community. It comes as little surprise that when an author comes to campus, the inspired writers flock to hear anything that might grant them a peek into the profession they aspire to go into.

  Keith Lesmeister was one such author. Lesmeister spent two days in Storm Lake exploring the campus and doing a reading of his new collection of short stories, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, for an ACES event, as well as speaking to Gwen Hart’s Advanced Composition class about the publishing world.

  To say the reading was informal would be an understatement, but that was part of the charm. He started as all nervous presenters begin with stories and jokes, but eventually he seemed at ease among the students. As a teacher himself, the classroom was not a foreign field of on lookers, and contained interested minds searching for entertainment. He seemed happy to oblige.

  Lesmeister started by talking about his drive, demonstrating in his description how he can take a simple observation at a Sinclair’s station and turn it into something interesting. Then he spoke a little about his Iowa upbringing. Born and raised in Cedar Rapids Iowa, he demonstrated through his words how his family inspired his first ideas about writing.

  The packed ACES lecture hall listened with rapt attention. He read the title narrative of his short story collection, which follows the story of an addict detoxing while he’s farm sitting in the middle of nowhere. The story, like many in his book, painted pictures of rural life, family life, warts and all.

  After the reading, hands went up and people asked questions such as, “Are the stories based on people’s lives?” The short answer is no. Though with all writers, there are bits and pieces that are inspired by his life. They ask him what the most difficult things are about being a writer. “Pretty much everything,” he answers.

  He talks about the dedication it takes to write, how going out with friends and sleeping in until 8 would be great, but instead he gets up at 5:30 because it’s become his routine. They ask him why he writes about the Midwest, and he responds, “I really think it’s a wonderful, wonderful place with its own sort of rich stories and mythologies.”

  They ask him about the critics and the worst criticism he’s ever gotten, and his answer is philosophical. “What I’ve discovered is I almost like the harsher reviews more than the ones that are gushy, flowery. I’m serious. I say that because when somebody offers you a critique of the book, that means they really have taken time to sit with it and think about it. Which means they’ve highly invested in the book. That’s a pretty cool thing…I really think that criticism has its own kind of flattery.” He says they have to be resilient, if they want to write.

  Lesmeister didn’t start out dreaming of being a writer. He didn’t even consider it as a possibility, that people didn’t grow up to be writers. When he went to college, he was focused on sports and football. Teaching and writing weren’t initially on his radar, but he started thinking about writing because he wanted to document family history. He wanted to make a record of the things that happened at family reunions, stories about the wild things that would happen.

  That eventually morphed into an interest in writing a memoir. However, he wasn’t sure that he was ready to share those stories with the world. Regardless, he kept writing, but started working on fiction. After taking a fiction writing class, he developed a taste for short stories. Lesmeister credits a short story called White Angel by Michael Cunningham, among others, with really inspiring him to write short stories.

  When he sits down with the Advanced Composition class, the writing questions are pulled to the forefront. Some in the room want to know about publishing, others want to know about development of stories. He explains the purpose of some of his characters, how some of them were there, in his mind, from the beginning and how others just came as an afterthought.

  He goes into detail about how he takes things that happen in his life, little snippets of a day, and builds a scene out of it in his head. He pushes it, expands upon it, changes places, names, countries and makes up events preceding it and following it. All to create compelling fiction.

  One of the students asks about publishing. He tells them about his process, what publishing We Could’ve Been Happy Here was like. He tells them that if they are interested in getting their work out there, they could try looking in the back of The Best American Short Stories Anthology, look at the reviews and journals who submit to it and perhaps try to send in to those publications.

  “Send to places that you think it (your writing) will be a good fit,” he explains.

  Lesmeister describes publishing as the most mysterious and arbitrary things. He says he didn’t understand it when he was younger, and he still doesn’t understand it, even now.

  After the class, Lesmeister agreed to speak with me. We walk down the hall to a lounge outside Professor Hart’s office. Two days of talking, tours, interviews, and readings, and he was still energetic and willing to have a conversation. He describes that he hadn’t really considered writing when he was young, and I inquired if teaching had always been part of the plan.

  “I didn’t really know what I wanted, I especially didn’t know that writing was an option to me until I was in my upper twenties and into my early thirties really. I didn’t realize that this would be an option, as a lifestyle, both the writing and the teaching. You don’t grow up thinking about this as an occupation… you think about teaching certainly, but not necessarily about making a career, or a life, as a writer. That idea when it came to me felt very fresh and new, and interesting. I thought this is exactly what I’m looking for.”

  I also asked of him why he chose short stories as his medium of choice.

  “Really it’s because it’s what I love to read. It’s what I love to write. I really never read a short story until I was in my upper twenties and once I read the White Angel story, that kind of got me started. Once I read that I thought, this! I want to try and do something like this. It was just such a beautiful rendering of this relationship between two brothers. The sentences and the language was just perfect. It really had an emotional effect on me. You know, I was moved, really emotionally moved by the story and it, more so than anything else I’ve ever read… If I could attempt to do something even half this good I would be very satisfied with myself.”

  Next, we talked about the process. All writers have a process and everyone enjoys something different about it, so I asked Lesmeister what his favorite part was.

  “When I first started as a writer I really loved the adrenaline rush of getting a first draft on the page. That first draft, there’s something really magical about it. But now as I’ve developed as a short story writer, what I’m mostly interested in is the revision process. It sounds very tedious, but there’s something that I really love about rereading a story and finding (places) to tweak the sentences, places that I need to add description or dialogue.”

  How somebody writes can vary as much as what we each find appealing about writing. Some lay out the bones and built on draft after draft. Others dump out everything onto the page and trim down as they go. Lesmeister fell somewhere in between, dumping out his subject and then building upon it until the entire draft is finished.

  Lesmeister sometimes goes through dozens, and on one story, fifty or more of these drafts were revised until he is finished.

  Earlier, he told the composition class to “Focus on creating the best work possible, because I think good work will always rise. I really do. If you focus on making the work as good as it can be you’re going to find a home for it somewhere.”

  “You used the word journey to describe that and I think that’s exactly what it is. Think of it as a long journey, don’t think of it as something that you’re going to start and come back to, but think of it as something that you’re on constantly. Also, just let me veer into some very practical advice. Try to write every day. Read what you want to write. If you want to write poetry, you should be reading poetry. If you want to write novels, you should be reading novels. If you want to write short stories, you should be reading a lot of short stories. When you’re first starting out, I think it’s important to try and emulate someone you really like. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. That’s how I started out, sort of trying to write stories like my favorite authors. Outside of that, persistence, doggedness, self-discipline and really sticking with it. It’s not going to be easy. There are going to be a zillion other things you’d rather do with your time like watching Game of Thrones, playing basketball with your friends, watching movies or going out; but your job as a writer is to say no to those things, so you can get the work done.”

  Lesmeister is currently working on more short stories. His book, We Could’ve Been Happy Here can be found wherever books are sold.

  Tags: a&l, aces, arts & life, book, Midwest, writer

• Cutbank
  http://www.cutbankonline.org/cutbank-blog/2017/9/cutbank-interviews-keith-lesmeister
  Word count: 1873

  CUTBANK INTERVIEWS: Keith Lesmeister
  September 6, 2017
  Keith Lesmeister

  Keith Lesmeister

  Keith Lesmeister’s first collection of short fiction, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, examines the contemporary Midwest in 12 stories that each stand very much alone but also feel very cohesive and connected. Lesmeister lives and works in rural northeast Iowa. His fiction and nonfiction have been widely published, and We Could’ve Been Happy Here has received praise from writers such as Benjamin Percy and David Gates. Bret Anthony Johnston said, “These are brutal stories—brutally good, brutally urgent, brutally hopeful.”

  Denton Loving recently asked Lesmeister about the new collection, his home in Iowa from where he writes, and his love of basketball.

  Denton Loving: Congratulations on your collection of stories, We Could’ve Been Happy Here. Many of these stories were originally published in wonderful journals such as Gettysburg Review, Meridian, Redivider, and Slice. How long did it take you to write the twelve stories that form this collection, and how do you see the stories all working together?

  Keith Lesmeister: It took three to four years, I think, but that doesn’t include how long these stories have been rattling around prior to exposing themselves on the page. In terms of them working together, most of the stories feature characters with some issue that’s partly of their own doing. A recovering addict trying to regain the trust of his family. A couple of kids who have been wiping out the rabbit population around one of their homesteads. A middle-aged couple trying to reinvigorate their love for one another through the unlikely circumstance of robbing a bank. Also, all the stories are set in the great state of Iowa.

  DL: Exactly. I wanted to ask you about the stories all being set in Iowa, which is your home state. The idea of the Mid-West is apparent in a lot of your work, especially in regards to how you create a sense of place to inform and impact your characters. Do you find it easy or difficult to write about this region that you call home?

  KL: Very difficult because I’m from here, which means I take a lot for granted. I’ve had to readjust how I interpret my surroundings, thinking of myself like a tourist when I drive around, trying to take it all in. And despite the stereotypes, several parts of Iowa are quite beautiful. That’s been a big surprise for me as I’ve written this collection—how much I truly love the landscape around here.

  DL: One of the themes I very subtly notice in a lot of your work is the tension between conservative and liberal ideologies. I’m thinking about your story, Imaginary Enemies, where two uncles at a child’s birthday party each represent different paths of thought. Another example is in A Real Future, where the protagonist laughs at his fellow firefighter’s bumper sticker that says, “Spay and Neuter Liberals.” He’s laughing not because he agrees with the sentiment but because he identifies as a liberal himself. This sort of divide seems systemic all across our nation, but is there anything unique about where you live that draws your focus?

  KL: Iowa is a deeply political state in part or perhaps because of our standing as first in the nation to caucus. I’d like to think that my depiction of characters in my stories represents the state in that even when people have deeply divided political beliefs, one might still associate with—even enjoy on some level—those with whom they disagree.

  “By writing what I don’t know, it allows more opportunity for surprise and discovery, which is a wonderful thing for a writer to experience.”

  DL: Another theme common to many of the stories is the conflicting dynamics between children and parents. In some of the stories, children are dealing with their parents’ deaths. In some stories, children and parents are at odds with each other, and in some they are completely estranged. I know you have three children of your own, whom you’re very close with. What drives your exploration of these kind of relationships?

  KL: As writers we’re encouraged to “write what we know.” I think this is true to some degree, and in some of my stories there are aspects that “I know” well. Other parts—and this is where I part ways with the writerly advice—I’m writing what I don’t know. In other words, I don’t know what it’s like to be estranged from my family, but several of my characters find themselves in that precarious situation. By writing what I don’t know, it allows more opportunity for surprise and discovery, which is a wonderful thing for a writer to experience.

  DL: Despite the very heavy subjects of most of these stories, there’s a unique, sometimes dark humor that appears over and over again. I’ve read where you’ve said that you’re drawn to characters who have some element of surprise, as you just mentioned, and often the humorous moments in your stories are humorous exactly because they’re so surprising. Do you have to work for those funny moments, or do they come naturally in your writing process?

  KL: I appreciate this question, though I'm not quite sure how to answer it, mostly because I don't consider myself to be a naturally funny person. I do however know a lot of funny people, and maybe over the years I've observed their comments and timing and off-kilter view of the world, which might be what I'm channeling in my own characters. Any time something funny happens, I'm usually not working for it. It's usually some piece of dialogue unique to the character. Something I could've never come up with on my own.

  “I’ve been writing long enough to know my own limitations, and I try to stick with what I do well while slowly improving on those other areas.”

  full-cover-final-880x629.png

  DL: You managed to include your love of basketball in at least one story in the collection, aptly named A Basketball Story. Talk about your history playing basketball and what the game means to you. Are there any parallels with basketball and writing?

  KL: I played football in college, but my first love has always been basketball. I'm not even six feet tall so there are limitations to what I can do on the court. Of course I mention my height, but there's also my (lack of) vertical jumping ability and several other deficiencies. Still, I love the game and I've learned to take what the defense gives me. Never force your offensive game, which is true for writing too. Never force anything, let your characters do the work for you. And because of my height I've mastered the mid-range jump shot, which, like a fine wine, gets better with age, so I'm shooting probably 100% from mid-range. Another way to say this: I've been writing long enough to know my own limitations, and I try to stick with what I do well while slowly improving on those other areas. Which is why I'm reading more Alice Munro now than ever before. Which is why I work on left-handed dribbling. Which is why I'm working to extend my long game (beyond the three point line). Which is why I'm working on moving through time and space as I think about longer stories that span a character's lifetime. And which is why I'm writing from new and different perspectives. The other obvious parallels: hard work, determination, practice. And learning to deal with setbacks.

  “The cows are always bigger and scarier when they’re standing three feet away”

  DL: The first and last stories in this collection are about the same character, a man named Vincent who, in both stories, is trying to stay clean while he’s farm sitting for a friend. In both stories, Vincent has a lot of bad luck aside from constantly chasing lost cattle. Have you ever tried to herd cattle and will we see more stories about Vincent?

  KL: Vincent is a man near and dear to me. I've been living with this guy for several years now, and I talk to him as if he were standing here next to me right now. He's horrible at rallying cattle. But he's got a good heart and wants the best for his family. Like him, I'm not so great at herding cattle either. The cows are always bigger and scarier when they're standing three feet away. I imagine Vincent will stay with me for a while. Plus, I'd like to see what he might be like if he reconnects with his family. Also, I wouldn't mind finding out what his family was like prior to his addictions taking hold and not letting go.

  DL: I know you don’t have any cattle yourself, but you describe your home as a hobby farm. What do you raise there?

  KL: One dog, one cat (recently adopted), several chickens, loads of stuffed animals, and lots of kids, my own and whoever else’s are around. I think the kids like me because I play Settlers of Catan and buy fancy chips and queso dip.

  DL: You and I met while we were both students in the Bennington Writing Seminars. The program’s motto is, “Read 100 books. Write one.” What are some of the most memorable books that you read while writing the stories that make up, We Could’ve Been Happy Here? What writers do you think have influenced your own work?

  KL: Instead of listing titles, let me list a few authors: Elizabeth McCracken, Brad Watson, Chris Offutt, Mary Miller, Ron Rash, Charles D'Ambrosio, Jane Smiley. Also, my teachers and their work: David Gates, Bret Anthony Johnston, Amy Hempel, and Wesley Brown.

  DL: You teach college level courses, including creative writing. What’s the best advice you give to your writing students?

  KL: I like to borrow advice from Anne Lamott and Cheryl Strayed: pay attention and write like a motherfucker.

  Keith Lesmeister is the author of We Could’ve Been Happy Here (MG Press). His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Gettysburg Review, Harpur Palate, Meridian, Redivider, Slice Magazine, and many others. His nonfiction has appeared in River Teeth, The Good Men Project, Tin House Open Bar, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. He received his M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars. He currently teaches at Northeast Iowa Community College.

  Denton Loving is the author of the poetry collection Crimes Against Birds (Main Street Rag, 2015) and editor of Seeking Its Own Level, an anthology of writings about water (MotesBooks, 2014). His fiction, poetry, essays and reviews have recently appeared in River Styx, The Southeast Review and The Chattahoochee Review. Follow him on twitter @DentonLoving.

• The Gazette
  http://www.thegazette.com/subject/life/books/iowa-authors/iowa-author-uses-cedar-rapids-as-backdrop-in-collection-20170916
  Word count: 345

  Iowa author uses Cedar Rapids as backdrop in collection
  Review: 'We Could've Been Happy Here'
  We Could've Been Happy Here by Keith Lesmeister
  We Could've Been Happy Here by Keith Lesmeister
  By Rob Cline, correspondent

  Keith Lesmeister, who grew up in Cedar Rapids and now lives in Decorah and teaches at Luther College and Northeast Iowa Community College, has penned a collection of short stories set in Iowa. “We Could’ve Been Happy Here” is, as the title suggests, a collection featuring characters whose lives are not all they hope for. Many are trying to do better; few are succeeding.

  Several of the stories are set in Cedar Rapids, including “Today You’re Calling Me Lou,” in which a young man tries to help his firecracker of a grandmother celebrate her birthday, and “A Basketball Story,” in which twins obsessed with basketball grow apart for the first time. Local readers will recognize the neighborhoods and landmarks in these stories.

  His characters find themselves in conflict not just with other people or with themselves, but with the natural world. Cows escape, a badger evades a trap, rabbits are systematically exterminated by two children, a deer leads two hunters on a chase after an errant shot fails to bring the animal down. Lesmeister’s Iowa is a place where civilization — which is on a shaky foundation for these characters — and the wild are, for better or worse, intertwined.

  “Burrowing Animals,” a story in which an adult son returns to his parents’ home in an effort to avoid a relapse into drug abuse, is among the strongest stories in the collection. Set in Cedar Rapids, the story delves into the different but linked troubles that threaten to undo father and son. The story is sad but edges toward hopeful at the end before the narrator extinguishes the fragile glimmer of hope. It’s a powerful moment at the end of a beautifully structured story.

  Sorry, this story is currently not accepting comments.

• Michigan Quarterly Review
  http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2017/05/sharing-the-pain-sharing-the-process-an-interview-with-keith-lesmeister/
  Word count: 1600

  Sharing the Pain, Sharing the Process: An Interview with Keith Lesmeister
  by Cameron Finch
  May 25, 2017
  in Interviews

  Keith Lesmeister is an Iowa-based writer of fiction and nonfiction. His debut collection of short stories, published by Midwestern Gothic Press, just celebrated its Pub Day on May 16, 2017. I was first drawn to Lesmeister because of his connection with Midwestern Gothic, a literary journal and book publisher which strives to showcase the truths, the fictions, the folklores, and the beauty of the “flyover” states. As a Michigander myself, I find the journal’s mission to find great Midwestern voices incredibly important. Lesmeister’s retro-pink collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here, is a beautiful addition to the MG Press gamut, as the twelve stories introduce readers to deceptively ordinary Iowan characters. We imagine them as our neighbors, our farmers, our children, our volunteer firemen, our returning war veterans—each with a home, each with their own traumas and baggage, each with a dream and a story to tell. Because I am one of those inquisitive humans who walks the sidewalks, silently imagining the lives of the people who pass me by, I found Lesmeister’s work immediately appealing. He was gracious enough to take time from his busy schedule to allow me to interview him for MQR.

  Two overarching motifs of We Could’ve Been Happy Here are broken/dysfunctional families and “at-risk (to be killed)” animals. Both categories are shown trying to survive a hard-knock life. What do you hope your audience gains by reading your heartfelt and honest pieces about loss, love, and sacrifice? And how do these families and threatened animals especially allow you to dig deep into the real emotions of humanity?

  Let me answer the last question first. I think people who read literary fiction want to be moved in some way. They want to feel; they want an emotional connection. That’s what I want as a reader, and that’s what I’m trying to accomplish on the page. To that end, I think I work best with people (and/or animals) who are at the end of their rope; who are in some way being threatened by themselves or someone else, and this dynamic—this exploration of vulnerable people and creatures—allows for meaningful, though sometimes difficult, interactions between characters that wouldn’t otherwise happen if everything in their lives was hunky-dory. In terms of the first question, I’m not sure. I try to stay away from “messages.” I personally don’t like being told how to think or how to feel about something, and in this way, I hope readers discover for themselves some connection with the stories and characters, even if that means they don’t care for them as people/characters.

  Were any of the stories especially easy or difficult to write? Are there certain characters in the collection that have inherited traits or elements of yourself?

  I wish stories were easier to write. I find them difficult. Pain-staking. Each and every story in this collection went through literally dozens of revisions. I’ve never considered anything I write “easy” to do, mostly because I think trying to inhabit a character or persona is just so damn difficult. In terms of your second question, I suppose the characters here inhabit elements of myself in so much as I am flawed, weak, vulnerable, scared of myself, and unsure about everything.

  The book’s first and last stories involve a character who is “farm-sitting” for a friend on vacation and loses a herd of dairy cows in each narrative. Can you tell us about the process of writing these two distinct, but connected, stories? Did they start out as one and separate organically? Did you know from the beginning that these two stories would bookend your collection? What drew you to this particular narrator’s story?

  These two stories started off as one, but quickly turned into two. The first story, “Nothing Prettier Than This,” originally featured the narrator—Vincent—on the farm by himself. It was going nowhere fast, so I added another character, Katharine, and once that happened, the story took on a new shape and I was able to find its emotional center, which is that both of them are at some kind of crossroads in their lives. The title story has a similar history. In early drafts, Anya, the nine-year-old birthday girl didn’t ride along to herd cattle. Once I figured out that she ought to go along, the story pretty much wrote itself. It also allowed for added tension throughout the car ride. In terms of what drew me to this narrator, I think I was wondering what it would be like if I were estranged from my own family and had a host of other issues to deal with. While thinking about that scenario, these stories took shape.

  You also live on a farm in northeast Iowa, right?

  I never considered my house/land a “farm” until I got to grad school, in Vermont, and quite a few of the people in the program were from the coasts. They said, “You’re from Iowa? Do you live on a farm?” I said, “No, not really, just an acreage on the edge of town.” Then they asked, “Well, do you have a barn?” And I said, “Well, yes, as a matter of fact.” They said, “How about animals?” And I said, “Well, yes, as a matter of fact.” And they said, “You live on a farm!”

  But compared to the thousand acre plots of land around here, my “farm” is nothing.

  What keeps me living here? First of all, most of my family live here, and second, it offers a quiet, peaceful, low stress lifestyle where people concern themselves with what I consider genuine community. Plus, the area where I live has two colleges—a private school and a community college, the latter is where I work—and a rich artistic, musical, and literary culture. Plus, I can walk anywhere in town and be there within twenty minutes, at most.

  You skillfully write prose from the perspective of an addict, a lesbian, a black volunteer fireman, an Iraqi combat veteran, and a handful of imaginative, naive children. What a range! What helps you find the exact tone and voice for each of these unique, complex characters?

  Getting to know a character is much like getting to know a co-worker or friend. You spend time together, ask him/her questions, and through these shared experiences you get to know him/her pretty well. I spent a lot of time talking to my characters, asking them questions, figuring out their wants, desires, insecurities, vulnerabilities, fears, loves, and once we shared our secrets with each other, I could hear them talking to me. Once I could hear them, finding that tone or voice was much easier, but only after spending months getting to know him or her.

  A theme that appears in almost every story in your collection is the need for a role model, a confidante, someone to protect, and someone to trust. As humans, we crave the ability to share our dreams and our fears with another. We don’t want to be alone. I feel this is especially important in the career of a writer, too. Through your own journey as a writer, who have been some of your writerly role models—both for feedback and stylistically—and how do you seek the kind of community support writers utterly need?

  I think I’m influenced quite heavily by everyone I read. Lately, I’ve been reading Marilynne Robinson, Jane Smiley, Alice Munro, Ron Rash, and Emily St. John Mandel, whose work—I can only hope—will influence my own. I mean, who wouldn’t want that? And I agree with you that “community support” is essential. It doesn’t need to be a lot of people, just a handful of trusted readers who will tell you honestly what’s working and what needs help.

  You ruthlessly force your characters to endure grief, disaster, and abuse. Was it difficult to make your characters suffer?

  Not really. In fact, I became more engaged with them the more they suffered. In other words, I loved them more when we shared pain together.

  What would you like your readers to take away from your stories’ open endings (those that leave you hanging, or wondering about what will happen next)?

  I’m not as concerned about the endings or how people interpret them as I am in showing a change or shift—by the end of the story—in the characters’ hearts. Also, I think open endings require a little more work of the reader; that, when a scene or story is left open, the reader gets to imagine for him/herself how things might’ve turned out.

  What are you working on now?

  Short stories. It’s what I love to read, it’s what I love to write. Though today, for reasons unknown to me, I wrote a poem. Maybe it’s a prose poem. I have no idea. Maybe it’s an outline to a story or an essay. It’s something, though, I know that. What exactly? I’m not sure yet.

  Cover photo courtesy of Iowa Soybean Association.