Topophiles Writing Sample.docx

 The TopoFiles: A Study of Regional Identity in American Lifestyle BlogsWhen everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.(Dillard, 1)For most of America's history, our childhood and adult homes were one and the same, or nearly so. The known world was impenetrably vast, but the accessible world was small: a hamlet, a proper town, perhaps a city, perhaps even two. In Sense of Place, Barbara Allen writes that "the expressive behavior of people in a particular place is necessarily shaped by their interactions with their physical environment” (5). The physical and cultural characteristics of our surroundings played an instrumental role in shaping our perspectives--in many cases, our home places played as instrumental a role as did the people who populated them. Imagine Willa Cather without Nebraska, Faulkner without Mississippi, Steinbeck without California. But first came steam, then electric rail, then telephones, then automobiles and airplanes and suburbs and sprawl and cell phones and the internet. Our nation shrunk, continues to shrink. From my home in New York City, I can fly to California in 6 hours, Hawaii in 9, Florida in 2.5. Better than that, I can have a video conference with a client in Shanghai, exchange instant messages with a friend in Auckland.These facts are known. What is less understood is the impact they have on our regional identities, on what Yi-Fu Tuan calls topophilia: "the affective bond between people and place or setting" (4). Does the homogenization of the region's man-made landscape impact our sense of the region as a distinct entity? Does the ubiquitous availability of instant communication? Marshall McCluhan thought so, warning, in The Gutenberg Galaxy, that "electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village," one where "'Time' has ceased, 'space' has vanished" (36). To find out not only if the global village was real, but where, and to what degree, I looked to lifestyle blogs, those online diaries edited (or not) for public consumption. First started by then-Swarthmore freshman Justin Hall in 1994, lifestyle blogs really began to catch on in the early aughts; today there are millions of them in America alone. I found blogs in all fifty states, analyzed their voices, linguistic styles, vocabulary, and content, and compared it to those traditionally considered characteristic of the bloggers' regions literature. What follows are blog vs book comparisons for four regions: the Deep South (Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Louisiana, Arkansas), the Rust Belt (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin), the Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon, Idaho), and the Mid-Atlantic (New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey). Each of these regions has its own distinct economy, topography, and culture, but how marked these distinctions are, and to what degree they manifest in the writings of the lifestyle bloggers, varies. Before I begin, one big caveat: the lifestyle bloggers I analyzed tended to fall into one of two demographics: twenty-something, single white female or thirty-something married white female with children. In the fall of 2010, these characteristics applied to most lifestyle bloggers. As such, the conclusions I've drawn from the blogs are not meant to be representative of the region as a whole--merely of these particular demographics. Part 1: The Rust Belt: Plains-spoken AmbivalenceIf you were to divide the United States into fifths, the Rust Belt would lie in the second fifth, a lopsided trident composed of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. As middle America’s northeastern border, this subregion retains some topographical characteristics common in the mid-atlantic states--faintly rolling hills, deep valleys, canyons, exposed bedrock, thick oak and maple forests. Too, it has the sprawling, flat fields (here of corn and soy) that gave the Midwest its “breadbasket” title. While there are cultural differences among the Midwest's three subregions, historically, the literature of the Rust Belt has simply been called midwestern. As such, it is against the characteristics of the greater region's literature to which I compared the writing of the Rust Belt bloggers. These are the hallmark emphases of the midwestern writer: content over style, "mud-on-the-boots" observation over philosophy, the small town over the big city. In his 1958 essay “A Soil for the Seeds of Literature,” John T. Flanagan noted that "From the very beginning, the more serious middle western writers were conscious of the need for verisimilitude" (210-11). The midwestern writer "begins with space," and fills it with what he knows to be around him (Pichaske, 10). According to Barbara Allen, these surroundings are the weather, agricultural life, the town, its people, shops and shopowners, and daily small town life (29). Pichaske echoes Allen, and adds what he calls “the pillars of midwestern life: a bountiful dinner table, familial love, occasional monitary reward, and the Word of God” (97). The loss of time is also a big theme, and can result in “nostalgic memories, exodus, and collapsed chronology” (99). Apart from agricultural life and religion, all of these topics make frequent appearances in the Rust Belt blogs, too. That the weather looms so large in the midwest's literature and its lifestyle blogs is not surprising, as Diane Dufa Quantic explains: "In a region where there are no natural barriers the great expanses exacerbate the weather's natural violence, and the land's products continue to influence the quality of life, no matter how far removed one imagines oneself to be from the land" (xii). As in midwestern literature, Rust Belt bloggers often use the weather to introduce a story (Pichaske, 44). "So, I’m actually WAY more of a Winter girl," notes Dysfunction Junction blogger DJ (October 2, 2010). Paige begs to differ, kicking off a post with: "Personally, I think my pioneer ancestors showed up here in Wisconsin sometime in mid-May, during the two weeks that the weather here isn’t miserably hot or miserably cold, and thought things were great" (December 3, 2008). None of the bloggers whose blogs I read were farmers, or worked on farms--as its moniker indicates, the Rust Belt has, in the past century, gone from being almost entirely agricultural and rural to being industrial, commercial, and urban. Perhaps because much of its industry is machine-based, steady, and predictable (or was until recently), bloggers rarely discuss their careers. As for religion, one of the bloggers was a somewhat lapsed Jew, and some of the others were Christian, but only Julie of Wine Me, Dine Me Cincinatti mentioned this, and the charity she performed in its name, with any regularity. The town and all its parts though, form the backbones of some of the blogs, and played important roles in all but one of the others. "My soul belongs to Chicago and Chicago sings the blues better than anyone else," writes DJ (May 4, 2012). Bob echoes her: "This will come as a shock to many people*, but there’s tons of stuff to do in Cincinnati. Here’s the catch, its not going to come up and punch you in the face, as I like to say, but you’ll have to get off that easy chair you’ve been complaining from and go out and get it" ("FBs," September 17, 2009). There are many restaurant reviews, which tend to prioritize decor, and service, and the backgrounds of their owners over the taste and presentation of the food. Festivals are very popular subjects, as are local sports games and blogging community meet-ups. Missing are the “credible accounts of the incredible”; instead we get credible accounts of the credible (Allen, 30).Midwesterners are always grappling with home--leaving, returning, leaving again (Pichaske, 114). Home represents the “Edenic past,” the “garden myth,” while away signifies progress, future in its “distant towers of refinement and culture” (Weber, 24). "A beautiful, tumbledown brick farmhouse on the corner of an industrial park unleashes a piercing regret for the agrarian past we’ve lost," writes Kimberly, in The Farmer's Marketer (July 5, 2009). Some of the bloggers have struggled with leaving their hometowns--they depart, they return, they depart again. Paige admits: "Truth be told, I like Wisconsin a lot more when I’m not in it" (September 17, 2007). Some of the bloggers speak with mitigated fondness for their hometowns, and most of the Ohioans and the Illinoisan have unbridled hometown pride. "I am a fierce defender of my hometown and will champion it to anyone who will listen," writes DJ (May 4, 2012). If the thematic pillars of midwestern literature match those of the blogs, so too, for the most part do the descriptive and lexical pillars. "The midwestern style is plainspeak…the midwestern narrator is rarely flamboyant or self-celebrating. Usually he is reticent, apologetic, ambivalent, confused, unpretentious" (Pichaske, 19). These qualities appear in the Rust Belt blogs, as well, though I'd replace "reticent" with "powerfully inclined to shear the ornament off" (Morris, xii). Some of the bloggers were tentative, bracketing their statements with thought modifiers and adverbial qualifiers. Others were more declarative, using assertions backed up by further assertions or by visual or anecdotal details. "Did I mention that Memphis is HOT! Not KC hot, but down south HOT! I have never been as hot in my life as I was that day at Graceland," writes Rachel, in Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe (June 22, 2009). Too, most Rust Belt bloggers shared a penchant for hyperbole couched in simple, undramatic language. Of his coworkers at the hotel where he works, Sov Knight writes "Everyone here seems to genuinely like me, which is a curious thing." Pichaske writes of the midwesterner’s skepticism towards theories and his preference of experience-based knowledge, and this comes out through the dominance of the narrator, his thoughts, assessments, and illustrative personal anecdotes.Midwestern speech peppers colloquial and retro-sounding phrases amidst common American English, and the Rust Belt bloggers do the same, along with what I call AIMspeak: acronyms like LOL, OMG, YOLO, along with abbreviations and cutesy mashups, truncations, and deliberate misspellings (Pichaske, 52). In Snack-face, Kailey dishes on "yumgasms," "snicky snacks" and "jerk guids," while DJ appends exciting events with "squee!" and Fizzgig squeals: "I heart him buckets!" (September 28, 2009). In midwestern literature, descriptions are place-centric, be it town or country, and they are rendered specific through brands, trade names, streets, as well as earth, land, and home imagery (Pichaske, 10). Rust Belt bloggers love their brand and trade names, and their town destinations, and they frequently bring up the weather, but only in Michigan and Wisconsin is the land itself discussed at any length, and when it is, it is often presented as something in need of defending--something in danger of becoming a memory. After a visit to a farmer's market in Indiana, Kimberly writes "At these little ad hoc markets there is undeniable evidence of the tiny shred of a meaningful past and a hopeful future, almost swallowed up in a vast suburban wasteland" (July 5, 2009). In Rooted, Pichaske sums up midwestern literary style this way: "realism bordering on naturalism, with elements of humanism and social critique. Plain, colloquial speech, with elements of self-conscious doubt. Guarded experimentation. Limited theory" (20). All apply to the Rust Belt blogs. If there is one overarching theme in the literature of the midwest and the blogs of the Rust Belt, it is as Kimberly described: tempered optimism in the face of admittedly bleak--but not impossible--odds. There may be locusts and droughts and outsourcing and factories closing, but as long as there is some little sliver of live earth, a hope can sustain itself. In the words of one of the midwest's best-loved daughters: "Laura felt a warmth inside her. It was very small, but it was strong. It was steady, like a tiny light in the dark, and it burned very low but no winds would make it flicker because it would not give up" (Wilder, 390). Part 2: The Deep South: Lilies of their ValliesIs any American region more romanticized by its people (and distrusted by outsiders) than the South? Many battles have been fought in this land of sweet tea and slavery, sweeping plantations and inescapable poverty, white gloves and white sheets, not the least of them cultural. And in its literature as in its history as in its economy, the South's Agrarians have, by and large, taken ownership of the word "southern," and defined it on their own terms. This is not to say that there are not competing narratives. There is the narrative of the slave, the free man, the sharecropper, the Creole, the immigrant… but none are allotted anything close to the Agrarian's portion of the Southern Identity pie. In literature, this translates a fair number of steel magnolias and dead mules, but above all, to "stories about the assault on its culture: the assault of the local by the global, of place by tourism, of history by the museum, of the real by the simulacrum, of authenticity by mechanical reproduction, of coherent space by time-space compression, of depth by surface, of value by consumerism" (Romaine, Scott, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction, 1). In lifestyle blogs, stories about cultural assault are replaced with stories of the assaulted culture, presented as if the assault, and the reasons behind it, had never taken place. While the South's northern and western borders are arguable (some say Maryland and Texas, others, South Carolina and Mississippi), the states that make up the Deep South are generally agreed to be Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and South Carolina. Dead mules aside, many of the themes and some of the language common in Southern literature are present in the Deep South blogs I analyzed. In The Real South, Scott Romaine describes the available subscriptions to readers hungry for the South: "If one doesn't subscribe to the south of Southern Living, then alternative subscriptions are available: the South of The Oxford American, the multicultural South often circulated in academic journals, the Dirty South playing on XM radio" (16). I confess I did not find the last subscription among the lifestyle blogs, but the rest are there, along with the south of the Tent Revival. In Topophilia, Yi-Fu Tuan writes that "Awareness of the past is an important element in the love of place. Patriotic rhetoric has always stressed the roots of a people" (99). The culture of the Deep South is one obsessed with heritage and fixated on a golden, leisurely, gentleman farmer past. It's a culture that’s been nostalgic since its infancy, and this need for regional identity and nostalgia carry into the blogs. Regional cooking, old fashioned morals regarding courtesy, courtship, and charity, sepia-hued "Mayberry" small towns, and childhood memories of fireflies, front porches, and family gatherings are treated with veneration--even if it is, in some cases, a bit tongue in cheek. To quote Elizabeth Fortson Arroyo (as Adelaide does in her blog Sweet, Sassy, Southern, and Classy), “What could be more Southern than to obsess about being Southern?!” (Gretlund, 144). The most dramatic theme is the defense of certain elements of Southern culture against disembeddedment, and this is demonstrated through the frequent appearance of the textbook southern belle. Gracious, domesticated, impeccable dresser, and a skillful entertainer, the southern belle serves as an aspirational figure in many of the southern blogs, many of which bear titles including the words "Southern," "Belle," "Preppy," and "Princess." In her bio for Southern Belle, Jennifer describers herself as a " 'thirty' something pearl wearing Junior Leaguer and self-proclaimed shopaholic who loves a good glass of bourbon, all things southern, pink, Lilly, seersucker."Alongside the traditional southern belle, the modern southern belle, with her sorority, her football team (and love of the tailgate), her e're sought manly-but-chivalrous beau, and her blingy-preppy brands (Lacoste, Tory Burch, Burberry, Frye, and, as always, Lilly), and her ironclad status as Daddy’s little girl, is considered to be all that a Southern college girl should be. Adelaide's tag line offer's a gentle summary: "I love my family, my friends, my sorority, pink and green, sundresses, sweet tea, and shopping," while Gracie Beth’s acknowledges that she is "on what seems to be a never ending quest to find my prince charming." Future suitors be warned: "do not bash a girl’s football team unless you are prepared to defend your statement, because southern women know their football! Berating/being cruel about my Vols is a deal breaker, I bleed orange." Asked to list her favorite colors, Southern Web Girl's Kristen, a fervent Alabama supporter, has a different palette in mind: "1. Blue! 2. Blue! 3. Blue! 4. Blue!" (June 5, 2009). Belles aside, the football teams and sorority pride are also illustrative of another Southern theme- that of the importance of community, and the writer’s status within it. "We can't go through life without community," writes Adelaide (September 17, 2012). Community interaction is pervasive, and occurs through church groups and social gatherings, in favorite haunts with the people who populate them. Leah explains what makes Burning Man so appealing: "Here is a place where taking a cake to your neighbors to say hello is not just something you do on move in day or on holidays, it’s something you do many times, daily." Additionally, the sense of virtual community is strong. Southern bloggers are not merely friendly but tend to interact with their readers, addressing them mid-thought, asking them if they relate to post topics, seeking advice on family, relationships, recipes. "This time around, instead of posting a recipe I am actually asking for one," writes Katia, in Gourmet Girl. (October 15, 2008). Family, which acts as branding iron, glue, and curse in Southern literature, is at least the first two in Deep South blogs. Bloggers maintain close relationships with their families, tend to live close by, and visit often. Parents, mothers in particular, are seen as pillars of strength, offering support and serving as inspiration. While a few bloggers have expatriated, some return to their hometowns, and the others settle in nearby states. Rebecca writes "I get so sad when I think about how far away Manley and I live from where we grew up. I think it's strange and sad that, in this modern world, folks live so far from their families" (October 15, 2012). Christianity, which is present to various degrees in most Southern literature, forms a support structure and identity system similar to that of family for many of the bloggers. Faith, church, and doing “good works” in God’s name are common activities, addressed freely and with enthusiasm. In Oh Amanda, Amanda writes about her relationship with God: "I imagine when I’m finished shouting, God takes my hand like a gentleman and leads me back to the grass with my family" (October 29, 2012). Like a Warm Cup of Coffee's Sarah is more dispirited, wondering "why God is using me for His glory when there are so many better than I to use" (November 20, 2011)."Southern stories are sutured to southern places," but place has a more bifurcated influence in the blogs: the home, and its various components, is universally important; the land surrounding the home, less so (Romaine, 7). Interior decorating and gardening are popular topics across generations, but many of the younger bloggers scarcely touch on landscape at all–-places (both new and familiar) are designated only by their inhabitants. Among the older bloggers, though, landscape is frequently described. The bloggers speak of "miles of mountains," and "rolling hills," of Cracker Barrels and Waffle Houses and the Franklin Farmer's Market, of spanish moss and crab boats and shacks serving shrimp and grits and etouffe and bait shops selling chicken liver alongside worms and minnows. Rebecca describes her childhood home of Fairhope, Alabama as being "nestled in the crooks of Mobile Bay, walloped by hurricanes, and forever buried in my heart" (October 15, 2012). Shannon describes her new home as being "in the country," but warns her readers: "by 'in the country' I mean more than four minutes away from a Wal Mart.' It's a whopping nine minutes to a Wal Mart, and I think this must be just exactly how Ma Ingalls felt" (January 19, 2011). The prevailing themes of Southern literature correspond, for the most part, with those of the Southern blogs, but what of the language itself? In Southern literature, the narrator's voice is often "nostalgic, and culture is intrinsically aspirational and projective" (Romaine, 16). Sometimes it is "carnivalesque and schizo, ranging from backwoods speech to cocktail chatter to metaphysical speculation" (Romaine, 44). Stream of consciousness is common. Often, there is a sense of drama, overstatement/hyperbolics. Style-wise, southern literature is full of colors, personification, gentle, sweeping, sonorous adjectives. Southern American English is prevalent, as are "detached pastoral abstractions that could be set anytime, anywhere" (Makowsky, 3). Often, primary characters are portrayed as being "feckless, greedy, lazy, 'no count,' and uproariously, if vulgarly, funny" (Makowsky, 3).In the Deep South blogs, too, there is a marked sense of wistfulness, of a romantic nostalgia for the remote and near past. When they are not expostulating on true prince charmings or cupcakes, many Southern bloggers turn meditative, philosophical, and lilting. Stream of consciousness abounds, as do conversational rambles. There is an unedited, thought-to-page quality to many of the posts, and they tumble, jerk short, and tumble on again, unedited and scattered. Here's Amanda, describing a journey to Disneyworld: "Excited kids. Bumped flights. Four hours in the air. Nice passengers. Lots of snacks. Waiting in airport. Rental cars stink. Finally! Hugging the family. Eating and talking. Talking and eating. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep" (September 18, 2009). As far as the sense of drama and propensity to overstate goes, though, the bloggers are split. Some are more prone to understatement, which perhaps corresponds to the southern stoicism, while others (especially Georgia and Alabama) definitely fall into the emphatic, grandiose overstatement camp, and still others go for the woe-is-me disguised as sarcasm. "Only two more days for me to kiss my infant’s face," laments Amanda (September 18, 2009). Shannon counters: "But just before I let myself descend–yet again–into my swirly pot of self-pity that my babies are growing, I caught a look at my 8 year old, attempting to use one of the old swingset bars as a javolin" (September 9, 2009). The writing in some of the Deep South blogs is rhythmic and poetic, employing colorful verbs (especially sound and motion), heavy sensory detail (mostly sight, with some taste, touch, and sound), figurative language, metaphor, and personification. Katia's garden is "bustling with basil," and Rebecca thinks about the seasons "in terms of a giant breathing in and out of the whole earth, with the pauses between the breaths being the stillness of midsummer and midwinter" (October, 2012). The younger bloggers, however, tend to be more spartan, with few adjectives, figurative language, or sensory details.One area where they, and their more mature brethren, are not spartan: their use of Southern American English. Running rampant and exultant are both the lexicons of the hillbilly: "girls," "ya’ll," "dang," "ain’t," "stink in," and the Southern Gentry: "have such a time," "from the goodness of the bottom of my heart," "precious," "pique my interest," "oh my word," "rattled on," "blissfully good," "sweet friend," "dear friend." Twain's deft hand with irony, sarcasm, irreverence, and self-deprecation hangs over many a post. Take Shannon's ode to Squirrel Awareness month: It is also Squirrel Awareness month. That one just needed a paragraph of its own, and I suggest you sit here and think squirrely thoughts for a minute before you continue reading, because it is very, very important that we are all properly Squirrel Aware. (September 17, 2009)In the blogs, there is a dearth of "uproariously, if vulgarly funny" characters, and the laziness is all a matter of interpretation, explains Leah. "Up north, the people here would be seen as slow, maybe plain ol’ dumb. Here, you know it’s just the south being southern. No rush, everything arrives with a twang and a slow late blooming smile" (September 13, 2009). "Just the South being southern"--no other region could lay claim to that expression. The Deep South is our most fully realized region, our most region-before-country region. Above all, its our region whose narrative has been reconstructed to suit its narrators, and offered up to the rest of us as truth. There is something to be said for sticking to conviction, at least in a literary sense. Part 3: The Pacific Northwest: Lost in the Land of Amber Fields and Verdant Mountain MajestiesLast summer, my friend and I worked on a biodynamic vegetable farm in the Var region of Provence. Before we left, we hypothesized about our future co-workers. A mixture of hipster, hippy, and rasta, we decided, combining unfortunate dreadlocks, FEED-100 tee-shirts, and hand-rolled cigarettes into one smugly beatific package. Without a doubt, we decided, they would be from Portland.We were right, or partly right. All six of our co-workers fit the above description, but only two were from Portland. Still, 2/6 was enough to solidify my impression of Portlanders as earnest and artfully crunchy do-gooders. Seattle, in my mind, represented Portland’s intellectual, bespectacled, black-coffee-and-caterwhauling-indie loving cousin. But the first description is of a microcosm at best, and the second is merely a stereotype. Who are Northwesterners, and how does their northwestern-ness come out in writing?The first question is relatively easy to answer: the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Idaho, and Washington) was settled by pioneers who found the Midwest’s landscape too harsh and the life afforded to its homesteaders too hardscrabble. If the physicality of the Pacific Northwest's logging and agrarian lifestyle was somewhat akin to that of the Midwest, at least its seasons were milder, and its abundant forests and swathes of fertile grasslands more visually stimulating. In addition to logging and farming, Idaho for a brief time offered its residents a chance to strike it rich from oil and gold, though the subsequent bust left many a boom town crippled or fallow. Today, any chance at real money lies in the recreation business--outdoor activities like skiing, snowmobiling, hiking, fishing, and deep-water rafting are the Northwest’s main tourist draw. What all these industries had and have in common is a tie to and dependence on the land, and a sense of it as an impressive beast that must be tamed “through the exploitation of its resources” (Shwantes, 7).In addition to feeling challenged and shocked by the land, the pioneers and later settlers also felt isolated by it. Two chains of mountains, the Cascades in Washington and Oregon and the Bitterroot Range in Idaho form fairly impassive natural barriers (though the Columbia and Snake rivers provide escape valves). A sense of remoteness, of what Shwantes calls “hinterland” culture, still predominates the rural areas of the Northwest today, accompanied by an “awareness that much of the region remains uninhabited or only lightly populated…inhabitants tend to gather like bees into a few urban hives” (Shwantes, 5-6).And what of the hive-dwellers? According to Shwantes, the “natural setting” looms large in their perspectives too, as evinced by Portland’s regulations protecting the city’s “view corridors”– empty spaces which look out on the Willamette River, Mount Hood, and Mount Saint Helens to the east and the West Hills to the west–-from future man-made obstructions (Langdon, 1). So we have the primacy of the natural, and the sense of remoteness as definers of the Northwest sense of place. What we don’t have is much of a regional identity, dialect, or culture. Perhaps because the natural is so majestically, dramatically, inescapably there, it engulfs all else. What unified voice there is belongs, in general, to the area’s newcomers--the teachers, artists, musicians, and writers who heeded the two-pronged clarion call of land-as-muse and big-shot university positions that sounded post-WWII. The newcomers brought with them wide-eyes and a sensibility unencumbered by “self-consciousness or regional insecurities” (Shwantes, 292). As the poet David Wagoner tells Shwantes, the Northwest was a godsend. “It has for me the central shock of untouched nature. I came from a place where nature was ruined, and here the natural world was still in a pristine state, in some areas” (448).However, if there was a Northwest sound or voice, Wagoner didn’t hear it, and apart from the characteristics already mentioned, neither did the authors of the other works I consulted, Nicholas O’Connell’s On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwestern Literature, and Lisa Gabbert’s “Distanciation and the Recontextualization of Space: Finding One’s way in a Small Western Community.” What the latter did mention, which also perhaps explains the lack of defining regional characteristics, is the area’s transiency--its industries are seasonal, and there is no real divide between the summer and temporary residents and the year-rounders.In Just a Small Town Girl, Kathleen writes occasionally of her childhood home in rural Washington, but most of the memories are centered around people, not place, and there is a distinct lack of nostalgia. "I believed the only future for people who stayed in my town was to become one or more of the following: a fisherman, a fisherman’s wife, a drunk and/or a bigot” (February 17, 2009). Indeed, Parker’s bio describes the author as “just a small town girl with a big city heart,” a heart currently sated by the neon schmaltz of Las Vegas.The narrator of River-Rose seems to prefer nature over neon, but she sees the towering sunflowers,sun-spattered trees, and sunset-streaked lake in the same way that Kathleen sees Las Vegas’s landscape: awe-inducing and praiseworthy and even soothing, but not hers. "When I see a beautiful sunset, it's almost as though my mind can't believe it's true. How can it be possible that such colour and wonder is occurring right before my eyes?" she writes (September 10, 2009). This same lack of attachment shows up in My Pretty Little Head; while its author, Christine, is a photographer and posts numerous landscape photos, there is rarely relevant commentary, and what is there generally pertains to the quality of the photos, not their subjects. Nature photos are common throughout the blogs (with the exception of Just a Small Town Girl), but again, their subjects are always viewed with awe, not attachment. In Just a Little Bit Louder, Stephanie describes a sunrise: But as we stood, waves blowing cold wind at us, Stacy and I commented that the moon was starting to melt away. The moon never fully touched the horizon, as the earth’s shadow consumed it and it just quietly disappeared out of view, like when you watch a movie in widescreen and the credits don’t touch the top of the screen, but rather another ending point. (October 3, 2009)The one power of the Northwestern bloggers’ childhood places was their ability to generate a sense of isolation– and a need to escape–in their inhabitants. Not all of the bloggers got the hell out of Palouse, but those who remain discuss their restlessness and future (geographically far away) plans at great length. Writes Christine:I am a wild dreamer. Everything I think about is at least 6 months out. At times this can be very disappointing because that means there is an awful lot of lag time for dreams to be squashed, altered, or easily letdown. However, I have a BIG dream that is consuming all my thoughts lately, as in I can’t sleep at all because I am constantly brainstorming, and I really truly in my heart of hearts think it will work out. (October 26, 2009)Miss B echoes Christine, wondering: "Do I really want to work in an office mostly doing administrative things?– or do I want a different career path? One that I started to pursue a few months back. I have to do some thinking (July 3, 2009).Two characteristics I didn’t come across in the Pacific Northwest books were self-absorbtion and introspectiveness--traits common among nearly all of its bloggers. Nothing overly emotional or dramatic, but there are thought spews in abundance, mostly containing descriptions of crushes and exes (and their emails!) and husbands and wives, of love lost and hearts broken, as well as of future-related anxieties, smatterings of biblespeak, and the family. Family serves as an anchor (often literally- many of the twenty-somethings live close by or even with their parents). In "Playing catch up," Stephanie writes: “It is so hard to have the people I love spread out all over the world. Sometimes my heart aches to be with people far away; not that I don’t like those I’m with, but when I am in a state of semi-permanency, I miss the temporary so much. It’s more new: fresh: exciting (October 14, 2009). Last September, Rose narrated a road trip to the Midwest this way:Across the Road in AmericaWant to go for a ride? Come on, let's go!Through the trees of Idaho.Past a Main Street within the Midwest,by the church sitting on the corner.To the countryside, where old barns lean,and a rusty gate stands,near the old railway station…finally some blue skies--and wide open spaces!What it comes down to for Northwest rhetoric is a sense of nature’s sprawl and power (and not, importantly, of owning or being one with it), a sense of isolation, a tendency to focus inward, a reliance on family as root providers, and pervasive itchy feet.. Part 4: The Mid-Atlantic: Life Is Tragic and Absurd (but Beautiful)When I tell people about this project, the question I get asked the most is a variation of “what region has the best blogs?” The Deep South put up a valiant fight, but the Mid-Atlantic takes this one. The Mid-Atlantic bloggers as a whole have a talent for nuanced, quietly striking descriptions. Deadpan humor, along with a sort of giddy piled-on sarcasm, is common, as are close-camera scenes. Place and seasons, particularly in the New Jersey blogs, are prominent, either as the crux or introduction of posts.To me, the Mid-Atlantic bloggers were not only the best writers, they were the most stylistically cohesive. And yet, the region wasn’t one I’d heard of before starting the project, and searching for Mid-Atlantic literary regionalism was decidedly unfruitful. What I did find useful was the region’s historical, ethnic, and cultural geography, which from its nascence has been ruled by religious pluralism, ethnic diversity, and a symbiotic farm/factory/market system. The pursuit of Capital, be it financial or intellectual, has always been the Mid-Atlantic’s raison d’etre, its driving force. According to Frederick Jackson Turner, it is the Mid-Atlantic (and not, as I'd always thought, the Midwest) that is the “typically American region..democratic and nonsectional, if not national, easy, tolerant, and contented…rooted strongly in material prosperity” (44).The Mid-Atlantic bloggers are not content (which is not to say they are unhappy), and many do not seem at all rooted in material prosperity (which is not to say they are not prosperous– many of them appear to lie comfortably in the upper middle class). The rest of Turner’s characterization holds true though: democratic, nonsectional, and tolerant. By "democratic," I don’t just mean left-leaning, but also imbued with a need for things to be fair, a passion for citizens’ rights, freedom of speech, and equal distribution of privileges.The Mid-Atlantic is extremely urbanized, and the glut of and need for microcosms, and the sense of insignificance and not infrequent Napolean complexes that accompany big cities are all present in the region’s bloggers, who often describe local restaurants and parks, places that are new or special to them, the people that populate their day-to-days, and their frustration or anxiety over not getting exactly what they could have, should have, need to have in order to stay in the rat race. The rat race is very much present in the younger bloggers. To recently unemployed, childless MRM, the prospect of a fifth year college reunion brings on a bout of self doubt: "I'm turning 28 this summer, which feels too old to be so unaccomplished" (January 21, 2011). Mid-Atlantic bloggers are openminded, yes, and they are also generally open about their own lives. Therapy and childhood abuse are addressed in matter-of-fact asides by more than one blogger; divorce, family illness, affairs, and eating disorders, though less common, are treated in the same frank manner. "My Mother once told me I was a 'mistake,'" writes David, before adding, more cheerily, that "What matters is that I was conceived out of love and was loved from birth" (January 25, 2012). Most bloggers are not writers outside of their blogs; the Mid-Atlantic group is the exception, boasting novels, a cookbook, and freelance work. These are not professional, extension-of-my-career blogs either (that would be cheating!), but they are blogs whose authors clearly pay attention to their craft, as posts are generally focused and researched, the words deftly arranged, with a nice mix of substantive literary and low pop-culture references. This is also a fairly well-traveled bunch: with long soujourns abroad, road trips to nearly all 50 states, and many outdoorsy getaways.To get at stylistic traits, I had to break it down state by state. In Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State, James Broderick quotes author John Cunningham on his home state: “[New Jersey] is both factory and farm; it is High Point and Cape May. Diversity–that’s the spirit of New Jersey” (3). Early Jersey writers like James Fenimore Cooper, Philip Freneau, and Walt Witman embraced a language that was “patriotic, romantic, celebratory, pastoral, voluminous” (4). They criticized the narrowmindedness of their countrymen, and outlined the American credos of “freedom, democracy, self-reliance, love of nature, optimism, endurance, a rough-and-ready posture…a small helping of genteel European cultivation and a large does of Daniel Boon-like courage and cunning”(15). In two hundred years, little has changed, though the optimism and patriotism have abated–it is hard to be both patriot and cynic! Still, there is a definite love of the idiosyncratic, eccentric, even ridiculous that is allowed to flourish in America. In BaRou is the New Brooklyn, Colleen Kane writes of her return to New York:On spying a Brooklyn Brewery logo on a bar, I wanted to start running like George Bailey at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life: ‘Hello Newark Airport! Hey ohhh all you Italian-Americans!’ [kisses one] The feeling reappeared the next day, as I went to pick up the bf in Williamsjerk (he’d taken a car from the airport): ‘Merry Christmas, Hasidic Jews! Happy Halloween, hipsters on old-time roller skates!’.(October 24, 2007) Interestingly, the love of nature seemed to be unique to the Jersey bloggers. Robin Damestra, who decorates her blog Caviar and Codfish with a plethora of sepia shots of the outdoors and rough-hewn kitchen tables topped with tarts, soups, and racks of lamb (all locally sourced, of course), writes of fall: “one day, the world will be green and warm; the next, bone-chilling with a rainbow of reds, oranges, and yellows. The change into fall can make a person think—about the new sweaters she must acquire, and the changeover from tomatoes to apples in her salads…” (October 18, 2009). In Damestra’s writing I see the “freshness of expression and bold embrace of the sensory world” Broderick attributes to Jersey’s best-known poet, Walt Whitman.These attributes are flush in Colleen’s writing as well, and especially so in Robin Lee’s “The Girl Who Ate Everything.” Lee’s vocabulary is a mash of lolcat misspellings and scrambled syntax, and she jabbers and shouts (via CAPS and bolding) in a way that is very conversational, personable, and real. During a trip to D.C., after visits to Ray’s Burgers ( “After I finished off my portion I thought, ‘NOOO, I WANT MOAR, OH GOD.) and Dolcezza for gelato (“There was no rush of memories of eating gelato in Italy—just an emptiness from the lack of warm, nutty happiness.”), Robin ends up in a 7-11, where she is assaulted by the chain’s “LIQUID ARTILLERY SLURPEE. EXTREEEEME! WILL HIT YOU WITH THE POWER OF FLYING SHRAPNEL AND MISSILE LAUNCHERS ANNNND FROZEN BEVERAGE SLUSH AND SORTA FUTURISTIC-LOOKING FONT IN CAPS” (September 5, 2009). The most striking characteristic of the New Jersey bloggers is the attention paid to their surroundings. A New Jersey blogger will not just give you quotes, she’ll give you context–the cafe the conversation took place in, what music was playing in the background, what each had to eat, what the weather was like… You get a lot of deep maps of small areas in these blogs. Sometimes, the maps are humorous (though never cruel), as in Colleen’s description of Saints fans lining up outside Academy Sports after the team qualified for the Super Bowl:The newscaster interviewed various inarticulate but very happy line-standers, already bedecked in black and gold Saints gear, about what new Saints gear they were planning to purchase. Most answers were variations on, “T-shirts, caps, sweatshirts…WHO DAT!” One more creative reveler answered in song and wove in the lyrics to “Pants on the Ground. (January 26, 2010) More often, though, they are wide-eyed and appreciative. Of her neighborhood in Instanbul, Lisa Lubin of LLWorldTour writes:It is a former Bohemian enclave currently full of expats and artists turned yuppies and hipsters. Nearly everything you need is right here. There is a small produce stand selling plump fresh cherries, apricots, and veggies on every corner. There are grocery stores, bars, cafes, a gym, and an odd plethora of pharmacies. Sounds permeate the air harkening back to an old European village:“Hot Simit (a kind of Turkish sesame seed ‘bagel’)!! Fresh, hot Simit!!”“Junkman!! I can take away all your nasty junk!!!”“Waterman!! I will bring big bottles of spring water right to your apartment!!”One of my favorite sounds is, strangely enough, the gas man. When I first heard the sweet tunes tinkling out of his truck as he drove around the ‘hood, I thought it had to be an ice cream truck: “Aygaz…get your sweet delicious Aygaz! (July 22, 2007)If a keen sense of observation, devotion to natural and man-made spaces, gentle humor, and generally well-honed rhetorical skills are characteristic of New Jersey, what can be said about the other two Mid-Atlantic States, New York and Pennsylvania? Let’s start with the former: New Yorkers also possess the pen skills of their Jersey neighbors, but their posts are more essayish, and much wordier. MRM, a recently unemployed young Manhattanite, describes thanksgiving with her family in the manner of a very sober Bridget Jones:Tomorrow night, as you all sit down to dinner with your families and get to answer questions from your family about when will you finally get married, why aren’t you married yet, what’s wrong with you that you don’t have a boyfriend--are you a lesbian?, when will your mother get to finally have grandchildren because she isn’t getting any younger, should you really be eating that second piece of pie, are you sure that’s the most flattering haircut for your face, and while your cousins are running around screaming and knocking things down and getting in your way, take a look around the table and realize that while they may have a funny way of showing it, these are the people who love you and will be with you and until the end, no matter what" (November 25, 2009).Too, the New Yorkers tend to zoom in on people, and the places they do describe are man-made and either lie in their neighborhoods (cafes, bodegas, playgrounds), or carry internal (nostalgic) or external (trendy) value.In general, they are quite aware of words’ connotative values. Here’s Pierre, who writes the very Nick Hornsby-ish MetroDad, discussing being single at 41:: “When I was younger, I dated vastly different kinds of women because I wanted to expose myself to a diaspora of individual personalities. Now that I’m older, I tend to find myself far more selective. Or maybe the proper word is discerning” (January 14, 2010).New Yorkers also love literary and ironic pop-culture references, either embedded or in list form. Here’s Lauren of Hipstercrite on her and her parents’ flip-flopped musical tastes:In high school, I would play my Mom’s Zappa records while I laid on the basement floor, imaging her doing the same thing at my age in 1967. Right when I was at the point having a completely fictional LSD trip, she would kill my buzz by shouting, “Wow, I can’t believe I actually listened to that crap.” I’d make my parents recollect their stories of seeing Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, all while bugging me to score them tickets to see John Mayer at whatever closest uber-dome there was (John Mayer + Parents is a whole another blog post in itself) (February 8, 2010).And Pierre again:The 5 Best Books I’ve Read In The Past 5 Weeks1. Nick Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked”2. Lorrie Moore’s “A Gate at the Stairs”3. Stefanie Wilder-Taylor’s “It’s Not Me, It’s You.”4. Colston Whitehead’s “Sag Harbor”5. Michael Lewis’ “Home Game”5 Best Quotes I Have Recently Read1. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard2. “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” – Frederick Douglas3. “If you care about what others think of you, then you will always be their slave.” – James Frey4. “Tina is my baby girl. She’s my sister from another mother of a different color. I’d do 25 to life for her. She is down like four flat tires.”" – Tracy Morgan5. “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.” – Tom Stoppard (October 29, 2009) High, low, middlebrow, stuff white people like… New Yorkers read it all. They read! (And listen to burgeoning, finely-wrought indie!) But I like it, that they read. I like that their blogs are well-written, that I don’t have to tiptoe over grammar errors and gaping sentences.Still, I prefer New Jersey, whose bloggers have a talent for writing their lives without seeming entirely self-occupied. There is no escaping the inner “I” and all its psychoanalysis in the New York blogs. In Danielle Abroad, Danielle writes about that persnickety demon, self-doubt.I’ve spoken of confianza before, but never of the opposite, and I believe that is where my problem lies. Yet I say this not because I’ve been doubting myself, quite the contrary actually; I have been so not doubtful that I’ve stumbled upon myself treating my body, mind, and soul with the utmost respect by default. Why yes, I have been yoga-ing for the past two days… how could you tell? (February 10, 2010)So we have the naturalism of New Jersey-ites and the neuroses of New Yorkers--but what of Pennsylvanians? Two Pennsylvanian blogs stood out to me, the first, Blogging Barbie, due to its spewing confessions doctored in lolcatz and AIMspeak, and the second, Life Goes On, I Think, because the writing is so spare and gorgeous. Blogging Barbie was one of the first blogs I read, and it was (and still is) one of the blogs that drew me to this new world.Blogging Barbie is both intensely private--she is careful not to drop any identifying details about who she is, and where; there are no photographs, and her profile picture is Barbie’s beaming head--and very upfront about her emotional turmoil, past and present heartaches, financial worries, and family drama. Nothing appears edited, and the language is very playful in its deliberate misspellings, truncations, and neologisms. Hers was probably the blog that introduced me to expressions like “oh hai,” “craycray,” “crazykins,” and SHOUTING, EXTENNNNDED EXCLAMATIONS! BB’s voice is a mix of Cher from Clueless and country balladeer, with loads of woven-in quotes and snappy recaps.I suppose its okay if I want to channel my inner 5yr old. Because, today? On my last day of my pediatrics rotation? Well, I kinda got my evaluation and grade. Long story short, my instructor said that she would be honored to write a recommendation for me. And that, I quote, “pediatric nursing is where I belong.” Oh, and I got an A in my clinical grade. It made me feel like this: [Followed by a picture of kids jumping on a trampoline.]The language and back-and-forth is maintained even when the tone turns somber:He knew that I was naive, and he played me like a piece of chess.He got what he wanted. Someone to pay his way for him, and all the while got to accomplish his hidden agenda. My family and close friends knew that soemthing just wasn’t “right” about him when they met him….but when I looked at him? I just finally saw someone that finally loved me. A relationship, a happily ever after. For once, in a very long time, I was part of the ‘LOOOK AT ME! I HAVE A Boyfriend TOOO, and therefore my world is PERFECT!!!’ crowd. Nevermind that I was blinded by a facade, explaining away red flags that my gut told me indicated something seriously, seriously wrong.As its title might indicate, Life Goes On, I Think also contains plenty of heartache and emotionally-wrought confessions (therapist visits, a mother who recommends plastic surgery and liposuction for her teenage daughter, self-isolating instincts, and soul-crushing break-ups), though its rhetoric—literate and full of “show-don’t-tell” moments—is a far cry from BB’s lolcat trills. The blogger, Paige Jennifer, is actually a writer, mostly of short stories, and it translates in posts that crafted like flash fiction, edited to for maximum dramatic effect. A phone conversation with her mother is loaded with action descriptions, used both to add context to the dialogue and to convey Paige’s emotions:For whatever reason, “accident” triggers the vision of him dropping a cereal bowl from his grasp, milk splashing across the tile floor. Never mind the fact that it has been a decade since my father had the dexterity to carry a bowl of cereal.“He’s in the ICU with brain trauma,” my mother continues.I fall back into the pillows, glance at the television, turn my gaze to my sliding glass doors. The soft glow of a street light shines like a halo against the dark night sky. (February 25, 2010)Most of Paige's posts have a defined beginning, middle, and end—the above post started with a discovery that turning over the couch cushions would stave off buying its replacement. In “It’s Just a Phase,” Paige describes the past months’ phases, from clementines to pomegrantes to frozen dinner hibernation. The bulk of the post is devoted to this last phase, and how, finally, Paige is able to burrow her way out, shoot an email to an old friend asking if he wants to meet up for drinks, buy tickets to Jamie Cullen, and plan trips to visit family in Sarasota and friends in D.C.:Eating some homemade guacamole, listening to the plows slide piles of snow elsewhere, I realized I was done with hibernating. The novelty of seclusion had worn off. My isolation phase had passed. Instead of embracing the quiet, enjoying the space, I felt punchy. It was so bad, I considered all of the different colors I could paint my living room. People, I hate everything about paint, from picking out the color to rolling it on the wall.Without skipping a beat, I opened my laptop and booked flights for a Sarasota trip, making sure my visit overlapped with Leslie and the kids. Then I bought tickets for a concert, finalized plans for Valentine’s Day, researched what plays I want to see, and started planning my annual springtime visit to hang with my favorite DC based girls. Before I knew it, my calendar was loaded up with social activities, all of which make me squeal with delight. So I guess you could say I was on to my next phase. (February 2, 2010)Pennsylvania is more of a hodgepodge than New York and New Jersey: it is both literate and teenybopping, open and private (the majority of the bloggers don’t include identifying details), edited and uncut. Like New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians write infrequently about their natural surroundings; unlike New Yorkers, man-made surroundings are also ignored. Of the three states, Pennsylvanians are the most introspective, and much of their writing has an air of self-explanation and even catharsis.The Mid Atlantic states are not typically viewed as a region the way the Deep South or New England are, and I didn’t find any literature addressing a cohesive regional writing style, and yet the states share a major characteristic, albeit one manifested in a few ways: their bloggers are wordsmiths. They know how to give dialogue rhythm and punch, they bolster stories with sensory imagery and past memories, they spin quotes and love both high and low pop-culture references. They can be sarcastic and they are always self-aware. And they hook you with plot and developed characters all the more compelling because they are real.Part 5: A Nation Divided, StandsAmerica is a: melting pot, patchwork quilt, dream-maker, dream-breaker, model of capitalism, model of why capitalism is wrong, an inspiration, the root of all evil. Put briefly: America is many things to many people. Can the same be said of its regions? Are people even aware of their region, anymore, or do they just identify themselves as American? If they do identify with their region, is the identification conscious or subconscious? I looked to todays' diarists for answers, and I found them, somewhat.I found that the regions whose residents felt the strongest sense of regional identity were those that were under, or considered themselves to be under some form of assault. Throughout the Deep South, bloggers clung to their dialect and vocabulary. They clung to the notion that family is king, and community the loyal court. Most of all, they clung to their genteel traditions (scrubbed clean of slavery, updated with college degrees), and to the belief that the South matters, and that they mattered partly because of their southernness. New Jersey is under assault from the inside: already our nation's densest state, it only grows denser. In response, its bloggers document with quiet admiration and whooping exuberance its beauty and its cultural idiosyncrasies. The Deep South and the Rust Belt had the strongest, and most enduring literary traditions of the regions I analyzed, and their influence was unmistakeable in the writing of many of the bloggers from these regions. There isn't one voice or style characteristic of Northwest literature, and the same can be said of its blogs. On the other hand, anxiety about the future and recalcitrance to leave one's community showed up over and over in the Northwest blogs, and these themes do show up in the region's literature as well. The bloggers of the Northwest had the weakest sense of regional identity, but their homeland was also the youngest, and its history was one of geographic isolation and transient populations. The region that inspired the most ambivalence in its people, the Midwest, also has the harshest weather, the gloomiest financial prospects, and the least protection against generic malls 'n sprawl. The impact of language and culture may have dissipated; the impact of geography has not. Overall, these are the thoughts I came away with: where we are from shapes how we write. More so, it shapes what we write about. More still, it shapes how we we write about what we write about. We perceive the changes to and threats of changes to our landscape, and we respond with humor, with traditions, with memories. We leave, but we don't forget, and our writing does not either. Pablo Neruda is right: when we explain ourselves, we will be talking, still, our geography. Works CitedAdelaide. "Celebrate we will…" Sweet, Sassy, Southern, and Classy, September 17, 2012. np. Web.Allen, Barbara. Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures. University of Kentucky Press, 1992.Alvarez, Danielle. "Doubt it." Danielle Abroad, February 10, 2010. Blogging Barbie. np. Web. Bayer, Kimberly. "Food Indy-pendence Day." The Farmer's Marketer, July 5, 2009. np. Web. Broderick, James. Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State. Rutgers University Press, 2003. Collier, Christine. "One Perfect Autumn Day." My Pretty Little Head, September 17, 2009. np. Web. ---. "Halloween Candy and Wine Pairing." My Pretty Little Head. October 26, 2009. Damaestra, Robin. "Carrots with honey and balsamic." Caviar and Codfish, October 18, 2009. np. Web. DJ. "Autumnal Blarg, Pumpkin Space, LALALAA." Dysfunction Junction, October 2, 2010. np. Web.---. "Back. Slightly. Maybe." Dysfunction Junction, May 4, 2012. Fizzgig. "I heart Fall…" It's All About Me! Deal With It! September 28, 2009. np. Web. Flanagan, John, "A Soil for the Seeds of Literature," The Heritage of the Middle West. University of Oklahoma Press, 1958.Gabbery, Lisa. “Distanciation and the Recontextualization of Space: Finding One's Way in a Small Western Community.” Journal of American Folklore, volume 120, number 476, Spring 2007. University of Illiniois. Gosdin, Julie Niesen. Wine Me, Dine Me Cincinatti. np. Web. Gracie Beth. Preppy Southern Princess. np. Web.Gretlund, Jan Nordby. The Present State of Mind: Southern Identity in the 1990s. University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Hanses, Rachel & Mark. "Stax, Sun, Graceland, BBQ, and Elvis! Memphisn TN!!!" Our Life Is Not a Movie or Maybe, June 22, 2009. np. Web. Harless, Kailey. Snack-Face. np. Web. Heptin, Kristen. "100th Post." Southern Web Girl, June 5, 2009. np. Web. Jackson, Robert. American Regional Theory: Toward a Theory of the Region in the United Statesand Its Roles in the Production of American Literature and Culture. New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, 2001. Kane, Colleen. "The Northeast: Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right." BaRou is the New Bklyn, October 24, 2007. np. Web.---. "How About Dat." BaRou is the New Bklyn, January 26, 2010. Knight, Sov. Sov Knight. np. Web.Kim, Pierre. "Diary of a Single Dad." MetroDad, January 14, 2010. np. Web.---. "Listography: a Life in Lists." MetroDad, October 29, 2009. Kimble, Paige. "Seasoned Change." Rhiannon Revolts, December 3, 2008. np. Web.---. "Five Points: Five Fingers, One Fist." Rhiannon Revolts, September 17, 2007. np. Web. Langdon, Philip. "How Portland Does It." The Atlantic, November 1992.Lee, Robin. "Louis Trip, Day 1, Part II: Ray's Hell Burger and Dolcezza, HELL YES." The Girl Who Ate Everything, September 5, 2009. np. Web. Levin, Paige. "In a Second." Life Goes on, I Think, February 25, 2010. np. Web ---. "It's Just a Phase." Life Goes on, I Think, February 2, 2010. Lowe, Shannon. "Alive and Kicking." Rocks in My Dryer, January 19, 2011. np. Web. ---. "Repurposing." Rocks in My Dryer. September 09, 2009---. "But I'm Still Waiting for 'National Fold Your Own Dang Laundry Day'." Rocks in My Dryer, September 17, 2009.Lubin, Lisa. "Not in the Guidebooks." LL World Tour, July 22, 2007. np. Web. Mae, Sarah. "I Get It." Like a Warm Cup of Coffee, November 20, 2011. np. Web. Makowsky, Veronica. "Walker Percy and Southern Literature." Walker Percy Project. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. March 16, 2009. Mangham, Katia. "Looking for Caramel Cake Recipe." Gourmet Girl, October 15, 2008. np. Web. Miss B. "Only Slightly Deflated." Miss B in California, July 3, 2009. np. Web. ---. "My Path and the Email from the Ex." Miss B in California, August 7, 2009.Mills, Jerry Leath. “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century.” The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1, Fall, 1996. University of North Carolina Press.Modery, Lauren. "Indy Music According to Middle-Aged People." Hipstercrite, February 8, 2010.np. Web. MRM. "My Third of a Life Crisis." Preppy Girl Meets World, January 21, 2011. np. Web. ---. "Happy Thanksgiving all!" Preppy Girl Meets World, November 2, 2009. O’Connell, Nicholas. On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature.University of Washington Press, 2003. Orefice, Stephanie. "The Moon by Night." Just a Little Bit Louder, October 3, 2009. np. Web.---. "Playing catch up." Just a Little Bit Louder, October 14, 2009. Parker, Kathleen. "Revisiting the Past: a Cautionary Tale." Just a Small Town Girl, Pichaske, David. Rooted: Seven Midwest Writers of Place. University of Iowa Press, 2006. Quantic, Diane Dufva. The Nature of Place: a Study of Great Plains Fiction. University of Nebraska Press, 1957. Romaine, Scott. The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Rose. "Standing Tall." River-Rose, September 10, 2009. np. Web. ---. "Greatful Moment." River-Rose, September 17, 2009. ---. "Loved Ones Here and There." River-Rose, November 26, 2009.--. "Across the Road in America." River-Rose, September 27, 2010. ---. "Sunsets." River-Rose, January 28, 2011. February 17, 2009. np. Web. Schmidt, Peter. “Walter Scott, postcolonial theory, and New South literature.” The Mississippi Quarterly. Mississippi State University, 2005. Schwartz, Bob. "FB's." 5chw4r7z, September 17, 2009. np. Web.Seale, Rebecca. "New Favorite." Dear Friend, October 15, 2012. np. Web. ---. "On the Farm." Dear Friend, October, 2012Shulman, Leah. The Future Is Red. np. Web. Shwantes, Carlos A., The Pacific Northwest: an interpretive history. University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Stehle, David. "Born a Mistake." The Rest Is Still Unwritten, January 25, 2012. np. Web. Weber, Ronald, The Midwestern Ascendency in American Writing. Indiana University Press, 1992. Wells, Jennifer. Southern Belle. np. Web. White, Amanda. "Mommy Bloggers." Oh Amanda, October 29, 2012. np. Web.---. "Birthday Party Eve." Oh Amanda, September 18, 2009Wilder, Laura Ingalls. The Long Winter. Harper Collins, 1954. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Topophila: a Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. Columbia University Press, 1974. Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. University of Virginia. 1996. Web. ................
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