The Painted Forest
144 pages, 5 x 7
5 images
Paperback
Release Date:01 Oct 2019
ISBN:9781949199192
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The Painted Forest

SERIES: In Place
West Virginia University Press

Council for Wisconsin Writers, Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award winner

In this often-surprising book of essays, Krista Eastman explores the myths we make about who we are and where we’re from. The Painted Forest uncovers strange and little-known “home places”—not only the picturesque hills and valleys of the author’s childhood in rural Wisconsin, but also tourist towns, the “under-imagined and overly caricatured” Midwest, and a far-flung station in Antarctica where the filmmaker Werner Herzog makes an unexpected appearance.

The Painted Forest upends easy narratives of place, embracing tentativeness and erasing boundaries. But it is Eastman’s willingness to play—to follow her curiosity down every odd path, to exude a skeptical wonder—that gives this book depth and distinction. An unlikely array of people, places, and texts meet for close conversation, and tension is diffused with art, imagination, and a strong sense of there being some other way forward. Eastman offers a smart and contemporary take on how we wander and how we belong.

Thoughtful and elegant. . . . Eastman's deep fascination with and love of her home state, in all its complexity and eccentricity, permeate this moving book and will live on in the reader’s mind.'
Publishers Weekly
In this shimmering collection, Krista Eastman blends imagined scene with researched fact to bring us fresh visions of places we thought we knew. From examinations of home to 'laughter from nowhere,' from the Wisconsin Dells to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station, from an itinerant painter’s elliptical masterwork to gestation’s feral undertow, Eastman casts a spell that renders us 'still captive to the mystery in distance, still loyal to the pledge found in story.''
Joni Tevis, author of The World Is On Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse
The Painted Forest is a surprising and tender book in which a reader might be reminded of the considered natural observations of Annie Dillard, the unrelenting gaze of Lia Purpura, or the masterful storytelling of Jo Ann Beard. Eastman is interested in interrogating the history and ethos of several specific places, including her own home state of Wisconsin, as well as elegantly demonstrating the ways in which landscapes shift and morph through generations and recall.’
Caryl Pagel, author of Twice Told
The Painted Forest is a singular and visionary portrait of the Midwest, one that defies familiar caricatures of the region. Eastman puts rural towns and hamlets too often dismissed as 'nowhere' definitively on the map, and reveals that they are far more uncanny, complex, and bizarre than our wildest imaginings.'
Meghan O'Gieblyn, author of Interior States
Gorgeously written and meticulously researched, it would be perfect for lovers of creative nonfiction—especially those with an affinity for nature writing and ecocriticism. . . . A continuing tour led by a bright, fascinating guide who reminds us that adventure is born from the possibility of self-discovery.’
Rain Taxi

Krista Eastman's writing has earned recognition from Best American Essays and appeared in The Georgia ReviewThe Kenyon Review (KROnline), New Letters, and other journals. She lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Scrap Metal (A Prologue)

This tubby steel machine, this 1978 Chevy Malibu station wagon, careens a large family forward, makes tinny the sound of our quarrels and questions while highway approaches and then unfurls behind, approaches and then unfurls. It is from this wagon that we view the sculptures, the scrap metal forms welded at weird angles onto themselves, forms that groan at ground in the way of all heavy equipment, but forms whose slanted reaches skyward warp and mock the object of industry. Here, out of nowhere, in the middle of nowhere, stands steel impracticality, love or whimsy or thought made big and embarrassing, material and metallic. They are painted. They are placed, purposively, along the road. We view and evade them by continuing at fifty-five miles per hour.

In this manner, we pass by over and over again, on our way to the capital to see the aunt, on our way to the capital for new school clothes. We start in a small Wisconsin town, pass up and over the Baraboo Bluffs, and then spill out onto a flat expanse of would-be prairie, where Highway 12 divides a U.S. Army ammunition plant, on the left, from a trailer park and junkyard, on the right. It’s then that our eyes catch for a few full seconds, take in, for example, a flat, twenty-foot red heart stuck through with the scrap metal semblance of an arrow, before returning to the blur of roads, the blur of farmland once again. Our silence means, maybe, that we think this stretch of road strange, these oddities as resistant to what we, for our own comfort, might wish we could hang on them: learned vocabulary, confident appraisal, a more casual recognition.

For the length of my childhood, these sculptures climb higher. The blow torch of Tom Every, local scrap man, will eventually produce dozens of regal birds from old musical instruments, a three hundred–ton celestial launching pad called the Forevertron, and a steady gathering of the curious, pilgrims or passersby whose bodies register bafflement, joy, unexpected envy. Once, my quiet dad hazards a response. “I think they’re kind of neat,” he says, his eyes rolling sideways for spousal support. We’re in a car on Highway 12 and the brave utterance cannot be taken back. From the window of our wagon, the coming road takes on a new and emerald sheen, the vast look of aftermath.


 
Scrap Metal (A Prologue)                                                                                                              
Insider’s Almanac                                                                                                                           
Wonder Spot                                                                                                                                   
Middle West                                                                                                                                  
The Painted Forest                                                                                                                         
Everybody Comes ’Round Here                                                                                                  
Animals                                                                                                                                         
My Youth                                                                                                                                     
Layers of Ice                                                                                                                                
Notes                                                                                                                                             
Acknowledgments                                                                                                                        
 
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