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In the 1930s, as part of the New Deal, the Works Project Administration put more than 6000 writers to work in the hopes that they would create a written portrait of this country. ("Why not?" FDR said. "They are human beings. They have to live.") The contributors - indcluding Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Zora Neale Hurston among, well, thousands of others - wrote historical pamphlets, recorded points of interest within each state, and provided general information to potential tourists.

Now, some seventy years later, Matt Weiland (deputy editor of The Paris Review) and Sean Wilsey (editor-at-large of McSweeney's) have convinced fifty authors to enact a sort of updating of those WPA guides. Given that the current economy is doing what it's doing, the timing is almost uncomfortably resonant.

With an emphasis on personal narrative, each writer took on a state - Louise Erdrich on North Dakota, Dave Eggers on Illinois, William T. Vollman on California, Myra Goldberg on Maryland, to name a few - to form the collection State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. The essays/histories/comics herein encapsulate history as well as the present moment, forming a diverse-but-somehow-cohesive account of our nation (kind of like how our nation itself is diverse-but-somehow- [sometimes]-cohesive).

On October 1st, Weiland will be in Minneapolis for a reading at the Central Library, along with a few contributors - Susan Orlean, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and Philip Connors. There will also be a screening of a 40-minute film, produced by Powell's, which is based on State by State.

The Rake caught up with Weiland (a Minnesota native), and chatted with him a bit about the book.

The Rake: In State by State, you've got so many different styles of writing - there's state history, personal history, memoir, graphic novel. Did you plan that from the outset, or was it something that just emerged as different writers turned in different pieces?

Weiland: It was important to us from the start that it varied in that way. We wanted to make a book as cacophonous and messy and interesting as the nation itself, and that meant allowing writers to do their own thing and go off their own way. It's kind of the way it feels driving across the country - wind in your hair, and windows rolled down, and everything - and you just bump into different landmarks and different topography and different sorts of people.

So we wanted different sorts of writers, too. Not just novelists, but also journalists and graphic novelists, and we have a musician, and a filmmaker, and of course a cook. We also wanted it to vary in terms of the style of the pieces. There's Jonathan Franzen's brilliant piece about New York, for instance, which is in the form of dramatic dialogue. We had no idea he was going to do that. It was terrific. And the unlikeliest piece, I think, was Craig Taylor's. He wrote about Delaware, and it's an oral history, like Studs Terkel's great books.


The Rake: In your preface, you emphasize the personal aspects of writing. Is a personal account more valid, more alive than something more...objective, like a straight-up history lesson?

Weiland: Well, I have no objections to history. I think when people talk about history being dry - it just depends on the writer. A great writer can make anything come alive. But by the same token, I think that personal history is a wonderful thing, and a much larger and deeper and better thing than a lot of soggy, dull memoirs. I think family history has done as much to make the fabric of our country what it is as the landscape.

Jayne Anne Phillips wrote a wonderful piece about West Virginia, about the generations of her family who are from there. And these people in it are just so West Virginia, and I think that's really important. Likewise, the piece on Minnesota, which was written by this terrific young writer from southern Minnesota named Philip Connors, is about a huge story that's not much talked about - the decline in family farming and the change in ownership of family farms. Really, that's his own family going back generations, and that's a real Minnesotan story, and I think he tells it really well through the prism of his own family history.

The Rake: Do you think all the time you've spent collecting the pieces and editing them might affect your future travels in some way?

Weiland: I think deeply. Two of the contributors and I are going on a road trip through the Midwest, including Minneapolis, and I'm sure I'll be thinking a lot about the book. In the Indiana piece, for example, the novelist Susan Choi talks about the old mint farms in Indiana, and I never knew that mint farming was a big thing there. I'll certainly be on the lookout as we drive through. And I think it'll be the same everywhere. The pieces got under my skin, certainly.

The Rake: Pretty recently you were living in England for a while, and State by State is really your second contribution to books that focus on the greater aspects of America since coming back, along with your introduction for the new edition of George R. Stewart's Names on the Land. Did you experience a sort of realization of your American-ness, or dare I say, patriotism, while you were abroad?

Weiland: I absolutely did. I was glad to be there. London is a wonderful place to live, and I relished living abroad, not least of all in these years. I love the feeling of being out of your own skin that living abroad yields. But I think I also longed to be back, and I didn't quite know why. It's no coincidence that having come back, I've worked on both these books. It was as though being away, I was reminded of all the things I really loved and missed about living here.

On the cover of State by State we use the good ol' slogan from the WPA guides, which is, ‘Take pride in your country.' I think it's often the case that we talk about patriotism in the sense that it's something huge, beyond our actual nation. But I think there's another, deeper way to think about patriotism, which is taking pride in all the little details that make us American, and make our country our own. That's an important kind of patriotism, I think. In living abroad, I was reminded of all that, and we tried to make a book that was true to that ideal.

The Rake: Going back to Philip Connors' piece on Minnesota. I'm from Minneapolis, and it's the only place in this state where I've lived. Meaning, it would seem his experience growing up in a sort of rural atmosphere would be something kind of unfathomable to me. But then he drops the phrase, referring to Minnesotans in general, "We do the little things that keep the hum of continuity about our lives." I just thought, Goddamn, he nailed that. You're from around here, too, so I just wonder how you relate to his piece?

Weiland: I'm in the same boat. I'm from Minneapolis, and I don't know a damn thing about farming. But I think he caught something fundamental about Minnesota more generally. I really could still identify with it. I thought he did a good job, too, with the eternal Minnesotan subject: Minnesota Nice. It's a tough topic to handle in a fresh way, and I thought he said something original and very funny. In fact it's been highlighted in a number of the reviews.

The Rake: What's interesting is that his essay seems to be about actually overcoming his Minnesotan identity...was that a sort of theme that emerged at all? Were there any recurring themes, or attitudes, that came out when you were putting this together that surprised you?

Weiland: A lot of people wrote about their own ambivalence. And I mean ambivalence in the best sense. Jhumpa Lahiri wrote about Rhode Island, and she asked us, "I think it's going to be pretty negative, is that okay?" The last thing we wanted is fifty celebrations - how boring would that have been?

But what Lahiri wrote ended up being incredibly warm, and I think maybe a lot of writers didn't think they'd be writing positively, but the more they got into their projects, the more they realized how much they really liked where they were coming from.

Again: On October 1st, Weiland will be in Minneapolis for a reading at the Central Library, along with a few contributors - Susan Orlean, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and Philip Connors. There will also be a screening of a 40-minute film based on the book, and it's gonna be sweet.