For more than a year, our friends and co-conspirators known as the Compass Group (the folks behind the autonomous structure of the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor) have been hard at work on their follow-up book to A Call to Farms. Having used the first in my teaching, I am super-stoked to see the publication of Deep Routes: The Midwest in All Directions. Purchase a copy today!

This book, for which I contributed a series of interviews with Indigenous activists, “is a collection of stories about learning where we are – by inhabiting, traversing, and exchanging narratives in the expansive region that some people call the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor. Emerging from a geologic territory shaped by retreating Pleistocene ice sheets and further carved by generations of plant, animal and human habitation, these essays contemplate another planetary shift that has transformed our very existence: global neoliberal capitalism. The authors critically reflect on the nature of territory, citizenship, mobility and the possibilities for a more just and egalitarian society. Drawing from sites within the the Midwest (such as parts of Minneapolis, Detroit, Rockford, Madison, Southern Illinois) and excursions far beyond it (locales as distant as Togo, China and Argentina) the twenty-seven contributors explore the wealth of associations these many journeys have nurtured.”
Deep Routes includes 25 entries from 27 different collaborators. The book is divided into five sections. The first, which is integrated throughout the book, includes my interviews with Indigenous activists throughout Turtle Island. The four main sections of the book include: “Searching for Common Ground”, “How Big is a Small Town?”, “Moving through Regions”, and “Where is the Midwest?”.
In the introduction, co-editors Sarah Ross and Bonnie Fortune (Rozalinda Borcila also co-edited the collection, but did not co-author the introduction) write that “This collection looks at that Midwest, a radical Midwest, a Midwest we only hear about in whispers and in fragments. It is written by people who call themselves artists, activists, and academics—sometimes all three at once.” As someone who both laments his presence in the Greater Midwest (what I actually call the Great Lakes), while celebrating its centrality to his everyday existence, I see this book as groundbreaking and a much needed addition to the existing literature on the subject. By drawing together academically inclined essays with interviews, accessible texts, and personal prose, this beautifully designed book is a needed addition to every Midwesterner’s library (including those expats who have moved east or west, north or south).
You can get a copy from us at Justseeds here!