Indiana Winter
"Stone," the first story in Indiana Winter begins: "My home is a harbor. It floats on limestone high above the Ohio." The last essay, "In the Suburbs," begins: "My mother is mentally ill, and I'm a writer."
In between this geological bedrock and the most personal of struggles, Susan Neville gives us a fascinating hybrid collection of stories and essays on the state of our world, including a look at prisons and jails, country churches, small towns and farms, the John Dillinger Museum, John Mellencamp's art opening in Seymour, a mental hospital on the night the Gulf War started, and New Harmony Indiana on the day Iben Browning predicted that an earthquake would destroy it.
The short story "In the John Dillinger Museum" won a Pushcart Prize.
"Susan Neville reminds us that we live simultaneously in two landscapes, outward and inward. You will find in these gutsy, eloquent pages the familiar Indiana of suburbs and towns, farms and army camps, basketball hoops and sycamores, limestone andd locusts. But you will also find a private Indiana, shaped by memories, riven by the fault lines of doubt and grief, lit by imagination. The journey through both landscapes is by turns harrowing and enchanting: I'm very glad i made the trip."