Notebook: (1) Heartland Vistas

by Ann Kjellberg, editor

The Detroit River and Windsor, Ontario, as seen from the Detroit Renaissance Center, Heartland Fall Forum, October 2023

I love going to the Heartland Fall Forum. Other attenders have reminded me that my part of the country has its own regional booksellers conference. Yes, I know. But there is something special for me about travelling into the middle of the nation, where booksellers far from the overhyped coasts are seeking out readers, finding them where they are, navigating in the world that distance between the solitude of the writer’s desk and the great shifting unknown of the reading public. I love hearing about where these booksellers take root: the lakeside villages surrounded by forests where families return summer after summer, the old cities continually remaking themselves in abandoned warehouses and hidden coffee bars, the far-flung college towns with their arguments and fresh passions, the prairie outposts where you have to drive an hour in every direction to find another bookstore. So much landscape, so many personalities and dreams. Heartland’s returning MC, my Brooklyn neighbor Isaac Fitzgerald, all fizz and enthusiasm, quoted at the convocation Alan Bennet’s The History Boys: “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—which you had thought special and particular to you … it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.” Everyone in the big anodyne Detroit conference room where we found ourselves knew the feeling of that hand against theirs, in their different ways. I met the white-bearded bookseller who said he had come up with the name “Heartland Fall Forum” and I said, score, it worked on me. Travelling into the great breadbasket of the nation at the moment of harvest, as work and nature come to fruition all around us, thrills the heart.