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If you think literary readings are dry, humorless, static occasions, drop in on one of Susan Neville's presentations. For her reading at Wabash last week, she opened with a joke from Kurt Vonnegut (who once called her late one evening searching for the right phrase for his novel Timequake) and read extensively from her book Sailing the Inland Sea: On Writing, Literature, and Land, recently chosen Best Book of Indiana in the nonfiction category by the Indiana Center for the Book. "So much of life lies hidden beneath the surface. As I stand on the banks of the Rise [of the Lost River], I try to see downriver in the early evening fog. But it's like trying to see the future. From this point on, we're told, the water will make its own way toward the west, leaving behind its underground bed. But the river itself will always be lost, like the submerged psyche of a state. And like its sin will appear and reappear: mysterious, tempting, and forbidden."
—from "On the banks of the Lost River," Sailing the Inland Sea

Professor of English and Wabash College poet Marc Hudson introduced Professor Neville, who in addition to being a writer herself, is director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Butler University.

"The boy in New Castle may not write because he thinks it's all been said before. Of course it's been said before, but not by him. Second rule for the fierce writer: Know this—every place on earth is filled with stories, with layers of forgotten history. It's Chekhov's brilliance or Alice Munro's or Thomas Hardy's or Welty's or Kimmel's or Faulkner's or Flannery O'Connor's—regionalists all—to excavate those layers and include them in one human story. To deny invisibility. "In the Midwest, we need to work at being fierce." —Susan Nevill, from Sailing the Inland Sea

"I write as a Hoosier," Kurt Vonnegut says. "That's all I've ever been. Eastern seaboard people who don't know much about the Middle West think we're all fundamentalists, really primitive people. But Indiana is a great seat of free-thinking and religious skepticism." —Susan Neville's "Vonnegut," from Sailing the Inland Sea.

"It's a straight shot from Indianapolis to Lost River. Drive out of town, down Highway 37, past Bloomington, until you start to see the moonscape of limestone. First there's Oliver's Winery with it's mini-Stonehenge, then the square stacked boulders of Bedford. You drive away from the swampy shoreline, remnants of an inland sea, veneered now with glacial drift. It seems important to try and imagine this as often as possible, to remember that our cars are always sailing on what used to be an ocean."
—Susan Neville, from "On the Banks of Lost River," Sailing On an Inland Sea