Author Sarah Kendzior lands at this month’s Jewish Book Festival on November 3 to talk about her bestseller, The View From Flyover Country. A collection of essays written between 2012 and 2014, the work seemed to predict both Ferguson and President Donald Trump’s election. Now, however, the U. City–based journalist is focusing on current events—and what’s next.
Why do you think Flyover Country resonates with so many readers? It’s interesting because these essays were mostly written between 2012 and 2014, and at the time they received a lot of skepticism as to whether our institutions were as fragile as I depicted. Now I think they see how this has played out under Trump. Trump didn’t emerge out of nowhere. It was certainly in the air, from Occupy Wall Street to the Ferguson protests. There was also a sense of denial about the state of the economy, being constantly told that we’d recovered from the recession when very few people saw that in their everyday lives. And people were enduring systemic injustice, racism, and misogyny, and they felt it wasn’t being addressed.
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Since Trump’s election there’s also been renewed interest in what’s going on in flyover country. Absolutely. Most journalists are in New York or San Francisco or Washington, D.C., and they have a narrow perspective—not the kind of lives we’re living here in St. Louis. And I think the media went on to botch the story again. The same type of parachute journalism that they did with Ferguson, where they ignored structural causes, they did in creating this mythical Midwestern Trump supporter, always an old white male manufacturing worker found at a diner with the same opinions. My book might have surprised people because they might have gone in thinking it’s about those Trump voters and found something else. Everything I write is drawn from my own experiences living in St. Louis. It’s not a monolith, but what we do share is feeling abandoned, left out of the national conversation, and falling behind economically.
Has traveling the country on your book tour changed your perspective? In the Midwest, they seem to relate more to the economic concerns and the flyover sense of abandonment. But people all over are worried about Trump: It’s not just coastal versus heartland; it’s elite versus non-elite. They’re worried about the direction the country is headed, and they all have questions about what’s happening now. I’m extremely concerned with the way this administration is chipping away at our institutions, but I think the citizens have done their jobs. They’re doing the best they can to stand up against this and for each other, and I saw that in droves, whether it was Milwaukee or Portland or New York.
Sarah Kendzior will be in conversation at 7 p.m. November 3 at the St. Louis Jewish Community Center.
