Love & Industry: A Midwestern Workbook

Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook. Belt Publishing, Sept. 2023: $19.95, paperback, 9781953368584

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Sonya Huber, author of the award-winning Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System, offers a candid, lyrical look inside the unsung world of exurban Illinois.

New Lenox, Illinois, is a small town deep in the corn grid of the Midwest, where it runs up against the grid of south Chicagoland, a placeless location marked by geographical flatness and dwindling industry. It’s also where Sonya Huber grew up, and in the twenty essays collected here, she lovingly explores the ways New Lenox—and the Midwest more generally—has come to define her life. Here, you’ll find portraits of Huber’s parents as they tirelessly run a small business, homages to the Gen-X joys of wearing flannel, secret insights about being a Pizza Hut waitress, and odes to the ecstasy of blasting classic rock as your car hurls along I-80. Whether she’s writing about All in the Family, detailing the region’s influence on David Foster Wallace, or exploring the poetry embedded in a can of Miller High Life, her vision is astute and her prose convincing.

Sometimes experimental and always inventive, Love and Industry: A Midwestern Workbook takes seriously Chicagoland’s farthest reaches—gritty, sweeping, a region full of its own distinct feelings of “almostness”—and transforms them into a map of the heart, a ramshackle territory marked by memory, family, regret, determination, and wonderment.

Advanced Praise 

"Sonya Huber has written a glorious midwestern road trip for the personal essay set. From Illinois's cornfields, to Gary’s industrial warehouses, to Minneapolis's anarchist meetings, to Chicago’s dark glass bouquet, these finely composed wanderings about love, trouble, home, and recovery testify to the kinetic bond between location and human spirit."

—Barrie Jean Borich, author of Apocalypse Darling, Body Geographic, and My Lesbian Husband

"I felt this book in my bones. The deeply felt essays in Love and Industry feature hard love and loud music, radiation poisoning in our bodies and our land, and aching questions about the places that make us ask: How do I get out of here? and Can I ever stay away?" —Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life

"Huber presents home without home clichés, a home that is complicated by generational trauma, by inequalities and exclusion, a home that represents our corrosive culture and the distrust that has seeped into our lives. These essays deliver the complexities of a place where love and hate are interchangeable, where discomfort has become a type of comfort."—Ira Sukrungruang, author of Southside Buddhist   

"These essays are daring acts of emotional cartography that reveal the Midwest to be much more than glacially-ironed plains and withering rust belt towns, but a place where a rare sort of awareness, humility, and intrepidness is born." —David Griffith, author of A Good War Is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America

Praise & Reviews

“Incredible writing with so much wonderful nostalgia and passions explored in creative ways."—Nathan Shuherk @NonfictionBooktok

“Easily one of my favorite essay collections I’ve read this year.” —Morgan Schutterle @NonfictionQueer on Tiktok

“Huber's 20 engaging essays describe how she dodged the industrial assembly line work of the Midwest ‘into the alphabet.’ Now an associate professor of English at Fairfield University in Connecticut, the author (Voice First: A Writer's Manifesto) takes readers through her 1980s childhood and teenage years in small-town, rural ‘Chicagoland,’ her anarchist days and labor rights protests, and her careers in social work and writing. The essays are dotted with reminders of the Midwest: boxed mac & cheese, fries from the freezer, corn, and Hamburger Helper. ‘Miller High Life, the Champagne of Beers’ is a loving essay crediting Huber's tough, hard-working father with instilling her Midwestern work ethic. ‘How To Disappear at Pizza Hut’ describes Huber's experience as a teenage server at the local pizza place. ‘The Third Eye of the Oyster’ examines Huber's love of walking, while ‘Land of Infinite David’ pays homage to Illinois, ‘land of David Foster Wallace.’ VERDICT Huber's essay collection may first be seen as a regional volume; however, it is a must-read for writing students, who will enjoy Huber's ability to craft personal narratives into essays to reach larger audiences.”—Joyce Sparrow, Library Journal, Aug. 2, 2023

"Though slim and unassuming, the 20 essays within pack a punch—not the sort that gives you an immediate bruise, but one that leaves you strangely sore for days, wondering what it was that hit you. The opener, “Flying the Flannel” deftly sets the scene, situating the reader in New Lenox, Illinois, Huber’s hometown. Located about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, just east of Joliet, Huber describes New Lenox as “deep in the corn grid of the Midwest.” But she’s not writing to cast aspersions on flyover country—she’s writing to pay homage to it. And not to a false version of the Rust Belt, but to the reality of it: the flatness, the monotony of the monoculture, the smokestacks and abandoned factories, the miles of highway.

“I’m drawn to places that look like they’ve been worn and used,” Huber says. “I have great affection for them.” People from the midwest seem to have a different aesthetic, she says, one that is “pleased with subtlety.” In the midwest, “Sometimes there’s not much to look at and so I think my standards of what is beautiful might be a little different.” Huber is now based in Connecticut, where she teaches in the English department at Fairfield University. Though the area has its share of vacant industrial buildings, it doesn’t hit the same as Illinois. “I found how much I also need the horizon,” she says. “Often when I get back to the midwest, I just feel my whole soul settle down because I love the nothingness in some ways.”

"Huber’s deep and at times complicated reverence for the landscape that made her comes across particularly well in the title essay, presented as a simple list. It offers a way of seeing the midwest as she sees it, of learning to slow down and really notice the beauty in freezing cold winters, concrete loading docks, and burned-out steel mills. Her description of “billboard-sized abstract paintings in layers of faded paint and chipped brick and colors that haven’t been named yet,” ubiquitous on the interstates of the midwest, is one of the most striking accounts of visual art that I’ve read.

Equally as bewitching is “Land of Infinite David,” which tracks Huber’s life alongside that of David Foster Wallace, who grew up near the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Both came of age in the corn grid, promising students who crisscrossed the state for high school competitions, and later relocated to the Boston area before returning home to Illinois. Though Wallace lived his later years in California, Huber writes that he claimed Illinois as his own, adding: “. . . and I understand one piece of myself through the lens of him, he who takes the idea of cows-on-the-book-cover and farm-town bucolic and stares at these ideas until they dissolve into exhaust.”

In her LitHub article, Huber writes, “The essay saved me.” She told me, “I love that it allows me to discover stuff . . . that it can sort of branch out in any direction.” In some of the works here, Huber tells it to us straight (what it was like to waitress at Pizza Hut or track her pregnancy); in others, she brings together seemingly disparate ideas, letting the reader learn alongside her and make their own connections. One piece unites the lofty claims of Miller High Life with the dashed dreams of her father and the emotional availability of Archie Bunker. No matter the format, each essay contributes to a sort of whole, a rendering of the shape of the author, formed out of long, cleansing walks, thrift store clothes, a hardworking family, and a love for a certain kind of working-class man.

As Huber writes, “Birth does not equal destiny, but landscape helps produce the soul over time.” Love and Industry shows the landscape of Huber’s soul, yoked to the endless horizon line of the midwest, where the “pink, gold, and brown flatness” is writ large.

—Kerry Cardoza, Chicago Reader, Sept. 8, 2023

Readings and Interviews