Because I’m on such a tight deadline I pretty much read, write, or think about my topic all the time, so when I go to bed I like to treat myself to something diverting. That’s why I’ve been reading Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621; selected edition by Michigan State UP, 1965).

Though it pretends to be a kind of medical textbook, it’s one of those big crazy erudite rambling books like Montaigne’s that covers about everything, from the “nature of spirits, bad angels, or devils” to the “miseries of marriage” to “fearful dreams and visions.” I think I saw a couple of earthquakes in there, a tempest, and a few “stick-frees [invulnerable men] such as shall endure a rapier’s point, musket shot, and never be wounded….” (“But such examples [of enchantment] are infinite,” Burton says.)

I was pleased recently to read the section titled, “Love of Learning, or Overmuch Study: With a Digression of the Misery of Scholars and Why the Muses are Melancholy.” Studium vehemens, or ardent study, is “an especial cause of madness,” Burton writes, that produces a “peculiar fury.” Isn’t that the truth, even 400 years later? You should hear what I’ve said to the cat when it rubs its cheek oils on the corners of my open laptop. Once, it blushed under its fur.

For a dozen pages Burton nails various problems of scholarship: “And to this day is every scholar poor; / Gross gold from them runs headlong to the boor”…“troubled with gouts, catarrhs, rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and colic, crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and all such diseases as come by overmuch sitting”.

But the best part is that nobody else, except Twain, can give as good a cussing to those who really need it as Burton can, and he gives scholars their turn for “meditating unto themselves” and being “excellent well learned, but so rude, so silly, that they had no common civility nor knew how to manage their domestic or public affairs”:

Because they cannot ride a horse, which every clown can do, salute and court a gentlewoman, carve at table, cringe and make congees, which every common swasher can do…they are laughed to scorn and accounted silly fools by our gallants. Yea, many times, such is their misery, they deserve it: a mere scholar, a mere ass.

It’s the spirit of a cussing and the manner of its delivery that makes it so invigorating for us all, and it’s particularly bracing when he lets rip on the whole system:

For we [those university bred] are the main cause why the state is oppressed with so many evils; we of our ownselves introduce this sad state of affairs, though deserving meantime any scorn and misery for not counteracting it to the best of our abilities. For what do we expect can happen when every day pell-mell poor sons of Alma Mater, sprung from the soil, manikins of no rank whatsoever, are eagerly admitted to degrees? And if these have learnt by heart one or two definitions and distinctions and spent the usual number of years in chopping logic, it matters not to what profit, whatever kind of fellows they eventually turn out to be, idiots, triflers, idlers, gamesters, tipplers, worthless, slaves to lust and pleasure…provided they have spent so many years at the university and passed muster as gownsmen, they are presented for lucre’s sake and through the interest of their friends—I may add often with splendid testimonials to their morals and learning; and on leaving college they are furnished with these, written most amply in their favor by those who undoubtedly thereby abandon good faith and lose credit….

The only thing our annual officials generally desire is that they may squeeze money from the number of those who take degrees, nor do they much care what manner of men they are, whether literate or illiterate, provided they are fat, and sleek, and handsome, and to sum up in one word, monied.

Philosophasters who have no art become Masters of Arts, and the authorities bid those be wise who are endowed with no wisdom and bring nothing to their degree but the desire to take it. Theologasters, sufficiently and more than sufficiently learned if they but pay the fees, emerge full-blown B.D.’s and D.D.’s. And hence it happens that such sorry buffoons everywhere, so many idiots, placed in the twilight of letters, ghosts of pastors, itinerant quacks, stupid, dolts, clods, asses, mere animals, burst with unwashed feet into the sacred precincts…bringing nothing but a brazen countenance, some vulgar trash, and scholastic trifles hardly worth hearing on the high roads.

Purged of sin by this excoriation, I fell dead asleep like a little crusader, the Melancholy folded over my heart and a martyred smile on my face, and dreamt of walking as though enchanted through the infernos of censure and blame….

As you might have heard, my first novel has just been published, and this makes me so happy that I want to make you happy too. No, Rory, no more piggyback rides; I’m talking about a raffle with prizes from some of my well-placed friends!

Since the book is set in Southern Illinois, the raffle is themed to that region, in which there’s so much that’s beautiful, colorful, and good. Why, just this week I learned that the grandson of the madam of what was once the most infamous bagnio between Chicago and New Orleans is an MD—specializing in urology. Isn’t that marvelous? Isn’t that wonderful? Onward and upward.

Though some awful things happen in the book—as they did in life, and still do all over—the communal narrator steps in at the last to declare, “We’ve never lost faith. We have everything. We have water, and we have land to hold the water. And we have fuel and crops and family and hope.” To my mind, this could be the voice of today’s America.

Mrs. Churm had first suggested I hold a contest when my book came out. The winner would get an all-expenses paid guided tour of the places in the novel and of some of my other favorite things about Southern Illinois: Giant City State Park’s wonderful Civilian Conservation Corps lodge, where I practically grew up; the Shawnee wine trail; the gorgeous orchards brimming with fruit; and rock climbing, hiking, camping, and fishing in the 300-million year old hills.

Yeah, we’re not gonna do any of that.

Instead, just send drop me an e-mail (at Oronte.Churm@InsideHigherEd.com) with the title “Southern Illinois Rocks,” and you’ll be entered into a raffle with winners chosen by random-number generator. (I won’t use your e-mail for anything other than letting you know when my next book comes out. If you’d rather not know, Rory, just say so in the e-mail.)

The very cool prizes, to be drawn in this order, and their remarkable sponsors:

Inside Higher Ed, your best source for news in higher education—daily, online, free—and my bloggerly home, will give away one $25 gift certificate to Amazon, which can, handily enough, be used to buy my book if you like.

The University of Illinois Press will give away two copies (awarded separately) of Bloody Williamson: A Chapter in American Lawlessness, by Paul M. Angle. This is the definitive nonfiction history of the vendetta, mine war, and bootlegging violence in my home county, where my novel is set. The New Yorker calls it “a shocking story, well told,” and any history or true-crime buff will love it.

UI Press will also give away one 3-volume boxed set of Folksongs of Illinois, a project of the Illinois Humanities Council, which covers the entire state and includes songs about notorious bootlegger Charlie Birger and the Shawneetown Flood. Artists include Carl Sandburg and the Staples Singers, the 1930s WLS National Barn Dance artists, the Girls of the Golden West, and 1920s countrybluesman Henry Spaulding from Cairo. There are also tracks from well known alt-country stars like Jon Langford from the Mekons, Janet Bean from Eleventh Dream Day, and Kelly Hogan. Added to that are songs from folk legend Art Thieme, Decatur’s Deacon James Biggs and the St. John Missionary Choir, labor songster Bucky Halker, and Tejano balladeers Silvano Ramos and Daniel Ramirez.

Southern Illinois University Press, which has a hot new website, is giving away three books from its Shawnee Classics and Shawnee Books Series, which I grew up with:

A Southern Illinois Album: Farm Security Administration Photographs, 1936-1943. Part of FDR’s depression-era program to help “explain America to Americans,” the photos here are beautiful, stark, and dramatic, in the vein of Dorothea Lange, who also worked for the FSA.

Tales and Songs of Southern Illinois, collected by Charles Neely. Where else will you read stories called “The Flight of the Naked Teamsters” and “The Dug Hill Booger”? This book gives a real feel for early settlers’ lives though their folklore.

A Knight of Another Sort, by Gary DeNeal, is the true story of Charlie Birger, a charismatic and popular bootlegger who would “support twelve or fifteen families, buy coal, groceries. . . . [But] he had cold eyes, a killer's eyes [and he’d] kill you for something somebody else would punch you in the nose for.” Born in Lithuania, Shachna Itzik Birger became a soldier, cowboy, saloon-keeper, and fighter of the Ku Klux Klan, and ended his life on the gallows.

Speaking of Gary DeNeal, who was so helpful during the writing of my novel and who’s become such a good online friend: Gary has published Springhouse (“An Adventure Shaped Like a Magazine”) for 26 years on the history and culture of Southern Illinois. As the local-history movement builds, it will be on the shoulders of regional giants like this one. Past issues have included articles on the Native American Piasa Bird, the Alton Mummy, early mistletoe traditions, the Civil War, Ohio River floods, fiddlers of the Ozarks, and hundreds more topics. One lucky winner will get a one-year subscription (six issues) to Springhouse if selected.

Finally, you might win a Southern Illinois Miners’ baseball hat, or a Miners’ mascot baseball. The Miners are in the Frontier League; their stadium is located at the intersection of I-57 and Route 13 in Marion, Illinois.

Raffle entry will close at noon, CST, July 10. If you’ve won I’ll e-mail you for your name and address. (If winners don’t respond within a week, I’ll pass the prizes on to the next randomly-generated winner.) Please allow 4-6 weeks, as they say, for delivery of your prize.

Again: Oronte.Churm@InsideHigherEd.com. Good luck!

First, I’d like to offer Mrs. Churm felicitations: Nine years ago today, I knelt on the steel deck of the Staten Island Ferry with all the lights of Manhattan as a backdrop and asked her to marry me. She accepted and told me she’d never forget that day.

“Me either,” I said romantically. “It’s the anniversary of the Herrin Massacre.”

She forgave me that eventually, and now here we are: Two beautiful boys, a Victorian house cozy enough that even the raccoons in the attic have no complaints, and my first novel—set during the time of that labor strife—just out.

If you’ve already bought the book, thank you very much. Your support, especially in these hard times, means more than I can say, but I’ve arranged for the chance at a few giveaways—books and music from University of Illinois Press, a subscription to a very cool magazine, an Amazon certificate, Southern Illinois Miners baseball stuff, and more—as a small gesture of my appreciation. Tune in later this week for details.

If you haven’t picked up a copy yet for yourself, one for your dad, and several for your sisters, cousins, coworkers, casual acquaintances, and the dozens of strangers you list as friends on social networking sites, please read on.

The novel’s first review, soon to appear in ForeWord Magazine, says in part:

[Griswold, aka Churm] is able to describe the most violent scenes with the lyricism of Steinbeck, and he can effortlessly shift into the stark beauty of narrative like Truman Capote.... As in The Grapes of Wrath, many of Griswold’s characters are...absorbed in day-to-day living but are still aware of their status as tiny parts...in the engine of a larger corporate machine. Unlike Grapes of Wrath...Democracy of Ghosts doesn’t get caught up in Steinbeck’s inclination towards melodrama and moralizing. Readers may uncomfortably identify with the characters in Ghosts.... Neither saints nor sinners, but possessing the qualities of both, the characters of A Democracy of Ghosts are liars, cheaters, killers, torturers, and opportunists; at the same time, they are loving, humorous, protective, and very human.

That pleases me, and I’d add that it’s also about the limits of American will, the different kinds of endurance needed in life, and the moment when you realize the shape of what you’ve built, almost unconsciously, over time. There’s some writing advice in the book, a Saturnalian act of onanism, and an otherwise nice guy who finds himself in the cemetery with a really dull jackknife and a crowd to cheer him on.

One of the most interesting aspects, for me, of the historical violence the novel’s based on is how large the event loomed in America’s consciousness in 1922-23, given the relatively small number of deaths that occurred, and how it continues to ripple down through time. It’s alive and powerful and has resisted being made harmless, let alone ridiculous, the way Chicago finally converted the bad reputation and fear over “Bang-Bang Chicago” into Capone-themed restaurants and walking tours. But prohibition is over, after all, while the struggle for self-determination and dignity continues.

(This is no comparison, but the attitudes that remain about the Herrin Massacre remind me of the way some Scots still feel about Culloden. An editor-in-chief of a large newspaper e-mailed today to tell me that, only ten years ago, a high school teacher he knew was planning to do a history unit on the Herrin Massacre, but someone called him at home and said he’d die if he taught it, so he dropped the lesson plan.)

Yet none of the troubles Southern Illinois has endured—vendettas, mine wars, bootlegging wars, coal depression—is what I think of first. I remember instead its varied landscape of Southern Till Plains, rugged sandstone hills, and river bottoms, and its smart, funny people, as positively imprinted on me as those of nearby Hannibal, Missouri, were for that other guy.

The novel, A Democracy of Ghosts, is now available from Amazon, or if you want to fully support a literary press for its good taste and daring, buy directly from Wordcraft. Either way, I hope you’ll check it out!

I know why I know so little, but why is it so difficult for you scientists to know things definitively? You’re the ones that got soluble dentifrice into those tubes that never go flat.

All a guy really wants to know from you, for instance, is what the deal was 12,000 years ago, so he can mention quickly, in a nonfiction book about Southern Illinois, that 35 genera of big mammals hanging around back then suddenly went extinct, including all the local mammoths, camels, giant ground sloths, and horses. If you could get together on your story, he could go back to finishing his reading on bootleggers being hung for killing each other. ("It is a beautiful world," one said as they slipped the hood over his head.)

Now, for years you blamed the Clovis people and their hot new technology for the extinctions. You said they were the first to walk across the Bering land-bridge, and that they hunted everything out after inventing deep fryers.

Then, all of a sudden, you announced you’d found evidence of pre-Clovis people all down the Americas, which kind of blew wide open your whole slander against the Clovis folk. Besides, the Clovis seem to have disappeared right along with the Giant Short-Faced Bears.

Now you say the Younger Dryas did it.

I mean, this geologic-prehistoric stuff isn’t the guy’s main focus—it’s not even a footnote, really, to what he’s writing—but you can see how he’d get a little sidetracked when you said it’s awfully funky, scientifically speaking, that even though the glaciers sitting on North America were melting back, this little ice age called the Younger Dryas came on again suddenly for another 1,200 years, probably killing off the food and destroying habitat, but you didn’t know why. I mean, that’s so weird.

You said the YD was brought on when Lake Agassiz, a body of glacial meltwater bigger in area than the state of California, broke an ice dam and drained into the North Atlantic, shutting down the Gulf Stream and changing the earth’s climate.

No, wait a minute: A comet impacted the earth, scorched the surface and raised dust and ash. “The entire continent was on fire,” you said. “And we’ve got the nanodiamonds to prove it.”

Psych!

My acquaintance Crazy Larry, an actor, has been supplementing his income by serving as a fake patient for doctors-to-be. You’d know the name of the testing-prep company that runs the program—evidently one of three or four steps toward U.S. licensing—for (mostly) foreign students. They probe Larry several hours each day before they’re allowed to practice on human beings.

Larry’s meant to portray various symptoms and give a little feedback about their bedside manners, and the whole thing is watched by supervisor-graders through unseen cameras. He’s got stories, many too horrible to be told, but my favorite is how one young doctor, not quite fluent in English, listened to Larry’s chest then said, “Turn around so I can do you from behind.”

And I hope you’re as frightened as I am that Larry says that nine times out of ten, if he’s wearing a giant skin-cancer prosthetic, the students never notice or ask about it. What’s the old saying? Fifty percent of all doctors graduated in the bottom half of their medical school classes….

Larry’s not meant to comment on the supervising doctors’ manners or methods of critique and instruction, but he can’t help but notice that some are not terrific teachers. They don’t say things clearly, such as, “You did X very well, and I liked what you did with Mr. Larry’s Y, but next time please don’t be so intent on rote actions. You took the pulse of the goiter hanging off his neck, but never marked it in his chart.” Instead the teacher-doctor often says something convoluted, such as, “In the instance of which there are not any particulars you should never not go to the etc.”

Larry made the stunning observation to me that to be a good teacher one must be conscious—a loaded word for him that equates to having sense, sensibility, and verbal facility. I’d like that as a definition, of course, being a teacher, but I wonder if he’s right? He did, after all, have heatstroke last night and has hypothermia this morning.

A Times piece a couple of days ago, “Michigan Works to Remake Itself Without King Auto," says that “About 800,000 jobs have been lost in the state—about one in every six—since 2000, and its unemployment rate has reached 12.7 percent, higher than any other state.

The state has authorized tax credits to support a new battery manufacturing plant for G.M., and similar assistance for three other proposed battery projects. The jobs created will number in the hundreds at first, but state officials are hopeful that Michigan will be at the center of battery development nationwide….

Michigan is also pursuing wind-power technology, solar-panel manufacturing, even production of railroad cars—any viable industry that might be interested in hiring the thousands of engineers who used to work in the auto industry.

'This community still has a lot of things going for it,’ said Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan. ‘This is the heart of the automotive research capital of the world, and there’s a strong structure to build on.’

One hopes the structure is strong, for all our sakes, and that that structure is the sort needed for the future. But who knows if that’s true, beyond wishful thinking, PR, and marketing of a region? And why can’t anyone know?

As I’ve been reading for my nonfiction book, I find that the easiest research questions to ask—why is Southern Illinois in such bad shape economically, when it had (and has) such enormous resources?—lead quickly down a rabbit’s hole of thorny explanations. After all, Shawneetown, on the Ohio River, had the first banks in the state of Illinois, and (self-excoriating) legend has it that when investors came, hats in hands, looking for capital to build a new town called Chicago, they were turned down as a bad risk because everyone knew that Southern Illinois would not only continue to grow and prosper, but would serve as the seat of government, money, and power. (The first Illinois capitol was in Kaskaskia, Illinois, a Mississippi River town founded by the French, in 1709, south of St. Louis.)

One of the most illuminating sources I’ve found on what happened to my hometown after Big Coal went bust is Seven Stranded Coal Towns: A Study of an American Depressed Area, by Malcolm Brown John N. Webb. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1941). This Works Progress Administration report on “derelict, economically wrecked” communities looks at three counties—Franklin, Saline, and Williamson—in Southern Illinois on the eve of America’s entry in WWII, and in the depths of the depression.

During the boom years of bituminous mining, from the turn of the century to the mid-1920s, there was a lot of money being made. The New Orient mine in Franklin County was for a time the largest mine in the world, and 99 others were shipping millions of tons of coal, first to Chicago and other Midwestern markets, then to the rest of the country and even internationally. The period has been called the “silk-shirt days,” an implicit criticism of workers who had and spent money.

(They were mostly buying homes, raising families, starting businesses, and building towns. You know, all-American stuff, not to exclude a few benders. They never earned overmuch for their dangerous, filthy work, and part of this story is what’s called “extractive wealth”: Money taken out of the community by absentee, wealthy investors from Boston, Chicago, and other urban centers, who surreptitiously bought up the most useful land and/or mineral rights before the locals knew what they had.)

Basically, “The working miners enjoyed a satisfying degree of economic independence. If a miner disliked his boss, or if he objected to lax safety practices, or if he found his earnings falling because of poor coal, he could always quit his job, knowing that in a week or so he could find another one.”

The report says that “every single year for a quarter of a century, from the discovery of coal on Herrin's Prairie [the original name for my hometown] in 1896 until the post-war depression in 1921, there was always some advance and never a backward step. [A]verage net increase in employment each year between 1900 and 1923 was 1,400 men. The average growth of coal output during the same period was 1 million tons, roughly equal to the total output of the field during the year 1900.”

Of course people were optimistic, made plans. Real estate boomed. Local papers made pronouncements that the coal would last until sometime after the year 9,000. But overproduction, new technologies, and failing markets—sound familiar?—brought it all tumbling down.

“Within less than a decade the whole structure of prosperity lay in utter ruin,” the report says. Fifteen of the 16 mines you could see from the top of Herrin City Hall were closed. “Out of every four coal diggers who had once worked in the mines, only one—who counted himself exceedingly lucky—still held his job; and even so his yearly income had shrunk from $1,350 to $700. [A] total of 34 coal-town banks…collapsed, and some seven million dollars in savings [were] swept away.”

The report states a maxim:

When 10 percent of a community’s labor force is unable to find a job, the community has begun to suffer appreciably. When unemployment climbs to 20 percent, a depression of serious consequences exists. And when unemployment reaches 30 percent—a figure rarely reached by most American communities and still more rarely maintained over any period of time—the community must be judged to be in extremely desperate circumstances. According to this scale, the predicament of southern Illinois will be clear; throughout the seven towns 41 percent of all available workers had no jobs at the time of the census.

The area never really recovered, and at the time of the WPA report, businessmen had been trying “for two generations” to get new industries to come in to replace the mine jobs lost. Subsidies and other money was raised locally to entice businesses, such as a piano factory, a glove factory, and a car factory, to move there, but none of them worked out, and some of them took the community’s cash and fled. (The auto factory made one car before it shut its doors.) Stated reasons for the inability to get things going in a new direction include unionization and poor location, but none of the pat answers hold up well.

The need for energy in WWII created a new spike in mine production that rivaled that in WWI, but mechanization kept employment numbers lower than they had been in the boom. And then it really was over: The “Quality Circle” of high-BTU, relatively low-sulfur coal in these three counties was mined out, gone. Factories did eventually come to town; the Norge plant made washers and driers for Borg-Warner and Magic Chef for four decades, providing a decent living wage for many line workers, but it’s gone now too.

The Times piece on Detroit refers to a former worker hoping for new opportunities. “Leaving the auto industry behind, after a total of 15 years in the business, was difficult, he said, but a fact of life in today’s Michigan. ‘You’ve got to work,’ said Mr. Cortis. ‘I don’t want to be on a two- or three-year unemployment extension.’”

Or more, god forbid.

Yes, friends, the time draws nigh. My novel will release in mere days and is now available for preorder at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or just about any fine bookstore near you (if you ask them to order it, that is; the distributor is Ingram.)

Note that I am not the author, as the Barnes & Noble page suggests, of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, Mergers and Acquisitions, Hiking Cape Cod, Narrow Gauge East from Denver, or Three Years of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

And how about this: My publisher, in recognition of my book being about hard times, and it being hard times now, has lowered the cover price to make it even easier to own. Thirteen ninety-five! Rory eats more than that in postprandial bon-bons every day.

Finally, if you needed any more incentive, the great Bob Shacochis writes, “With iron and blood, it seems, and from the rich depths of the earth, John Griswold has fashioned a classic American novel, its dignified intonations of our young nation’s sweat and tears evocative of the indelible storytelling of Dos Passos, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair.”

[Update, 6-10-09: Looks like the book's in stock already and will ship immediately, but I'm going to ignore that while I giggle like a pleased schoolboy over Bob's blurb and prepare for the anniversary of the Herrin Massacre, June 22, which I'll treat as the official release.]

My acquaintance Rory has a Ph.D. in American literature and is an administrator and a poet of sorts himself. At lunch yesterday, talking around a mouthful of Chicken Tikka in a restaurant he tried to tell me was Thai, he began to dissert on those he called “hillbillies,” whom he admires very much. Despite his predilection for tasteful shirts, fad diets, Wallace Stevens, and Miles Davis, he called himself one too.

He stopped masticating to reconsider. “I think they put too much cardamom in the Masala,” he said.

An indeterminate number of years ago Rory slid out of the American Bottom (I know!), an alluvial-rich floodplain on the left bank of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis. Separated from his boyhood by time, education, and ease, he’s still trying to define himself back into an imagined-remembered culture he feels for some reason has inherent authenticity, whether it be “hillbilly,” working-class, or Southern Illinoisan, that others do not.

“You’re not from Southern Illinois,” I said. “The northwest margin is the Kaskaskia River valley.”

“I know,” he said glumly. “But I won’t admit that to anybody but you.”

Still, it’s an interesting pursuit. Rory said he’d always thought his dad was a hillbilly—pater hillbillus, if you will—making him one too, but it turned out his dad’s people, a phrase of no small import, were from southeast Missouri. His dad lived in a small industrial town famous for two things: Lewis and Clark started their expedition there, and refineries had saturated the dirt over the years with four million gallons of gasoline. His mom wasn’t hillbilly either, she was country, Rory said. I asked him to clarify, and he said that in his lexicon, country people owned land; they were farmers. As a kid his mom got grief for riding a bus to school from somewhere past the outskirts of town, but looked at another way, that equated to wealth.

He told me how he plays with an old friend over this hillbilly distinction, and I said, “She’s right. You always say you’re a hillbilly, and that I’m one, and that all the writers you like are hillbillies. What is it you think you’re claiming title to?”

He talked about the way people dressed and about their not believing in government but got frustrated and challenged me to come up with a definition. I said maybe it was meant to put down descendants of the Appalachian mid-south with a certain independence of spirit. He said I’d made the mistake of romanticizing a culture but admitted he was guilty of it too. He’d often thought he could fit in in a real hillbilly bar but knew he’d last only five minutes.

All this is a more ancient foundation to his new interest in defining the working class. It’s a hard task; what if you're a poet and an electrician? Or someone who gives up a high-paying job to do something more rewarding for poverty wages? What if you got a street education in Indonesia and are now President?

I’m afraid Rory’s earring will tarnish if his head overheats thinking about it. Forget hillbillies. Anyone care to help him by having a go at a definition of working class in America?

No, I don’t mean this.

Or this.

Or this.

I’m not even referring to the governor of Illinois at the time that the events in my novel take place: “Lennington Small was indicted, while governor, for embezzling $600,000 and running a money-laundering scheme when he was state treasurer. He was acquitted, but four jurors later got state jobs, raising suspicions of jury tampering.” Small, when accused of mishandling the events leading to the Herrin Massacre, complained that Attorney General Edward Brundage had kept him distracted with silly accusations.

No, what surprised me in the research I’ve been doing is that a group in the county I’m originally from actually worked up the juice to draft and adopt a resolution to secede from the union in 1861. I always knew many of the original settlers came from the Carolinas to Tennessee to Kentucky to Southern Illinois. Most of them up to the end of the Civil War were northern Democrats—not the party of Lincoln—and some were Copperheads. The region is made more southern by its two great rivers, and most of it sits at a latitude lower than Richmond, Virginia, capital of the confederacy. My dad, who grew up in Southern Illinois, remembered anvil shoots when he was a kid to celebrate the anniversary of the murder of Lincoln.

But running across the actual resolution was a surprise.

Resolved that we, the citizens of Williamson County, firmly believing, from the distracted condition of our country—the same being brought about by the elevating to power of a strictly sectional party, the coercive policy of which toward the seceded states will drive all the border slave states from the Federal Union, and cause them to join the Southern Confederacy.

Resolved that in that event, the interest of the citizens of Southern Illinois imperatively demands at their hands a division of the state. We hereby pledge ourselves to use all means in our power to effect the same, and attach ourselves to the Southern Confederacy. [etc.]

The resolution was repealed the next day by a group of fellow townspeople in the county seat, and four months later John A. Logan, also from the area and a future Union major general, delivered an impassioned speech on the importance of the union that supposedly changed many minds.

Yet a 1994 article in the Illinois Historical Journal, “Aiding and Abetting Disloyalty Prosecutions in the Federal Civil Courts of Southern Illinois, 1861-1866,” says,

While southern Illinois reportedly contributed more than its share in filling enlistment quotas, federal court records reveal that it also had its share of difficulties in executing the draft. Enrollment officers were assaulted, shot, and threatened, and some were forced at gunpoint to relinquish their enrollment lists. Martial law was declared in Williamson County in order to complete the enrollment. At least fifty-six individuals in eleven cases were indicted for resisting, obstructing, or opposing the draft, including John Birge and Joseph Kern, who allegedly advised men to avoid the draft by maiming themselves and using noxious drugs.

Somebody once suggested that Illinois is the most representative of the United States, not only for its geographical position in the heart of the country, but also because it contains all the country’s promise, problems, and divergent opinions. And a deposed First Lady eating spiders on national TV. If that's not American, I don’t know what is.

Mrs. Churm has a habit of calling out answers for the TV game show Jeopardy, often while I’m trying to eat a perfectly good sloppy Joe sandwich. Back at the end of 2008, our son Starbuck, six years old then and unaware of the cauldron he was stirring, asked her why she hadn’t tried out for the show.

“Because you’re good, Mommy,” he said. “You know everything. You could win.”

“I am good, aren’t I?” my wife said. “But there’s a lot to it. You have to be able to hold up in front of an audience.”

“And to be able to buzz in properly,” I said. “Don’t forget the buzzing, darling.”

“Have you ever been famous for anything, Daddy?” Starbuck asked.

He kept at his mother, and by January Mrs. Churm had agreed to take an online test for the show. If I remember right, it consisted of 50 questions on a variety of topics, with only seven or eight seconds to answer each one. They didn’t tell her how she did—the whole thing seems to be run that way, with reminders you’ll probably never make it at every turn—but in April she got an invitation for the next step: To try out in person with other potential candidates at the Chicago regional trials.

So on Friday, Mrs. Churm will try out for Jeopardy at the Westin while my two boys and I drive from the city to Crazy Larry’s house to pick up hundreds of free collectible toys he’s decided he’ll no longer horde. One must seize opportunities as they present themselves. Then she’ll go shopping in the Loop as recompense for all they’ll have put her through, from another written test, to mock games with fellow contestants, to one of those bantering sessions Trebek does on the show supposedly to keep things light.

She’s already been through a lot—the uncertainty, the wavering confidence, the questioning if this is where an advanced degree leads. Worrying about the gamble in being led onward, the chance of having to choose between paying to fly to LA (and risk not even being asked to be on the actual show), or to pass and thereby miss out on retiring at the age of 37 on winnings (on pretty slim margins, it seems to me). Not to mention reading up on procedure and technique on Wiki and on the Jeopardy discussion forum and the insane archive of previous questions.

We’re pulling for her. Where else will two university employees get that kind of money? Even a child knows the answer to that.