State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey

State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America
Edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey
Ecco
Five stars
Reviewed by Jessica Gribble

Anyone who’s ever lived in the United States will find something to enjoy in State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America. The day I brought the book home, I handed my copy to my mother-in-law, who immediately turned to the state where she was born, Michigan. I was surprised, because I think of her as a Pennsylvanian; she lives there now and my husband was born in Pittsburgh. But she foreshadowed one of the important themes that run through the book: our hearts are tied to the places we grow up.

If you pick this book up in the bookstore, please give yourself permission to flip directly to “your” state, whether it’s the one you live in, the one you were born in, or the one you secretly love. An impressive group of authors makes this an essay collection with no weak chapters. The editors, Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey, have chosen a group of writers with a careful eye toward which authors will write well about which states. I found the tones of the essays impeccable: New York, by Jonathan Franzen, was delightfully irreverent and THE city (you know the one!) nearly eclipsed the state. Louise Erdrich’s North Dakota was personal, but the figurative space between the lines gave me plenty of room to stretch out and allow my imagination to roam free. Alison Bechdel drew a graphic essay for Vermont, a state that allows people to think a little differently. And Carrie Brownstein brought the weather inside the pages of the book to do perfect justice to Washington. (You’ll have to read the rest of the book to find out how your state is put on paper!)

There are all sorts of fun additions that make State by State a multi-media reference volume. Weiland and Wilsey have been promoting the book very vocally, so you can find interviews with them on Amazon.com, NPR, HarperCollins’s website, the Powell’s Books website, and the book’s own website, http://statebystate.us. A thirty-eight-minute film accompanies the book and is touring on its own: check out the Powell’s Books website for details.

The book is beautifully produced, with a cover image drawn from the WPA Writer’s Project “American Guide Week” poster (1941). Cute endpapers show a not-to-scale map of the fifty states, drawn by the cartoonist Seth, and picking up on the themes of each essay. Statistical tables at the end give readers a great overview of all the states at once. The preface (by Matt Weiland) and introduction (by Sean Wilsey) are both chatty and informative, explaining how the project came about. It’s important to know that this book reprises, in a sense, a project done in the 1930s: the WPA American Guide series of the Federal Writer’s Project. That project produced hundreds of books, pamphlets, guides to major cities, oral histories, slave narratives, recordings of folk songs, and collections of folklore and social history. Many of the contributors to State by State reference the WPA materials. Each chapter begins with a list of facts about the state, including the capital city, state bird, state flower, state song (all but nine with the state name in the title!), land area, median age, etc.

In the interests of reviewing the book, I read it in one fell swoop, alphabetically. I discovered that if you read the whole country as one story, you learn that you’re an outsider anywhere you weren’t born and that everyone itches to leave and then longs for home. At first, I found many of the essays pessimistic; writers were looking back at a time when their state seemed better, less developed, more welcoming. There’s a wide variety of writing styles, so some states include a lot of history: others are more personal. I found that many authors don’t cover the whole state, but stick to the cities they know best. I found the middle of the country, alphabetically, to be quite amusing (the “M”s). The state mottos are mostly pretentious and anachronistic. I read Pennsylvania in the Philadelphia airport, but the rest of the county in either Colorado, where I live, or Portland, where I was working for a weekend. I found Wyoming to be very true to my experience of it. I was not disappointed by Susan Orlean’s treatment of my birth state, Ohio. I drew up sketchy plans to move to Maine, Idaho, or North Dakota. I could feel the humidity in Florida as if I were there. I learned why Virginia has no state song. I learned that we, as a nation, are still struggling with race. I learned that there’s something to love about every state.

I’m going to put State by State in a prominent spot on the bookshelf in the guest bedroom, so that our guests can start at the beginning with Alabama or flip directly to their own states, and enjoy our fifty states as much as I did, reading this book.