The One-Room Schoolhouse: Stories About the Boys

by Jim Heynen

In more than one hundred perfectly pitched, sometimes perverse, and always surprising stories, Jim Heynen displays his mastery of country wisdom, speech, and behavior as he reveals life in a Midwest where electricity is a magical novelty and cities a distant rumor. These are tales of farmboys finding their way, contending with grown-ups, city kids, birth, death, bats, rats, skunks, and even mean ponies. Or choosing between corncobs and peach tissues, hurling rotten eggs, getting in trouble, helping out, and trying to conceive of the mountains and oceans and forests they've never seen. Their adventures are an education in  the natural world, as well as an aknowledgment of what is both common and strange in human nature. Whether true of just funny, sad or even magical, The One-Room Schoolhouse is indelibly American.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jim Heynen's brilliant piece "That Could Have Been You" anthologized in Flash Fiction Forward led me to The One-Room Schoolhouse , which is more of the same: sparse and simple tales about "the boys," a unnamed group of mischievous farmboys on the cusp of adulthood, but still young enough to feel the wonder and strangeness of childhood.

This format of interrelated short short stories works especially well for a book you intend to pick up and put down at random. As it happens, someone else has a hold on my library copy, and I had to read through it rather quickly, so some of the stories had less of an impact for me, but there are gems in this book, as the blurb on the cover reads: "A few tales...are tiny masterpieces." Especially the stories with unexpected twists or compelling imagery.

What Happened During the Ice Storm
Catching Pigeons
Electricity
The Hike
Habits
Hoof Rot
Pies
The Minister's Wife
Scar Tissue
Fireflies
The Grandfather

A good read for flash fiction enthusiasts and anyone interested in reading about growing up "country." 3.5/5 stars.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not every story hit the mark with me but the ones that do more then make up for it. "Pies" is my favorite read-a-loud story especially around our Thanksgiving baking. While "Thinking about the City", "Indoor Toilet", "The Girls", and "The Minister's Wife" have become classic "read out loud" family traditions many of the others have a stark dark earthiness perhaps inappropriate for sharing out loud.

I was introduced to the book during a poetry class as an example of "prose poetry". This book requires patience to extract the "gems". For me it offered a glimpse into the past- with all its harsh realities and local color. Written in language that is the stark antithesis of sophistication- Heynen transports us to another time and place from a boy's point of view. I am reminded of my father's stories of growing up on a farm in rural Minnesota before the War.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

alternately dark and sweet shorts on the mostly blank "boys" of a rural somewhere. definitely drawing on native american storytelling, doing its own great thing as well. people would probably call this flash fiction, whatever, it's good, read it. this is what people think a prairie home companion is, but actually PHC is trash. this is not trash.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

These little stories are gems. So much surprise and grace in this book. My 70-year old Mennonite father loved it as much as I did, read it aloud to my mother after dinner.

[Patti Irwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s a lot to say about this collection of interconnected short stories. In brief though, they are brilliant gems of distilled language. They are at once universal in their appeal to the memories of the wonder, innocence, and yes, cruelty of childhood and nostalgic for a time and place that no longer exists. They give a taste of farm life that most people never experience and capture a farm life that no longer exists even for children currently growing up on farms.

Personally I have never experienced such a life but I come from people who have. In this case literally—Jim Heynan is my mother’s cousin. Whatever personal experiences Jim drew upon from his childhood, my mother was a part of it. When she first read these stories she said she knew there were girls running with “the boys” because she was one of them.

These stories deserve to be read even without that personal connection but they should be sipped like a fine wine as opposed to swigged like a cold drink. They are more poetry than prose, but poetry in friendly paragraphs so as not to scare non-poetry readers who think (wrongly) that they cannot read poetry. They tell stories of a time and place in the past both physical and emotional. But it does not present a story arc that is linear or chronological. I am a lit major, English teacher, avid reader. I could read and appreciate the craft and beauty of each of these stories. What stops me from eating it with 5 stars is my own personal preference for getting lost in the story arc of a novel as opposed to a short form.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stuff, and great bathroom reading as the vignettes are short and stand by themselves. In the end, a good, aggregated, imperfect picture of live. There's definitely some animal cruelty, which is part and parcel with farm life at the time I suppose, but it was sort of cringe-inducing. I picked it up for my dad, sight unseen, but ended up reading it before giving it to him.

[James Calvin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The boys went for a hike around the section. Four miles. They packed a lunch in an empty gallon syrup can and set off at noon. They knew they'd be doing some things along the way--watching for wild strawberries, checking out a couple creeks, crawling through some culverts, maybe chase a few calves, make a visit to their favorite apple orchards, tease a few geese if they came toward the road, that sort of thing--but they figured they'd be done by four o'clock. Plenty early for afternoon chores, anyhow, so no one would complain that they'd been gone too long.

And so begins one of dozens of Jim Heynen's tales of "the boys," a couple of blessedly generic farm kids who wake up wide-eyed to life itself through barn windows and pasture gates. Heynen's boys abide in a world that's almost gone, even here in the neighborhood where Heynen himself grew up. It's difficult to imagine too many ten-year-old boys who'd think of a hike around the section as being any kind of adventure. . .as long as they'd be home before milking.

You can't plan for blisters on your heels or sunburn on the spot where your shirt sleeves are too short. You can't plan on bumblebees in the roadside ditches, or for twisted ankles from jumping off a little bridge. No one expects barbed wire cuts or getting caught in somebody's apple tree, or getting nipped by a goose that has a worse bite than a rat terrier.

But the boys, their lunch in an empty syrup can, know darn well that a hike around the section will be an adventure because their world is elegantly simple, ripe with possibilities once they clear the driveway. They're adventurers, explorers, even a little criminal. They're boys.

And who'd expect to get bawled out for using a few leaves of corn for toilet paper, or that there'd be leeches in the neighbor's creek? And what's wrong with putting a seed corn sign at the edge of an alfalfa field as a joke? And how much trouble could it have been for people to find their mail when it had been switched to a neighbor's mailbox that was only a half-mile away?

They're bound to get into trouble somewhere around the section, even though land there is so flat and exposed they never got out of sight of someone's kitchen window. They're boys, and if they're not whacking each other or picking sputzies off telephone lines with BB guns, they're peeing somewhere they shouldn't.

And if somebody's bull is mean, why not tease him a little by waving a shirt to show him he shouldn't be so serious about things? and isn't it a good idea to throw some weeds over the telephone wires so birds can eat without worrying about lurking cats? And who would ever think there's be a problem with filling one end of a culvert with stones so that the next rabbit that thought it could run in one side and out the other would have another guess coming?

Once in a while I see two or three or four of them along the river out here, maybe toting a five-gallon bucket or two, a fishing pole thrown over their shoulders, skinny kids walking along in shorts and sneakers, suntanned boys out to nab some frogs or polliwogs.

And so what if there's an apple stuck in the end of the muffler on somebody's tractor--it would just blow out when the tractor started. And just what good do the glass insulators on telephone poles do anyway?

How were Heynen's boys to know that a little hike around the section would take 'em all afternoon, that they wouldn't get back until six, "that they'd be scratched up, bitten, stung, tired, hungry, let along practically crippled, and screamed at like some kind of menace to the community?"

And that so many people for miles around would waste their own time yelling across the fences and fields and using what was left of their telephones just to ask each other, Where are they now and what are they up to?

I see them myself occasionally around in the neighborhood, walking along the old railroad tracks, a gang of boys out on an adventure, getting soakers in the creek or wading through the trickle the river becomes in thick July heat. It's a half-century later now, more than that really, and, come summer, most boys are in this, that, or the other program most all summer--music, sports, summer bible school.

And besides there's iPads after all, and more fancy shoot-'em-up electronic games than a parent can ever stay up on, new stuff all the time. Videos, thousands of them, right there in their fingers.

But when I seem them walking along or riding bikes down to some crick somewhere, whenever I stumble on a couple of Jim Heynen's boys hanging out on the river, a handful of little guys straining their arms and backs to catch frogs or do whatever they came to do or shouldn't be doing, totally oblivious to any world but their own, I can't help but think the world still holds great promise.

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book over a year ago, maybe longer ago, but so many of the images have stuck with me. Each story is brief, but pregnant with meaning and suggestion. So much is explored regarding masculinity, boyhood, growing up, life and death... There is so much subtlety and complexity in what Heynen has to say about manhood versus boyhood. How the boys feel pressured to mock the women and girls, but aren't as strong as the men, and wind up doing work with the women. How the boys are seduced by violence but also possess a sensitivity to nature and animals that the men no longer do. No one else mentioned it, but a couple of the stories and images also hint at a latent homoeroticism or sexuality that begins to creep in. These boys, who, as a group, not individuals, are the protagonist of each story, are something else. Not quite human, not quite man, not women, not grown-up, but not fully innocent either. Such beauty and honesty. I can't recommend it more, especially as a writer learning how to use every line, every word to its fullest.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

kind of like Palm of the Hand Stories meets Prairie Home Companion, but no at all, really. It just seemed fun to write that. Really it's full of short shorts about farm boys, free bunnies, climbable cows, and pie.
Heartbreaking? maybe, at times. Lassied out, perhaps. Shouldn't everything be lassies out?
My dad grew up on a farm in Minnesota, so I like to think this is a window into that. It's good, good short farm writing-- a small book to pick up anytime for a quick satisfying page, or slipping into for a hundred pages or so. Maybe it's not that long--85 pages? I'd have to check.
Either way, I don't tire of this animal-rich prose too easily.

[Neil McCrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I stumbled on this book almost by accident, and while I hesitate using too many superlatives, the fact remains that this book significantly changed the way I look at my own writing.

The One-Room Schoolhouse consists of a series of very short stories, 2 or 3 pages on average, connected by setting and character. All the stories feature "the boys" as their protagonist, a group of pre-teen boys simply identified and acting as a group rather than as individuals. In each episode the boys deal with a prosaic bit of rural middle America, and transform it into the stuff of high drama.

Strongly recommended.

[Samantha · Rating 1 out of 5]

I often found myself asking why I was continuing to read this. I finally skimmed the last 20 + pages. It had good moments, but was ruined too often by cruelty.

I do not like all of the animal abuse in it. It's not entertaining, which a book should be. The very last chapter is particularly upsetting to me. The cruelty of it like so many other stories in this book is completely unnecessary. It is not the last thing you want to remember when finishing a book.

[John Butler · Rating 2 out of 5]

A collection of flash fiction concerning the boys of a family in the rural Midwest. A few of the stories are definitely on point, many I found trivial and lacking interest. Little or no surprise in most of them. Some of them I had read about other communities, even countries, so lacking originality.

[angrykitty · Rating 4 out of 5]

i picked this up off a discount rack, and found the stories to be really enjoyable. they're not gonna change the world or anything, but if you like cather (the book is set in a rural location), you might want to give these a try.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few gross moments. Many poetic moments. Sometimes boring. Sometimes completely beautiful. And not to mention, farm animals. Lots of them.

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

so they can put it on the back. It's frigging brilliant and the stories are exactly bathroom length.

[Simona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each story held a moment of turning, where the most mediocre thing suddenly became beautiful.

[Sharon Sherman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fun easy read. Stories about the boys on the farm.

[K. Rezaiezadeh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting slices of flash fiction aimed at a part of American society that much of literature seems fine with forgetting these days.

[Holly Ristau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read the summer of 1995 and this was my response at that time: Short short stories about growing up in the early 1900's. Some pretty good ones!