Letters from the Country

by Carol Bly

Letters from the Country, one of Bly's best-known and best-loved books, is a collection of essays as fresh today as when they were originally published in Minnesota Monthly. This contemporary classic welcomes readers to the small town of Madison, Minnesota (population 2,242), a rural community struggling to place itself in the new American landscape.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Memoir

204 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1981

Reviews

[Peter Landau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goodreads is good for something. It showed me that there was a Carol Bly in the world. She’s the ex-wife of Robert Bly. He’s that poet who found fame not for his verse as much as his drum circles pounding the beat of the burgeoning men’s movement.

Needless to add, my initial reaction to Carol Bly was, Blah! Who needs her? But the review I read on this site was by author Ben Loory. He has good taste, and he was blown away. Carol Bly did divorce her husband, so I thought I’d give her a chance.

Jesus H. Christ!!! MY LORD BAG OF RICE was perfect. Beautifully crafted, but without the craft standing up and getting in the way of the stories, all of which were fueled by an ethical mandate and delivering a well-earned emotional oomph. Her stories of rural life are rooted in the place but not ignorant of the times in which they played out, reflecting larger political issues through the lives of those seemingly far from the front lines of social battlefields.

I began to recommend her to everyone. She reminded me of one of my first literary heroes, Sherwood Anderson, but maybe even better, less stylistic but more, I don’t know. Real?

Her LETTERS FROM THE COUNTRY is a collection of essays she wrote for a Minnesota magazine published by the local public radio station. Most of them came out in the early 1970s and reveal Bly’s engaged point of view. She’s quick to point out hypocrisy, comes to everything with a clear moral imperative and has strong opinions on how to right wrongs.

Her great theme is how the powerful exploit and hurt the less powerful, and those situations are illustrated in each of these short works, which are more explicitly political than her short stories. There’s a no-nonsense sensibility to her writing that’s not without humor, but sharpened by her moral outrage at the complacency of people who rather take the easy way out.

Not Carol Bly. She’s a fighter. Besides writing, she taught a course on ethics, wrote a textbook about writing from a place of emotional truth and a tome of the evils of bullying. She died a number of years ago, and we’re all poorer for it, but we have her books. Go on a Bly binge. You won’t regret it, and you’ll be a better person for it.

[Alicia Bayer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is very specifically geared towards an audience that hasn't existed in decades -- rural Minnesota residents in the 1970's. It's obviously dated and overly intellectual to an almost painful degree at times. It contains advice for surviving the emotional and intellectual starvation that the author (Minnesota poet Robert Bly's ex-wife, who in a strange twist of coincidence apparently went on to become my UU minister's writing professor in college) perceived in her small SW MN town, and it glorifies urban living in a rather bizarre manner as if all people in the cities are regularly getting together and discussing great philosophical theories and their innermost feelings.

All that said, I really loved some of the ways it made me think so much that I had to give it 5 stars. Some of it's irrelevant, boring, hard to follow, rambling and just meh. But each short chapter, originally published in MPR's Minnesota magazine, contains really interesting insights and some of it is as relevant in the age of Trump and Round Up as it was in the author's time of Silent Spring and Watergate. I want to read it again with a highlighter, just for the brilliant parts that are spot on about ideas I've never seen discussed before. It's a fantastic book for anybody craving real interaction, feeling, thought and connection with their community -- in any community. And the thoughts about morality, corporations, political figures, etc. are really thought provoking.

I kind of want to lend this little book to a half dozen people I can think of, but I also don't want to because I don't want to lose it. I consider that a sign of the best kind of book.

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays deserves to be read on the merits of “A Gentle Education for Us All” alone, which provides the best defense of a liberal arts education I’ve ever read. Although the late, great Bly wrote these essays in the late ’70s for a specific agrarian Minnesota audience, her criticisms and recommendations remain topical and useful for, say, a person living now in a major Eastern metropolis (to take just one example, anybody who follows sustainable farming in the U.S. will recognize some of her arguments). Her moral and political outrage, intelligence, humor, and compassion made her voice stand out anywhere. She was anti-apathy, anti-complacency, anti-smalltalk, anti-ignorance, anti-war. She was pro-dissent, pro-judgment, pro-arts, pro-feeling, pro-action, pro-farmer, pro-sustainability, pro-local-theater-productions, pro-conversation….. She wanted to talk with children and teenagers and old people about contemporary art and music and politics and farming. And she proposed solutions to the problems she identified, starting at the very grassroots level, with 4-H meetings, church groups, and the town parade committee, and urging people to seek accountability from Washington. She demanded respect for people living in Minnesota farms and small towns, and she demanded that these people learn to respect themselves, by which she almost always meant to educate themselves. That goes, of course, for everybody.
Additional thoughts here:
http://alisonkinney.com/2015/07/26/ca...

Thanks very much!

[Tom Baker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carol Bly wrote some very profound essays here in Minnesota in the 70's. She had a knack for bringing the reader in on something rather mundane and then overwhelming the reader with some wit and wisdom. She was a sharp and analytical woman who though loving the rural life, saw that there was so much more that could be attained through a differing attitude along with some hard work and self education and not to settle with ignorance.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

I admire Bly's voice and abrasive side in this essays. Living in a small town in Minnesota and reading these essays, I can assign characters from her essays to people in my own life. Most of them are still relevant today, although a few are dated.

[Heidi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. Bly is searingly honest in her observations of small-town life. I know that I could assign a person from my life to every character in her book. :-)

[Cheryl Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though these essays were first published in the '70s in Minnesota Monthly (collected and published in book form in 1981), most are still amazingly timely. This is a great window into rural life in the Upper Midwest, written by an insider who went outside the Midwest for her education, so she has a different perspective on the culture than her neighbors. She must have loved the Internet once it was created--she argues for the necessity of a kind of cultural resource person in every community, a function that Internet service could take over. Those essays are the only ones that seem dated. The essays that refer to how her community reacts to news about the Nixon impeachment inquiry feel like they were written about the Trump impeachment. I really enjoyed reading this book, and I especially like how it applies sophisticated philosophical questions to the outwardly simple and inwardly complex relationships and social undercurrents in a small community.

[Mark Schultz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Letters from the Country,by Carol Bly, 1981. Thirty-one essays written in the 1970s, by Carol Bly from her home in Madison, Minnesota. There are some really good ones in here, and some that missed the mark, at least to me. But the overall angle – to not dumb it down or swallow your feelings or always hold your tongue – is brought forward time and again in convincing ways.

[Sarah Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shes a little crazy and I think we are all better for it.

[Chelsea · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m from small-town Minnesota. I’m from a smaller town than the 2,000 people in Carol Bly’s home town. My town is so small that the high school graduates single-digit numbers of seniors. (I went to a larger town for school.) My town is so small that had I gotten in trouble in Hill City, my father would have known I was in trouble before I finished getting in trouble. (Fortunately, I had a little more room to get in trouble in Grand Rapids.) This is starting to sound like a Jeff Foxworthy joke. Actually, for comparison, have my home town, and the town I went to school in.

Full review here.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book, well written with many truths. The book focuses on a rural area of Minnesota where farming is the mainstay occupation. I did not find that it spoke for my own small town experience, in both rural California, or the mining town in Central Nevada. She is passionate about small town life, but it is specific to farming areas and the Midwest.

[Joe Vess · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little irregular. I mostly liked it, and there were some moments of brilliance, but others that were kind of boring.