To me, the Mid-Atlantic bloggers were not only the best writers, they were the most cohesive. And yet, the region wasn’t one I’d heard of before starting the project, and searching for Mid-Atlantic literary regionalism was decidedly unfruitful. What I did find useful was the region’s historical, ethnic, and cultural geography, which from its nascence has been ruled by religious pluralism, ethnic diversity, and a symbiotic farm/factory/market system. The pursuit of Capital, be it financial or intellectual, has always been the Mid-Atlantic’s raison d’etre, its driving force. According to Frederick Jackson Turner, it is the Mid-Atlantic (and not, as I always thought, the Midwest) that is the “typically American region..democratic and nonsectional, if not national, easy, tolerant, and contented…rooted strongly in material prosperity.”

The bloggers are not content (which is not to say they are unhappy), and many do not seem at all rooted in material prosperity (which is not to say they are not prosperous– many of them appear to be at least upper middle class). The rest of Turner’s characterization holds true though: democratic, nonsectional, and tolerant. By Democratic I don’t just mean left-leaning, but also imbued with a need for things to be fair, a passion for citizens’ rights, freedom of speech, equal distribution of privileges and on.

The Mid-Atlantic is extremely urbanized, and the glut of and need for microcosms, sense of insignificance and not infrequent Napolean complexes that accompany big cities are all present in the region’s bloggers, who often describe local restaurants and parks, places that are new or special to them,the people that populate their day-to-days, and their frustration or anxiety over not getting exactly what they could have, should have, need to have in order to stay in the rat race. The rat race is very much present in the younger blogs.

Mid-Atlantic bloggers are openminded, yes, and they are also generally open about their own lives. Therapy and childhood abuse are addressed in matter-of-fact asides by more than one blogger; divorce, family illness, affairs, and eating disorders, though less common, are treated in the same frank manner.

Most bloggers are not writers outside of their blogs; the Mid-Atlantic group is the exception, boasting novels, a cookbook, and freelance work. These are not professional, extension-of-my-career blogs either (that would be cheating!), but they are blogs whose authors clearly pay attention to their craft, as posts are generally focused and researched, the words deftly arranged, with a nice mix of substantive literary and low pop-culture references.

This is a fairly well-traveled bunch: with long soujourns abroad, road trips to nearly all 50 states, and many outdoorsy getaways.

To get at stylistic traits, I had to break it down state by state. In Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State, James Broderick quotes author John Cunningham on his home state: “[New Jersey] is both factory and farm; it is High Point and Cape May. Diversity–that’s the spirit of New Jersey” (3). Early Jersey writers like James Fenimore Cooper, Philip Freneau, and Walt Witman embraced a language that was “patriotic, romantic, celebratory, pastoral, voluminous” (4). They criticized the narrowmindedness of their countrymen, and outlined the American credos of “freedom, democracy, self-reliance, love of nature, optimisim, endurance, a rough-and-ready posture…a small helping of genteel European cultivation and a large does of Daniel Boon-like courage and cunning”(15). In two hundred years, little has changed, though the optimism and patriotism have abated–it is hard to be both patriot and cynic! Still, there is a definite love of the idiosyncratic, eccentric, even ridiculous that is allowed to flourish in America. In BaRou is the New Brooklyn, Colleen Kane writes of her return to New York:

On spying a Brooklyn Brewery logo on a bar, I wanted to start running like George Bailey at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life: ‘Hello Newark Airport! Hey ohhh all you Italian-Americans!’ [kisses one] The feeling reappeared the next day, as I went to pick up the bf in Williamsjerk (he’d taken a car from the airport): ‘Merry Christmas, Hacidic Jews! Happy Halloween, hipsters on old-time roller skates!’

Interestingly, the love of nature is something unique to the Jersey bloggers. Robin Damestra, who decorates her Caviar and Codfish with a plethora of sepia shots of the outdoors and rough-hewn kitchen tables topped with tarts, soups, racks of lamb (all locally sourced, naturellement), wrote early this fall that “one day, the world will be green and warm; the next, bone-chilling with a rainbow of reds, oranges, and yellows. The change into fall can make a person think—about the new sweaters she must acquire, and the changeover from tomatoes to apples in her salads…” In Damestra’s writing I see the “freshness of expression and bold embrace of the sensory world” Broderick attributes to Jersey’s best-known poet, Walt Whitman.

These attributes are flush in Colleen’s writing as well, and especially so in Robin Lee’s “The Girl Who Ate Everything.” Lee’s vocabulary is a mash of lolcat misspellings and scrambled syntax, and she jabbers and shouts (via CAPS and bolding) in a way that is very conversational, personable, and real. During a recent trip to D.C., after trips to Ray’s Burgers ( “After I finished off my portion I thought, ‘NOOO, I WANT MOAR, OH GOD.’ “), and Dolcezza for gelato (“There was no rush of memories of eating gelato in Italy—just an emptiness from the lack of warm, nutty happiness.”), Robin ends up in a 7-11, where she is assaulted by the chain’s “LIQUID ARTILLERY SLURPEE. EXTREEEEME! WILL HIT YOU WITH THE POWER OF FLYING SHRAPNEL AND MISSILE LAUNCHERS ANNNND FROZEN BEVERAGE SLUSH AND SORTA FUTURISTIC-LOOKING FONT IN CAPS.”

The most striking characteristic of the NJ bloggers is the attention paid to their surroundings. A NJ blogger will not just give you quotes, she’ll give you context–the cafe the conversation took place in, what music was playing in the background, what each had to eat, what the weather was like… You get a lot of deep maps of small areas in these blogs.

Sometimes, the maps are humorous (though never cruel), as in Colleen’s description of Saints fans lining up outside Academy Sports after the team qualified for the Super Bowl:

The newscaster interviewed various inarticulate but very happy line-standers, already bedecked in black and gold Saints gear about what new Saints gear they were planning to purchase. Most answers were variations on, “T-shirts, caps, sweatshirts…WHO DAT!” One more creative reveler answered in song and wove in the lyrics to “Pants on the Ground.

More often, though, they are wide-eyed and appreciative. Of her neighborhood in Instanbul, Lisa Lubin of LLWorldTour writes:

It is a former Bohemian enclave currently full of expats and artists turned yuppies and hipsters. Nearly everything you need is right here. There is a small produce stand selling plump fresh cherries, apricots, and veggies on every corner. There are grocery stores, bars, cafes, a gym, and an odd plethora of pharmacies. Sounds permeate the air harkening back to an old European village:
“Hot Simit (a kind of Turkish sesame seed ‘bagel’)!! Fresh, hot Simit!!”
“Junkman!! I can take away all your nasty junk!!!”
“Waterman!! I will bring big bottles of spring water right to your apartment!!”
One of my favorite sounds is, strangely enough, the gas man. When I first heard the sweet tunes tinkling out of his truck as he drove around the ‘hood, I thought it had to be an ice cream truck: “Aygaz…get your sweet delicious Aygaz!

And Anna, an art creator who writes Living the LBD Life uses her “beloved city of Washington as my gym. I walk 3 miles uphill to work each day, then downhill again in the evening. Because I live downtown, I tend to walk everywhere for errands, social functions, shopping, etc… I love that the exercise I do relaxes me, enables me to enjoy my city, and gets me in the fresh air.”

If a keen sense of observation, devotion to natural and man-made spaces, gentle humor, and generally well-honed rhetorical skills are characteristic of New Jersey, what can be said about the other two Mid-Atlantic States, New York and Pennsylvania? Let’s start with the former: New Yorkers also possess the pen skillz of their Jersey neighbors, but their posts are more essayish, and much wordier. MRM, a recently unemployed young Manhattanite, describes thanksgiving with her family in the manner of a very sober Bridget Jones:

Tomorrow night, as you all sit down to dinner with your families and get to answer questions from your family about when will you finally get married, why aren’t you married yet, what’s wrong with you that you don’t have a boyfriend- are you a lesbian, when will your mother get to finally have grandchildren because she isn’t getting any younger, should you really be eating that second piece of pie, are you sure that’s the most flattering haircut for your face, and while your cousins are running around screaming and knocking things down and getting in your way, take a look around the table and realize that while they may have a funny way of showing it, these are the people who love you and will be with you and until the end, no matter what.

Too, the New Yorkers tend to zoom in on people, and the places they do describe are man-made and either lie in their neighborhoods (cafes, bodegas, playgrounds), or carry internal (nostalgic) or external (trendy) value.
In general actually, they are quite aware of words’ connotative values. Pierre, who writes the very Nick Hornsby-ish MetroDad, discussing being single at 41, writes:
“When I was younger, I dated vastly different kinds of women because I wanted to expose myself to a diaspora of individual personalities. Now that I’m older, I tend to find myself far more selective. Or maybe the proper word is discerning.”

New Yorkers also love literary and ironic pop-culture references, either embedded or in list form. Here’s Lindsay, the blogger behind “Hipstercrite,” on her and her parents’ flip-flopped musical tastes:

In high school, I would play my Mom’s Zappa records while I laid on the basement floor, imaging her doing the same thing at my age in 1967. Right when I was at the point having a completely fictional LSD trip, she would kill my buzz by shouting, “Wow, I can’t believe I actually listened to that crap.”
I’d make my parents recollect their stories of seeing Hendrix, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, all while bugging me to score them tickets to see John Mayer at whatever closest uber-dome there was (John Mayer + Parents is a whole another blog post in itself).

And Pierre again:

The 5 Best Books I’ve Read In The Past 5 Weeks
1. Nick Hornby’s “Juliet, Naked”
2. Lorrie Moore’s “A Gate at the Stairs”
3. Stefanie Wilder-Taylor’s “It’s Not Me, It’s You.”
4. Colston Whitehead’s “Sag Harbor”
5. Michael Lewis’ “Home Game”

5 Best Quotes I Have Recently Read
1. “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” – Soren Kierkegaard
2. “It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” – Frederick Douglas
3. “If you care about what others think of you, then you will always be their slave.” – James Frey
4. “Tina is my baby girl. She’s my sister from another mother of a different color. I’d do 25 to life for her. She is down like four flat tires.”" – Tracy Morgan
5. “Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.” – Tom Stoppard

High, low, middlebrow, stuff white people like… New Yorkers read it all. They read! (And listen to burgeoning, finely-wrought indie!) But I like it, that they read. I like that their blogs are well-written, that I don’t have to tiptoe over grammar errors and gaping sentences.

Still, I prefer New Jersey, whose bloggers have a talent for writing their lives without seeming entirely self-occupied. There is no escaping the inner “I” and all its psychoanalysis in the New York blogs. In Danielle Abroad, Danielle writes about that persnickety demon, self-doubt.

I’ve spoken of confianza before, but never of the opposite, and I believe that is where my problem lies. Yet I say this not because I’ve been doubting myself, quite the contrary actually; I have been so not doubtful that I’ve stumbled upon myself treating my body, mind, and soul with the utmost respect by default. Why yes, I have been yoga-ing for the past two days… how could you tell?

Tina, who writes about her Florida-expat life in La Douleur Exquise Since1984, gives self-doubt an instigator:

Okay I said.. and when my roll is flopping over I don’t wanna hear shit about it.. he tried to sound like the good guy and say he has never said anything about it.. but he has .. one time.. I lost track of my conscious thought and let it go and he said damn babe .. that’s a big stomach…I reminded him about this and he said so do something about it.. I reminded him that I have NO time to do something about it.. and also said wait woahh buddy your body isn’t hot either you and your fucking beer belly from drinking so much…

Okay, so not all NY blogs are well-written. And self-indulgence is only fun if it’s smart.

And Pennsylvania? Two PA blogs stood out to me, the first (Blogging Barbie) due to its spewing confessions doctored in lolcatz and aimspeak, and the second (Life Goes On, I Think) because the writing is so spare and gorgeous. Blogging Barbie was one of the first blogs I read—I found it through 20SB, which I joined in an attempt to attract readers to my own blog—and it was (and still is) one of the blogs that drew me to this new world.

Blogging Barbie is both intensely private (she is careful not to drop any identifying details about who she is, and where; there are no photographs, and her profile picture is Barbie’s beaming head), and very upfront about her emotional turmoil, past and present heartaches, financial worries, and family drama. Nothing appears edited, and the language is very playful in its deliberate misspellings, truncations, and neologisms. Hers was probably the blog that introduced me to expressions like “oh hai,” “craycray,” “crazykins,” and SHOUTING, EXTENNNNDED EXCLAMATIONS! BB’s voice is a mix between Cher from Clueless and country balladeer, with loads of woven-in quotes and snappy recaps.

I suppose its okay if I want to channel my inner 5yr old. Because, today? On my last day of my pediatrics rotation? Well, I kinda got my evaluation and grade. Long story short, my instructor said that she would be honored to write a recommendation for me. And that, I quote, “pediatric nursing is where I belong.” Oh, and I got an A in my clinical grade. It made me feel like this:

Followed by a picture of kids jumping on a trampoline.
The language and back-and-forth is maintained even when the tone turns somber:

He knew that I was naive, and he played me like a piece of chess.He got what he wanted. Someone to pay his way for him, and all the while got to accomplish his hidden agenda. My family and close friends knew that soemthing just wasn’t “right” about him when they met him….but when I looked at him? I just finally saw someone that finally loved me. A relationship, a happily ever after. For once, in a very long time, I was part of the ‘LOOOK AT ME! I HAVE A Boyfriend TOOO, and therefore my world is PERFECT!!!’ crowd. Nevermind that I was blinded by a facade, explaining away red flags that my gut told me indicated something seriously, seriously wrong.

As its title might indicate, Life Goes On, I Think also contains plenty of heartache and emotionally-wrought confessions (think lots of therapist visits, a mother who recommends plastic surgery and liposuction for her teenage daughter, self-isolating instincts, and soul-crushing break-ups), though its rhetoric—literate and full of “show-don’t-tell” moments—is a far cry from BB’s lolcat trills. The blogger, Paige Jennifer, is actually a writer, mostly of short stories (from what I can tell, at least), and it translates in posts that crafted like flash fiction, edited to for maximum dramatic effect. A phone conversation with her mother is loaded with action descriptions, used both to add context to the dialogue and to convey Paige’s emotions:

For whatever reason, “accident” triggers the vision of him dropping a cereal bowl from his grasp, milk splashing across the tile floor. Never mind the fact that it has been a decade since my father had the dexterity to carry a bowl of cereal.
“He’s in the ICU with brain trauma,” my mother continues.
I fall back into the pillows, glance at the television, turn my gaze to my sliding glass doors. The soft glow of a street light shines like a halo against the dark night sky.

Most of the posts have a defined beginning, middle, and end—the above post started with a discovery that turning over the couch cushions would stave off buying its replacement. In “It’s Just a Phase,” Paige describes the past months’ phases, from clementines to pomegrantes to frozen dinner hibernation. The bulk of the post is devoted to this last phase, and how, finally, Paige is able to burrow her way out, shoot an email to an old friend asking if he wants to meet up for drinks, buy tickets to Jamie Cullen, and plan trips to visit family in Sarasota and friends in D.C.:

Eating some homemade guacamole, listening to the plows slide piles of snow elsewhere, I realized I was done with hibernating. The novelty of seclusion had worn off. My isolation phase had passed. Instead of embracing the quiet, enjoying the space, I felt punchy. It was so bad, I considered all of the different colors I could paint my living room. People, I hate everything about paint, from picking out the color to rolling it on the wall.
Without skipping a beat, I opened my laptop and booked flights for a Sarasota trip, making sure my visit overlapped with Leslie and the kids. Then I bought tickets for a concert, finalized plans for Valentine’s Day, researched what plays I want to see, and started planning my annual springtime visit to hang with my favorite DC based girls. Before I knew it, my calendar was loaded up with social activities, all of which make me squeal with delight. So I guess you could so I was on to my next phase.

Pennsylvania is more of a hodgepodge than New York and New Jersey: it is both literate and teenybopping, open and private (the majority of the bloggers don’t include identifying details), edited and uncut. Like New Yorkers, Pennsylvanians write rarely of natural surroundings; unlike New Yorkers, man-made surroundings are also ignored. Of the three states, Pennsylvanians are the most introspective, and much of their writing has an air of self-explanation and even catharsis.

The Mid Atlantic states are not typically viewed as a region the way the Deep South or New England are, and I didn’t find any literature addressing a cohesive regional writing style, and yet the states share a major characteristic, albeit one manifested in a few ways: their bloggers are wordsmiths. They know how to give dialogue rhythm and punch, they bolster stories with sensory imagery and past memories, they spin quotes and love both high and low pop-culture references. They can be sarcastic and they are always self-aware. And they hook you with plot and developed characters all the more compelling because they are real.

Source consulted:
Broderick, James F. Paging New Jersey: A Literary Guide to the Garden State

But the blogger was writing about these foods with such affection, giving them human characteristics and movement capabilities, singing their praises with chirpy abandon. And for some reason, I was hooked, and once I’d read all her archives, I started clicking through her blogroll, and from these blogs I found others and others and others until one day I told myself all this lurking had really gotten out of hand, and imposed a ban which lasted until I started researching regionalism in American lifestyle blogs.
I didn’t include many food bloggers in my study, as most of them tended to stick to their bread and butter, but healthy-eating bloggers were perfect, as most of them wrote about their daily life and emotions in between pictures of meals. As I began to reread them, two things jumped out at me: a) nearly all of the blogs were written by women in the 18-24 age brackett, most of them in college or young professionals, and b) from coast to coast and top to bottom, they shared a common vocabulary.
The most striking elements of this vocabulary incorporate what I call “lolcatz” and “aimspeak” (mashed-up or deliberately misspelled words, truncated words, and acronyms), though many of the words are unique to the bloggers–words like “hangry” (hungry + angry, or hungry to the point of being cranky), “bloobz” (blueberries), naner (banana), hugh jass (lit. huge+ass, referring to an enormous salad). Homegirlese, some of which originated with Homegirl Can Eat, started by a then-highschool senior from San Francisco, and made up of particularly jubliant truncations, mutations, and elongations (“Yo bitties! Not much time to chitchat due to homework off the yingyang…” is a typical lead), appears in most of the more popular healthy-food blogs. The typical healthy-eating blog (HEB from here on out) tone is parts cutesy, crunk, sentimental, and intellectual. Below, more examples excerpted from the following blogs: Snackface (OH), Jess Likes it Hot (AZ), Eating Bender (AZ, though longtime Chicago transplant),The Broccoli Hut (AL), This Winding Road (MI), The Foodie Diaries (NY), Peanut Butter and Jenny (CT), Banana Cabana (SoCal), and Homegirl Can Eat (NorCal).

1) Homegirlese:
shweet, deets, love me some, yeow!, stylin’, momz, omg amazing, pops, temps, blasty, ’cause, I’m a hoe, beebz, helluva, roomie, blaaast, craaaaze, get on that stat, scoreee, jerz shore, arseee, coolio, offish, cam, phenom, you best believe, fav, buttload, lovemuffins, boyf, my girls, papa bender, muy indecision-friendly (and other spanglish), funemployed, Chewish, Kev Thug, schizo, ridic, margs, baby back baby back baby backkk, def feelin’, snugglin’, nail paintin’, loved it, obvs, sleaze it up, looove, ya dig?, shoo0, fam, mama, thangs, all ova, wata, whateva, flava, locaaa, fab, yo bitties!, off the yingyang, hAyyy!, WOOPWOOP, Saaasssssafrraaasssss!, homegirlz, chillin’, lez go, getting that shit, cross yo fingas, baller, bossy, mothafudging, marvy, dimey, tdf, adorbs, oh hai, forealz, I GOOD, supa, puh-leaaase, lookin’ busted, da best, who he was workin’ with, ay baybays,

2) Sentimental, olden-timey letter
lovelies, ta-ta, dearies, ciao for now, I have much to share with you, please pardon, Oh I’ve missed you so!!!, thank goodness, do share!, rollin’, hollaa!, hi pooks, love., what up, lookin’ fly, stunna shades, freakum dress, MamaJ, amaze, gittin’ it all night

3) cutesy foodie
chocolicious, happy tummy, handy-dandy avocado slicer, whipped up, beautimous, okra action, tummy-lovin, hangry, broc, eats, wrap-innards, chocolate PB as a “boyfriend,” barney butt, starbies, hugh jass, foodiful, broccoli barricade, snackie, snackiness, peanut butter blob, snickety-snack, ch-ch-cheetahs, nom, gasm, THE NOG, bloggies, moo-free, bloobs, naner, protein powda, YUMYUMYUM, got our froyo on, reunited with my blender, lunch closed up shop,
pineapple and cottage cheese sandwiches are worthy of the death penalty ’cause this combo is sinful
So, who wore it better? (It being the sriracha, of course…)
End scene. Let’s get to Monday’s eats.
Mingled in the morning: bloobs and Barney Butter happy trail

4) literate, intellectual, formal
worthy of note, reminiscent, hence, irked, relish, grandiose, vehemently, hereby, formulaic, that said, nary a Kroger Peanut butter, in the spirit of, without further ado, exquisite, devour

Plus some regionalisms and retroisms:
my sweet tooth was a callin’ (also kind falls into cat. 3), spiffy, who’d a thunk, comin’, glorious, allo, oy, delicioso, chica, jeeze, howdy, folks, phew

Why though? What is it about healthy eaters that leads them to write this way? Discounting Brooke from HCE, whose voice, crazeeee though it is, sounds genuine (and who may have started out as something of a healthy-eating blogger but is now a college life blogger), I’m guessing (and only guessing) that this zany, spunky, playful, faux-rap star voice bubble wraps what could be disordered behavior, or at least a compulsive need to document and share with all everything you eat. That most healthy-food bloggers aren’t really like Brooke is to me evinced by their need to make foods characters, make them play, make them important, even if they’re a reiteration of the last twenty breakfasts/dinners/lunches. There’s the need to heap superlatives upon the fuji apple (amaze), the cottage cheese with pineapple and fake maple syrup (sinful). And there are more obvious hints–references to irritation or gloominess over botched meals, mentions of perfectionism, of past issues, of refusals to eat salads because the dressing is “gaggy” (and not on the side) or split-pea soup because it’s cooked with ham. Most of these bloggers are heavily-to-fully vegetarian; many of them are vegan or glucose-interolerant, and an increasing number of them are raw-foodists.
All of them are intelligent, well-educated, attractive, physically fit. They have relationships, friends, nights out dancing in dive bars. Family is extremely important to all of them, and all seem to view their parents as quirky, endearing, and slightly ridic, worthy of names like “Kev Thug,” MamaJ, and Pooky. They are like the average upper-middle class, college-educated girl, only they have managed to make something productive out of their insecurities and compulsions. Or maybe they don’t have insecurities or compulsions–I’m hardly in the position to say. What I can say, is the language is fun and funny, lively, engaging, original, fresh. It’s transformative language–baked sweet potato and tofu becomes “cheetahs and ‘fu,” yogurt (always greek) is combined with oatmeal and almond butter in “yoatgurt with barney butt”–and the transformation is totally addictive.

Once grouped, I analyzed each blog individually, noting expressions and quirks, sentence structure and rhetorical traits, voice, categories, and privacy levels. After the individual analyses, I started pulling out region characteristics, reflected in the current Expressions/Quirks, Linguistically Speaking, Voice, Categories, and Privacy posts.
After I’m finished with region analyses, I will compare them, compare excerpts from each region’s richest blogs, and see whether what stands out today reflects past theories of literary regionalism.
Oye.
But fun!
If you have any questions, or if you are unhappy about my scruntinizing of your blogs, please feel free to email me (cdw250@nyu.edu).

Books:
Carlos Schwante’s The Pacific Northwest: An Interpretive History
Nicholas O’Connell’s On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwestern Literature
Lisa Gabbert’s “Distanciation and the Recontextualization of Space: Finding One’s way in a Small Western Community.“

In the works I read dealing with Appalachian literature, all touched on the struggles with place-based identity, manifested in the “migration and homecoming, disassociation and reaffiliation, denial and affirmation” of the narrator’s Appalachian-ness. Once accepted, Appalachian writers display an intense regional and ethnic pride- their stories are rarely placeless, and generally rooted in their writer’s backyard, interspersed with folklore, colloquial language, and specific sensory imagery.
The degree to which these conflicts and themes played out in the blogs depended mostly on the author’s age– the oldest blogger, Blind Pig and the Acorn, lived and breathed her mountain heritage. Her posts focused on folk music, photographic essays of her home in the hills of West Virginia, interviews with elderly “mountain people,” Appalachian expressions, and family lore, as well as recipes, gardening, and musings on motherhood. The youngest blogger, Erin Seabolt Bond, left her West Virginia home for Washington D.C., and her posts are nearly devoid of childhood and place memories, and though there is plenty of sensory imagery, it is restricted to people and emotions.
In Now and Then: Sense of Place in Appalachia, Pat Arnow speaks of the Appalachian writer’s “selective reinterpretation of a previously stigmatizing culture often culminating in symbolic or actual return to an idealized primordial community and homeplace” (3). The aspects of Appalachian culture discussed on Blind Pig and the Acorn are certainly selective- no mention is made of the illiteracy, poverty, or alcoholism that often accompanied life in the haunting shacks the author photographs.
This glorifying of selective detail forms the backbone of what Wilma Dykeman, who teaches courses on Appalachian studies at University of Tennessee in Knoxville, calls “parlor literature…full of romantic descriptions of the mountains, detailed records of mountaineers’ odd customs and peculiar speech” (26). If it isn’t parlor, Dykeman says, writing is in the “Sut Lovingood* tradition of old southwestern humor…dialect, tall tales, and earthy humor” (26). My classmate’s writing fell squarely in the latter, as does another Appalachian blog, Southern Fried Mama, whose heroine, Dejoni, hails from the “Redneck Riviera” in Kentucky. Dejoni refers to the her town as “hooterville,” her pickup as “the big rolling turd,” and her daughter as a “vienna sausage.” She regularly says things like “holy ritz cracker,” “badonkadonk,” and “tasmanian she-devils.” She has a rollicking narrative and a deadpan delivery well-suited to button-pushing asides. She regularly mocks her region, but not with any rancor, and if she hasn’t yet started to take pride in Appalachian customs, she is perfectly comfortable discussing aspects of mountain life, raccoon shootings, Cow Days and all.
Dejoni’s voice aligns with that Arnow deems characteristic of Appalachian literature: each is “terse, understated, expansive in its humor” (27). Many of Dejoni’s posts contain series of choppy, one-line-per-indent sentences whose flat delivery only add to the tongue-in-cheek weightiness. Though not always pertaining to humor, understatement is prevalent in all the Appalachian blogs I read- all the sensory detail and anecdotes come as are, free of emotion or emphatics.
Which is not to say they come free of embellishment: all of the bloggers use figurative language to some extent, mostly in the form of colorful similes and personification. Apart from Erin Seabolt Bond, regional expressions abound, and are rarely self-conscious. Southern dialect is also common- words like “ol,” “dang,” and “y’all,” along with myriad dropped g’s and exclamations in the vein of “bless her heart!”
In her introduction to Now and Then, Arnow equates a trip back to her hometown of Huntington, WV to “rereading a book…each page brings forgotten details back” (5). What separates Appalachia from the Deep South is its resistance to change, brought on by economic stagnancy and encouraged by a sense of “us vs. them” similar to that which isolates the crabbing communities of DelMarVa. Such conditions made for easy analysis- Appalachia is the only region where culture seemed unified, and, unlike the young Southern woman’s obsession with a prototype southern belle, a continuation (if also a melioration) of past heritage and traditions.
On the characteristics of Appalachian Literature, author Robert Morgan explains: “The setting and speech patterns are Appalachian. It has universal themes like struggle, family relationships, and loyalties. It includes Appalachian music and instruments such as the dulcimer, and strong women are often central characters” (Dunham, Teresa Diane. “Conversation with Shepherd’s 2003 Writer-in-Residence: Robert Morgan”). To these, I would add that penchant towards understatement, a love of colloquial expressions, punchy verbs, similes, and personifications, and a strong, often proud sense of place. All of these characteristics come out in the Appalachian blogs as well, and their frequency and strength seem most dependent on age (though figurative language is present in all, embracing of Appalachian culture and expressions is more present in the older bloggers’ writing), as well as location (West Virginia and Kentucky seem to have bolder, more generous narrative voices than does Tennessee).

On Appalachian Lit:
Arnow, Pat. “Now and Then: Sense of Place in Appalachia”
A Conversation with Shepherd’s 2003 Writer in Residence
Sicily Burn’s Wedding

Appalachian Bloggers:
Shamelessly Sassy (KY)
Southern Fried Mama (KY)
Pensieve (TN)
Like a Warm Cup of Coffee (TN)
Hifi Heart (TN)
Blind Pig and the Acorn (WV)

*Sut Lovingood was creation of Southwestern humorist George Washington Harris, a “nat’ral born durn’d fool” Tennessee mountain man with a “whiskey-proof gizzard” and the ability to “get into more durned misfortunate skeery scrapes, than anybody, and then run outen them faster, by golly, nor anybody” (Sut Lovingood. Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool.” Warped and Wove for Public Wear). Lovingood served as the prototype hillbilly, intended to be laughed at but never empathized with.

I’m starting with the Deep South (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansaw, and Georgia), because, at least geographically, it is our most southern region apart from Florida and Hawaii. Dead mules aside, many of the themes and some of the language common in Southern literature are present in these blogs. The most dramatic is the defense of certain elements of Southern culture against disembeddedment, and this is demonstrated through the frequent appearance of the textbook southern belle. Gracious, domesticated, a skillful entertainer, and sporting Lilly, natch, the southern belle serves as an aspirational figure in many of the young southern blogs, and her influence wanes in the more career-driven, well-traveled, and intellectual blogs. Alongside the traditional southern belle, the modern southern belle, with her sorority, her football team (and love of the tailgate), her (hoped for) manly-but-chivalrous man, and her blingy-preppy brands (Lacoste, Tory Burch, Burberry, Frye, and, as always, Lilly), and her ironcast status as Daddy’s little girl, is considered (by the same bloggers in awe of traditionale belle), to be all that a Southern college girl should be.

Belles aside, the football teams and sorority pride are also illustrative of another Southern theme- that of the importance of community, and the writer’s status within it. Community interaction is pervasive, and occurs through church groups and social gatherings, in favorite haunts with the people who populate them. Additionally, the sense of virtual community is strong. Southern bloggers are not merely friendly but tend to interact with their readers, asking them questions and addressing them mid-thought.

Family, which acts as branding iron, glue, and curse in Southern literature, is at least the first two in Deep South blogs. Bloggers maintain close relationships with their families, tend to live close by, and visit often. Parents, mothers in particular, are seen as pillars of strength, offering support and serving as inspiration. While a few bloggers have expatriated, some return to their hometowns, and the others settle in nearby states.

The Southern culture is one obsessed with heritage and fixated on a golden, simple, gentleman farmer past, a a culture that’s been nostalgic since its infancy, and this need for regional identity and nostalgia carry into the blogs. As per Elizabeth Fortson Arroyo via Sweet, Sassy, Southern, and Classy, “What could be more Southern than to obsess about being Southern?!” Regional cooking, old fashioned morals regarding courtesy, courtship, and charity, sepia-hued small towns, and childhood memories of fireflies, front porches, and family gatherings all work their way into most of them.

Christianity, which is present to various degrees in most Southern literature, forms a support structure and identity system similar to that of family for many of the Deep South bloggers. Faith, church, and doing “good works” in God’s name are common activities, addressed freely and with enthusiasm.

Lastly, Southern places, which function as clean slates, as hope, and as sources of identity in Southern literature, have a weaker influence in the blogs. Many of the younger bloggers scarcely touch on landscape at all– places (both new and familiar) are designated only by their inhabitants. In others, landscape is frequently described, especially during violent weather and the turning of seasons. Gardening and gardens are popular subjects, and when these bloggers travel, home is always on their minds.  Topographically and culturally, their descriptions align with popular, old-timey conceptions- the Alabama Gulf coast is littered with “spanish moss, crab boats,” and shacks serving shrimp and grits and etouffe, while the hills of Arkansas boast old swimming holes, “Mayberry” downtowns adorned in patriotic bunting, and bait shops that sell chicken liver alongside worms and minnows. Whether these are undistorted, or the only bits the authors remember, or re-imagined, amped up simulacra, I cannot say, as a) I have never been to most of these places, and b) those I have seen, I have seen with outsider eyes.

As far as voice goes:

Nostalgic, and culture is intrinsically aspirational and projective- there is a marked sense of wistfulness in most of the southern blogs, of nostalgia for the remote and near past (witness the myriad 90′s and early 00′s pop-culture references, and the many childhood place memories).

Carnivalesque and schizo, ranging from backwoods speech to cocktail chatter to metaphysical speculation: when they are not expostulating on true prince charmings or cupcakes, many southern bloggers turn meditative, philosophical, and lilting

Sense of drama, overstatement/hyperbolics: bloggers are divided here- some are more prone to understatement, which perhaps corresponds to the southern stoicism. Others (especially Georgia and Alabama) definitely fall into the emphatic, grandiose overstatement camp, and still others go for the woe-is-me disguised as sarcasm

And Description:

Southern writing is full of colors, personification, gentle, sweeping, sonorous adjectives. It is “rich and ornamental – fully rhetorically expressed”: Some blogs are rhythmic and poetic, employing figurative language, metaphor, personification, colorful verbs (especially sound and motion), and heavy sensory detail (mostly sight, with some taste, touch, and sound). Others, however, are much more spartan, with few adjectives, figurative language, or sensory details.

Detached pastoral abstractions that could be set anytime, anywhere: Not always- both Rocks in My Dryer (AR), The Future is Red (GA), and Nom de Plume (AL) give specific place details (spanish moss, crab traps, cozy hills, wide-open, flat, treeless ranch land, Cracker Barrell, Perkins, and Waffle House, “Abbots Farm where you can purchase Jellies. Peaches. Salsas.”). Most of the others rarely bring up place at all.

Stream of consciousness: Many of the bloggers use (intentionally or no) stream of consciousness, or barring that, conversational rambles. There is an unedited, thought-to-page quality to many of the posts, and they tumble, jerk short, and tumble on again, unedited and scattered.

Southern people, and indeed human nature as feckless, greedy, lazy, “no count,” and uproariously, if vulgarly, funny: It seems the southern humorist has not made it to the 21st century,  though irony, sarcasm, irreverence, and self-deprecation are very common. Situations and people (especially the blogger him/herself) are often mocked, but only in the expatriate blogs are they  identified as southern.

Southern American English- Absolutely, to the point of sounding forced. Hillbilly- ol, ya’ll, dropped g’s, dang, ain’t, and/or southern antique- riends (voc), have such a time, from the goodness of the bottom of my heart, precious, pique my interest, oh my word, Now, rattled on, blissfully good, sweet friend, dear friend, are used frequently in most of the blogs.

The analyses of two blogs I have revisited and re-examined for Southern imprints are as follows:

Preppy Southern Princess (GA)
Initial impressions- that the writer is sheltered, dramatic, young, and a bit bossy, hold true. There are a lot of vocatives, both to readers and to post subjects, and quite a bit of imperative. Emphatic, and often hyperbolic assertions abound, particularly around the subjects of boys, football, and Lilly. Overstatement is defacto, but, apart from clothes, friends, and family, there really isn’t much description, and place description is particularly sparse. There are some antique southernisms (mostly adjectives like “lovely,” and “wonderful), and ya’ll is everywhere.
The spectre of textbook southern belle hangs heavily, both through content- a review and recommendation for the Junior League Cookbook, a post about the necessary qualities of the writer’s future husband,    posts about charity work, and posts devoted to instructing young gentlemen in proper courtship behavior. Joining textbook southern belle is modern southern college girl- the sorority is all-important, as is the U-Tennessee football team (Go Vols!), being a daddy’s girl, and the holy trinity of pink, green, and pearls. Family, Christianity, and hard-core Conservatism are bedrock values.

Nom de Plume (AL)
This is primarily a food blog, but a literary one in the vein of Molly Wizenburg and Clothilde Dousoulier. The language is definitely “rich and ornamental,” laden with charming, unusual, and sonorous adjectives, personification, metaphor, and lush sensory imagery (using all of the senses but smell). Overstatement rules here as well, though the tone isn’t assertive or didactic. The narrative rambles, and uses a mixture of antique southernisms and hillbillyese. All descriptions (and there are many), are fully-evoked, whether their object is food, place, person, or emotion. Content-wise, sense of place and regionalism (especially as expressed through food) are very present, as are friends and family, community and community spots, chic frugality, cooking, close-by vacations and short trips, and books (particularly southern cookbooks- including the Birmingham, AL Junior League cookbook). Though cooking is the author’s profession, it also is a way of strengthening and nourishing her marriage, and, to a lesser degree, her friendships.

Books:
Romine, Scott. The New South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction.

Schmidt, Peter. Walter Scott, Postcolonial Theory, and Southern Literature.

Robertson, JC. “What Makes Southern Lit Southern?,” Southern Literary Review, 3 May 2009.

Leath Mills, Jerry. “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature in the 20th century,” Southern Literary Journal, Fall 1996.

I started with the aggregate Rust Belt analysis.
According to Barbara Allen, common topics in midwestern literature are agricultural life, weather, the town, its people, shops and shopowners, and daily small town life (Sense of Place, 29). David Pichaske echoes Allen, and adds what he calls “the pillars of midwestern life: a bountiful dinner table, familial love, occasional monitary reward, and the Word of God” (Rooted, 97). The loss of time is also a big theme, and can result in “nostalgic memories, exodus, and collapsed chronology” (99). Midwesterners are always grappling with home-leaving, returning, leaving again. Home represents the “Edenic past,” the “garden myth,” while away signifies progress, future in its “distant towers of refinement and culture” (Weber, Ronald, The Midwestern Ascendency in American Writing 24). Some of the bloggers speak with mitigated fondness for their hometowns; most of the Ohioans and the Illinoisan have unbrindled hometown pride. In Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana, the bloggers have struggled with leaving their hometowns- two of them have left; the other two leave sporadically.

The weather is certainly a heavy hitter in ENC blogs, and as in midwestern literature, it is often used to introduce a story (Pichaske, 44). None of the bloggers I read were farmers, or worked on farms- as its moniker indicates, the Rust Belt has, in the past century, gone from being almost entirely agricultural and rural to being industrial, commercial, and urban. Perhaps because much of industry is machine-based, steady, and predictable (or was until two years ago),  bloggers rarely discuss their careers.  As for religion, one of the bloggers was a somewhat lapsed Jew, and some of the others were Christian, but only one mentioned this, and the charity she performed in its name, with any regularity. The town and all its parts though, form the backbones of some of the blogs, and played important roles in all but one of the others. There are many restaurant reviews, which tend to prioritize decor, and service, and the backgrounds of their owners over the taste and presentation of the food. Festivals are very popular subjects, as were local sports games and blogging community meet-ups. Missing are the “credible accounts of the incredible”- instead we get credible accounts of the credible (Allen, 30).

The midwestern voice, as per Allen and Pichaske, is fairly laconic, straightforward, unpretentious, awkward, bashful, meaning-driven, wry, understated, and entirely lacking in melodrama. Most of this applies to the ENC blogs, save for bashful and understated. Some of the ENC bloggers were tentative, bracketing their statements with thought modifiers and adverbial qualifiers. Others were more declarative, using assertions backed up by further assertions or by visual or anecdotal details. Most of them had a penchant for hyperbole couched in simple, undramatic language. Pichaske writes of the midwesterner’s skepticism towards theories and his preference of experience-based knowledge, and this comes out through the dominance of the narrator, his thoughts, assessments, and illustrative personal anecdotes.

Midwestern writing favors short phrases that sometimes trail off for effect. ENC bloggers use simple sentences and two-part complex compounds, where the first part is an adverbial qualifier and the second is a (usually) independent statement. Static sentences, or stand-alone assertions, are common in both books and blogs, though, as previously noted, many of the assertions are substantiated.
Pacing-wise, midwestern literature is jumpy stuff, full of “syntactical leaps and idiosyncratic phrasing” (Pichaske, 45), and the same can be said for the blogs. Transitions, in particular, tend to be either discontinuous or bumpy.
Descriptions are place-centric, be it town or country, and they are rendered specific through brands, trade names, streets, as well as earth, land, and home imagery. The ENC bloggers love their brand and trade names, and their town destinations, and they frequently bring up the weather, but only in Michigan and Wisconsin is the land itself discussed at any length.
Midwestern speech peppers colloquial and retro-sounding phrases amidst common american english, and the ENC bloggers do the same, along with aimspeak- lol-type abbreviations and cutesy mashups, truncations, and mispellings.

In addition to the aggregate characteristics, I also revisited two blogs that I felt occupied opposite ends of the quality spectrum- one educated, polished, and generous, the other ridden with grammatical errors, narrative jumps, voice switches, and sparse imagery. The authors of Rhiannon Revolts (WI) and It’s All About Me! Deal With It! (OH) are of similar age and (from what I can gather) economic background, but one is a grad student at ??, with abroad experience and a degree in American Studies from Smith, while the other toils at what sounds like an hourly wage job in the same area, if not town, she grew up in. Below are my individual analysis:

Rhiannon Revolts (WI)- Very sharp, at times knowingly querelous, and prone to undramatic exaggerations and generalizations. All statements are bracketed by thoughts and personal tie-ins, and the writing is intelligent, even bookish, without being didactic or weighty or pompous. Posts waver between memoir and in-depth book review- they are precise, thoughtful, full of grounding details (brand names, restaurants, authors), and very anecdotal.

MIdwestern traits displayed:

• importance of weather, and using it as an introduction
• earth, land, and home imagery
• brands, categories, signs, particular place details- restaurants, local speciality foods, events
• importance of family- lives with her mother; her brother is close by
• unique midwest stops and starts, syntactical leaps, idiosyncratic phrasing (asides, post-posted clarifiers, random SHOUTED COLLOQUIALISMS, ellipses, dependent+dependent+colon+voc+command, fronted conjunctions and transitionals)
• colloquial phrases (some antiquated, some anglo, some midwest) set amongst common english
• uncolored by melodrama or tragedy
• pragmatic
• self-reflexive, oral poetics, collage pastiche, neorealism (those grounding, specific details and the heavy presence of the author)
• unpretentious plainspeak

Blatantly not there:
religion, bashfulness, rough language, content trumping style, landscape as a release from/protection against the anxieties of civilization

It’s All About Me! Deal With It! (OH)
First off, this is not educated writing- unintentional fragments and spelling errors abound, and the transitions between ideas are very choppy. The general second is used, often in assertions. First person assertions, or static sentences, are very common, and are backed up with further assertions, but few illustrations. For the most part sentences are sparsely adorned, and the majority are complex compound (adverbial/transitional/conjunction intro+independent/dependent). The language is a mixture of plain american english, cutesy aimspeak, and antique phrases. The voice comes off as quite very young, owing to the simplicity of the structure and (sometimes content) of the sentences, the flat declarations, and the exclamations, but some topics are certainly more adult (domestic abuse, drug use, and sex), so the overall impression is of a culturally and financially impoverished, stunted teen’s diary.

Midwestern traits displayed:

• plain, awkward (lexically and syntactically)
• uncolored by melodrama or tragedy
• shear things off, a minimum of words arranged for a maximum effect (all those flat declarations can actually work to her advantage)
• weather factors into posts
• some idiosyncratic phrasing (conjunction intros, vague subjects, “I have but $ for the garnishment, post-posed affirming queries, ellipses)
• unpretentious plainspeak
• definitely a motherload of realism, rough rather than elegant, and very pragmatic.
• some neorealism as well, especially as relating to physical appearence
• colloquial and aimspeak snuggled amongst common (if shoddy) american english

blatantly not there:
bashfulness, religion, oral poetics, collage pastiche, landscape details

So…what, then? For the most part, the Rust Belt blogs line up rather neatly over the midwestern characteristics, and while the two blogs above are not, in terms of much of the subject matter and writing quality, alike, they do share many of the core midwestern characteristics, in particular the usuage of colloquial phrasings, the jumpy transitions, weather as background and plot construct, the unpretentious, straightforward plainspeak, and the importance of rooting names, places, and signs. As this is the first group I’ve done, though, I can’t yet call it a rhetorically distinct region- that pronouncement awaits further analysis.

Books:

Least Heat Moon, William. PrairyErth (A Deep Map)
Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey.

Pichaske, David. Rooted: Seven Midwest Writers of Place.

Allen, Barbara. Sense of Place: American Regional Cultures.

willing to talk:

• religious beliefs: 1
• job loss: 1
• marital strife: 1

willing to show their faces: 3/4

and their children’s faces: 2/2

the feed: cooking, family/heritage recipes, ethnic foods*, Hawaiian restaurants, airplane food

the body beautiful: 10k

the office: 9-5

love and squalor: marriage*, life as an army wife

the rough: hints of marital strife, marital and financial stress

the little things: daily life in Italy, Hawaiian culture*, Filipino culture, things to do/eat/see in Maui, crafting

internets: twitter, blogging*

the world: Italy and its culture, cuisine, and landscape, the Philippines, immigrating, island hopping, LA, Vegas

setting: Maui*, Hawaii*,  Italy

houseplay: parenting*

family*

gods: Christianity, church

teacher: informing, sing-songy, show and tell*

perked: spirited

drama: punctuated, opinionated

youth: teenage spews and gesticulations, 90s surfisms and valleygirl*

unadorned: simple, honest about emotions without being emotional*

personal essay: light musings, loads of memories, place descriptions, calm, wistful, rhythmic

raw: play-by-play*, spoken word*, direct address, meta, stream of conscious*

movement: jumpy*, zooming in and out, tumbling

delivery: rambling, note form, summary*

at play: playful, tongue-in-cheek melodrama

written as: cooking/travel show host*, family magazine op-ed, letter to a dear friend