If you believe that life should be full of adventure , then you have to willing to let your kids have them, too.

There was that sound again–snap, then a footfall. She tried to whirl around as a dark form–Dear God–sprang with a splash from the darkness–grabbed her from behind, shoved her under the water.

A lot of people see it as a kind of failure to stay in the place where you’re from, especially if you’re from the Midwest. Like ambition is geographic.

In Tulsa, a girl would no sooner have run around with unstraightened hair than she would have run around naked. It would have been worse than running around naked, letting everyone see your naps (40).

Sometimes, in a tight game with runners on, digging in at short, ready to break with the ball, a peace I’d never felt before would paralyze the diamond. For a moment of eternal stillness I...

They talk about big skies in the western United States, and they may indeed have them, but you have never seen such lofty clouds, such towering anvils, as in Iowa in July.

They are the largest collection of freshwater lakes in the world. They border eight U.S. states and the Canadian Providence of Ontario and at time have supplied water to one-third of Canadians and one-seventh of...

I wanted to make it in New York. I thought if I went out to the Midwest, I’d be burying myself. But I was wrong.

One of the few things I still miss from my Midwest childhood was this weird, deluded but unshakable conviction that everything around me existed all and only For Me. Am I the only one who...

I’m from the Midwest. We like to know who our neighbors are.

You can take the boy out of the Midwest, but you can’t take the Midwest out of the boy.

All I know is that the fear I have been battling all night is breaking down the door of my ignorance. As my feet slam down I feel not the hard, wet asphalt but the...