The virus arrives, the world shutters, and in Washington, DC, the homesick journalist Christopher Vondracek—recently relocated from South Dakota—starts scrolling through digitized oil paintings by the Midwestern nostalgia artist Terry Redlin. Vondracek traces Redlin’s coming-of-age during the Farm Crisis as well as his own fleeting memories of a small-town wracked with upheaval from farm foreclosures and a shifting political perspective on the prairie. The author takes an inside-out look at the entrenched cultural tropes and portraits of rural, rustic nostalgia in an age of global grain markets, collapsing rural communities, and changing heartland values.

Vondracek often asks of this land, “Is it a Redlin?” seeking to reconcile the idyllic portrayal of his American heartland with the reality unfolding on TV and social media channels. In Redlin or Rodin he looks to understand how the romantic palette of a farm country pastoral scene can obscure the industrialization of the very same land.

Christopher Vondracek is a Washington correspondent for the Minnesota Star Tribune. He's also author of memoir, Dancing with Welk, and a poetry collection, Rattlesnake Summer. He grew up in rural Minnesota.

Reid Forgrave has written about sports and other topics for GQ, the New York Times Magazine, and Mother Jones, among other publications. His specialty is long-form, narrative storytelling. He has covered college football and the NFL, as well as college and professional basketball and the Summer Olympics, for Fox Sports and CBS Sports, and he currently writes for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. The article in which he first wrote about Zac Easter is included in Best American Sports Writing 2018. A past life found him working at The Des Moines Register in Iowa as well as several other metropolitan newspapers. Forgrave lives in Minneapolis with his wife and two sons.

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