Two Sides of Bill Holm's Writing

At eighteen, what I wanted most to see in world was Minneota city limits receding, for last time, in rear view mirror of an automobile driving east to New York, Boston, Washington, wrote Bill Holm in title essay of his book Music of Failure (32). Holm fought life in small-town Minneota until day he left for college in 1961, and after graduate school in Kansas, he took a teaching job at Hampton Institute in Virginia. There for first time he encountered Easterners, with their pervasive feeling of empty-hearted rootlessness, books used as blunt instruments, [and] a sneering disbelief that hayseed farmers had souls, much less intellects (Music 33). Unable to let these misconceptions stand unchallenged, Holm began to write of his Midwestern home town, population 1400. Then in 1977 he returned from East Coast to Minneota, invested $5,000 in a house across street from Hope Lutheran Church, and taught for a quarter of a century at Southwest State University (not fifteen miles down road). Although he traveled extensively overseas, especially in Iceland and China, he embraced his roots, noting with some relish in 2008 that while other winners of McKnight Foundation Distinguished Artist Award may have spent most of their lives working in Minnesota, all of them have been as 'damned Minnesotan' as [I am] (McKnight 52). Holm's Minnesota roots are especially evident in his writing style, which shows outsiders magic of rural life and language while allowing natives to see their home in a new way. His mixture of rural Minnesota dialect and educated, lyrical prose deserves a close examination. A heavily corrected typescript of Music of preserved in a file in its publisher's desk drawer, offers a glimpse of that style in process of development, and an opportunity--rare these days--to engage in textual criticism. Both Music of Failure and Boxelderbug Variations appeared in fall of 1985, Holm's forty-third year. Both were published by small presses just getting their feet on ground: Music was Plains Press' fourth book; Boxelder was Milkweed Editions' sixth. Although Holm had previously self-published some saddle-stapled chapbooks, these were first two real books from a writer whose lifetime ambition had long been to die a famous author, a distinguished and respected professor at an old university (Music 56). Thanks in part to years spent refining his message and developing an audience, Music of Failure did well by its author. In 1987 it was reprinted as Prairie Days, with a ninety-three-word introduction by Garrison Keillor, published (with a cover suspiciously similar to that on Keillor's best-selling Lake Wobegon Days) by Saybrook Press of Dallas, Texas, and distributed by W. W. Norton of New York. essay, The Music of Failure, slightly condensed, reappeared in David Pichaske's anthology of rural writing Late Harvest (Paragon House, 1991), which was published in both paperback and cloth, then pirated in 1996 by one Smithmark Publishers. That title essay also reappeared in Holm's later Milkweed Editions book heart can be filled anywhere on earth (also 1996). In 2010, year after Holm's death, University of Minnesota Press reprinted Music of Failure in an edition which added Holm's essay Is Minnesota in America yet? draft under consideration here dates to 1985. It has been extensively revised in Bill's own handwriting, some pages several times--in pencil, blue ballpoint, dark blue felt tip, red ballpoint, and at least two types of black ink. These 95 pages of typewritten text are certainly not Holm's first drafts, which would have been hand-written, like two hand-written pages of additions to The Grand Tour, which include Holm's memorable warning that the divine lives in all human, ... Sacredness is unveiled through your own experience (12; Figure 1). Holm, who grew up in a day when high school typing class was reserved for secretarial girls, disdained typewriter (and computer) keyboard his entire life. …

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