Reaching Our Destination with Spirit Guides?

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Image via Boswell Books

Barrett Swanson grew up in Southeast Wisconsin and currently lives in Madison. A 2015 recipient of a Pushcart Prize, his short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times Magazine, The Guardian and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Among his unapologetically honest and biting critiques on society is a 2019 article in Harper’s, “Men at Work,” that surreally describes his volunteer role as an actor at a National Disaster Preparedness Training site in the days before COVID-19 reached America. Much of Swanson’s recent work eerily juxtaposes our increasing difficulty in distinguishing reality from imagination.  

In this post-truth, fake news, conspiracy-laden society, where do folks turn for answers? In his debut, Swanson takes us to Summerland, a term for Heaven in the Spiritualist tradition, guided by the belief that spirit guides (dead people) help each person reach their eternal destination. Each essay in this timely collection takes readers down some of the more obscure rabbit holes people find themselves in as they attempt to make sense of society. In Lost in Summerland, Swanson introduces us to characters who gather in upstate New York to summon ghosts and a group of Wisconsin veterans who turn to farming after finding disillusionment on the battlefield. These are not stories to explain what is happening right now and why, but stories of the people who are struggling to understand the what and the why of this modern moment.  

Swanson will appear at a virtual event cosponsored by Boswell Books and Friends of the Milwaukee Public Library 7 p.m., May 20. He’ll chat with Steven Wright, author of the novel The Coyotes of Carthage.