2025 MIDWEST CONTEST WINNER

"There was so much story shared so sparingly, in such a small but packed place. I loved how the museums lacked coherence, and were instead collections of named and unnamed items, suggesting meaning not in theme but in the small details that make up a life."
Amber Sparks, Guest Judge

Outdoor Museums of Assemblage Art

Flash by ​Jodi Cressman

Noah Porify Outdoor Museum, Joshua Tree, 2021

We came in August.  One week after my mother died.  One day after dropping off our youngest son for his first year of college in Los Angeles.  One hour after I texted a friend: I am undone.  

We were alone, walking through the unroomed desert museum, past the inverted arch of stacked, unplumbed toilets, past the empty folding chairs lined in rows on the bed of a trailer with flat tires.  I studied the beads of sweat gathering on David’s neck as he watched a wall of disconnected televisions playing a composite signal of sun and sand. 

Nothing is labeled. I named a sculpture “Ledge of Pants” to corral in language the disquiet of jeans stuffed into shoes and mounted on a horizontal plank at eye-level.  They looked like teenagers half-taxidermied. I thought of their mothers, searching for the top halves in some unseen world. I thought of my mother.  Of how I had found her sock in my drawer. 

It got hot.  We saw each sculpture twice.  Are we done?  David asked.  My lips formed the shape of the word yes. 

Centralia, Oklahoma, unincorporated, January 2025

We drove ten hours from Chicago to see the ruins in Centralia, classified as abandoned on a ghost town website.  Like an overturned purse, the contents of the buildings were tumbled out, exposed. In my pictures, I can see the interior of the car reflected in the scene.

Heaped on the switchgrass outside the former post office: a caulk gun, Christmas tree topper, plastic chair with metal legs, aluminum boat with stuffed panda face-down on the bow.  A chimney stood without its house. On Grand Avenue, a blue cooler tipped to the side, balls of wire, an assortment of trucks without wheels.  It was arrangement without design. 

We spilled out of the car.  My son Dox had been driving, his girlfriend Stella up front, me in the back, all wanting a closer look at a concrete gnome teetering on a pile of tires.  A cat perched on the outer sill of a boarded window met our eyes. Some of the chickens were in coops.  I wanted back inside the car.  

​They would drop me in Tulsa for my return flight while they kept on for L.A.  They would smell the smoke from the fires as soon as they crossed into the Inland Empire.

Living History Museums, Colonial Williamsburg and Shipshewana Indiana, 2010

Our sons, seven and eight, refuse to watch the engraving demonstration in Colonial Williamsburg.  They yank the sleeves of each other’s blue velvet waistcoats, knock off the tricorne hats that David’s aunt insisted on. They do not want to watch the taxation debate or read the placard about Peyton Randolph. They do not want to answer my question: And who do you think hauled the stones from the creek to build this house?  They want blacksmithing and musket-firing.  They want drum and no fife.  They shove biscuits in their mouths, in each other’s mouths.  They must have that wooden gun.  

On the drive home to Chicago, we stop in Shipshewana, Indiana, where, forty years earlier, my Mennonite grandfather would take my brother and me to the livestock auctions. Next to the auction is a new hotel, constructed in the shape of a farmhouse. We park our minivan beside the buggies tied to the posts in front of Yoder’s Department Store, where I insist on buying popcorn for nostalgic reasons.  My sons look long at the horses.  They look at the coverings pinned to the women’s hair. They look away from me, into my past becoming theirs, into some transient knowledge of deep time. 

Jodi Cressman

​Jodi Cressman teaches literature and writing at Dominican University, just outside of Chicago.  Her scholarly articles and books focus on the intersection of literature, medicine, and visual culture.  Her creative work has been published or is forthcoming in Chicago Quarterly Review, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Terrain, and Gulf Stream.  She is a nonfiction reader for TriQuarterly, an alum of the Kenyon Review and BreadLoaf writer’s workshops, and a former fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.  She is currently at work on a hybrid memoir about slow violence in American towns named Centralia.