It’s coming up on a decade since we hatched the idea of Everyday Life in Middletown—an archive of one-day diaries and other accounts, written by volunteer writers living or working in Muncie, of their ordinary lives. In that time, we’ve had more than one hundred people contribute, collected almost five hundred one-day diaries, and assembled an archive of more than 600,000 words.
The project is now drawing to a conclusion of sorts. We’ll cease our collections at the end of this year. At the same time, we’re writing a book about the stories the archive tells—about our town, our moment in history, and the fine details of how we live our lives. We started writing about the archive in 2019—when it was still relatively small, its purposes and value still taking form. Since then, it’s slowly become clear that what we’ve been writing about is a distinctive place living through an extraordinary time. In the most basic but most accurate form, our book is about how it has felt to live here amidst the multiple crises of our historical moment. It’s about the ways life has gone on here—and the ways, subtle or otherwise, that it’s changed—amidst the turbulence of history.
Having spent so much time thinking about the archive, sorting and analyzing its themes, it’s especially interesting to us to get new diaries now–to see the ways that they’re confirming and challenging our sense of what we’ve learned.
We collected a new diary set last month, and you can read them here.
Here is a short review of how the diaries resonate with some of the book’s major themes:
Attachment: Following the work of the late cultural critic Lauren Berlant, we’re interested in how people attach—to each other but also to things, places, and, especially, visions of the future. In a lovely diary this week, a new contributor [N01] writes about trying to get pregnant. Amidst the details (preconception vitamins, drugstore ovulation tests, timing apps), she writes briskly but movingly of her hopes, anxieties, excitements, and disappointments.
Meanwhile, a steadfast contributor [C46] navigates a recent move away from Middletown to follow her wife, who took another job; she narrates the uncertain feeling of imaginatively sorting new and different kinds of jobs, parrying her worry that nothing good will materialize.
Belonging: Another longtime contributor and Muncie native [C45] explains his ambiguous feelings about the city. He’s more connected and anchored locally than many of his friends who have moved here for jobs. At the same time, he sees himself as more realistic than some recent arrivals about what he describes as a politically reactionary strain among many Muncie natives.
Meanwhile, another new diarist [N02] tells of settling back in Muncie after a long career spent moving frequently from place to place. This writer and his wife chose Muncie, he writes, because of “the life we could enjoy here and the work being done to build a good life alongside those who live in our most challenged areas in the city.” Another [A23] recounts a conversation with a “townie” about local resentment of Ball State, causing him to recognize his positionality, as a highly educated professional and a non-native, in between the university and town communities.
Placed side by side, these three writers offer a nuanced view of something we analyze in detail in the book—the degree to which attitudes towards Muncie take the shape of what we call a “Rust Belt structure of feeling,” focused on the city’s industrial past, economically divided present, and current revival efforts.
Media. Aside from such biological certainties as sleep and eating, nothing is more ubiquitous in our diarists’ accounts than consumption of media, and especially social media. We’ve observed that people are ambivalent about their media consumption, imagining themselves as knowing users, resistant to the power of the algorithms to keep them hooked, reflective about the role of social media in our politics, moralistic in their self-assessment of their sometime overuse, quick to posit social media usage as an addiction or a distraction from face-to-face engagement or other more wholesome pursuits.
A typical range or practices and attitudes plays out in this diary set. Upon waking, writer F56 goes online, to Facebook and to YouTube videos, to calm a typical morning nervousness. Diarist B37 reads on his IPad, flipping from the New York Times, “when it gets too heavy,” to Facebook marketplace, even then questioning his use of time. Diarist C46 puts some tomato plants up on an online trading site. And, in another dynamic we’ve noted, social media time often seems worthy of notice—but just barely. Diarists record that it happens, but it seems to leave little mark, registering opaquely: “a quick social media and headlines check” [A01]; “I surf the internet on my phone while I eat; bad news mostly” [A02]; “I checked my weather apps and scanned social media” [B35].
Work. The archive testifies to the conflicts and tensions around our shared understandings of work. We both strive for productivity and resist the gospel of productivity; middle-class people feel cultural pressure to enjoy their work and find meaning in it, and a countervailing pressure to locate life’s real sources of meaning elsewhere. Wednesday, June 4 saw our writers experience a typical variety of workdays—from home, in the office, part-time. One writer stayed home sick, but his work still “found a way to find me at home ….”
Another diarist offered this reflection, which testifies beautifully to our conflicted shared feelings: “I’m a product of Midwestern farmers originally from the Southeast. Thus, I’ve inherited a work ethic of a day spent doing nothing is a day wasted. But is it really? I have friends who would emphatically argue either side: the glory and toil of (‘murican) labor, vs. the need to ‘pause, reflect, or be chill for awhile. Fortunately I’ve been corrupted with neither dogma, or at least today I’m not going to feel guilt for it.”
We invite you to immerse yourself further in the everyday lives of our writers by reading the diaries for yourselves. We’ll be sharing more about the archive, and the book, in the weeks and months ahead. And if you care to share your thoughts about our ideas for the book, we’d love to hear from you. You can write to us at edlmiddletown@gmail.com.