Michael Welch is the Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Review of Books. He’s a brilliant writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He’s a tireless advocate of literary Chicago. Now, with the release of On an Inland Sea, he adds acclaimed anthologist to this impressive list of credentials.
The book gathers thirty-three writers from all over the Great Lakes region to offer us essays and poetry touching on everything from accented names to zebra mussels to shipping lanes to negative capability (“the state,” explains contributor Kristin Idaszak, “of not-knowingness”). The result is a striking, coherent portrait of a region that much of the rest of the country might not see as a unified entity—when they think of the Great Lakes at all. This anthology will open skeptics’ eyes. Michael and I connected over video chat to discuss distant horizons, fish fries, ecological collapse, and a whole lot else from On an Inland Sea.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Victor Ladis Schultz
How did this anthology come about? Tell me about working with Belt Publishing.
Michael Welch
I thought about this anthology when Belt put out an open call for anthology ideas. And for a while I was batting around the idea of “I love Chicago, should I do a Chicago anthology?” They’d already published a few of those. So I was like, what can I do that’s new here? What am I really interested in, what calls to me?
And when it comes to my writing and my background, I’ve always been really drawn to fire, because my dad was a Chicago firefighter, the history of Chicago, like that element has really always been important to my life and my writing. And then water was the other one, kind of living my entire life alongside the Great Lakes.
So from there I started thinking about past books I’ve loved reading about the Great Lakes. I thought about Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, and how important that book was as I was starting to learn about the lakes. And then I started thinking about whether I’ve been able to find a book that looks at all the Great Lakes, a full region, versus, like, I found a lot of books that are about Lake Michigan or Lake Superior, and only looking at one body. And what I really wanted to create was this portrait of the entire region and look at, you know, the Great Lakes region spans hundreds of miles and eight states and an international border. But what are the shared experiences there, despite the differences? So that’s really where the anthology came from.
And then Belt all around has just been there. They’re the best. Anything I wanted to do, or lead the anthology towards, they supported me. There’s just been so much excitement, not only from Belt, but the community around the Great Lakes. So that’s been really fun.
Victor Ladis Schultz
You broke the book into three sections—“Boundaries & Boundlessness,” “Wreck & Renewal,” and “Futures, Unmoored & Undetermined.” Tell me about that structure.
Michael Welch
Yeah, I was starting from this really personal and individual place, and that’s where the first section, “Boundaries and Boundlessness” is. I was thinking a lot about just awe. And I write about it in my intro, this idea of feeling so alone alongside the Great Lakes, where you can look across the lake and not see anyone across but there is someone across that body of water probably doing the same thing looking out across the lake.
And so I started looking at how other people are feeling living alongside the lakes. How is it fueling the creativity in their lives? And then how is it shaping who they are? I was really trying to find a way to draw that connection between all those little individual experiences in that first section. From there, I wanted to move into a more collective space, so “Wreck and Renewal” is all about looking at the communities that we built alongside the lakes: How have we worked in harmony with them? And then also what are all the ways that we have fucked up the lakes, right? Looking at this history of destroying or manipulating the lakes—like in the 1970s, people used to say that Lake Erie was dead because we just destroyed that environment—so looking at the ways in which we got ourselves to the brink and, and then how we pulled ourselves back from it.
The last section, “Futures, Unmoored & Undetermined,” I was really looking at all the threats we are currently facing. What does our future look like? How do we actually shape that? And how do we take ownership of what the Great Lakes will be in the future? I mean, this is probably the most under threat this region has ever been between invasive species and climate change. Honestly, I don’t think this really made it in the book, but the need for fresh water between climate change and the AI boom … we are looking at the largest source of fresh water we have. How do we chart a path forward that honors the lakes and protects them?
Victor Ladis Schultz
Your introduction describes how the Great Lakes create apparent contradictions: a sense of awe that is both personal and communal, or a sense of simultaneous separation and connection imposed by the lakes’ vastness. Contributor Christina Olson, in her essay, describes a similar effect: “There’s something about a Rust Belt city that can either kick your teeth down your throat or hug you close.” Can you speak on this a bit? Does some sense of paradox prevail if you live close to a Great Lake?
Michael Welch
Yeah, that’s a good question. The Great Lakes are this interesting and strange natural wonder where, despite how grand and awe inspiring they can be, they feel accessible, and they feel really intimate, in a way. In my intro, I wrote about how growing up alongside a Great Lake, I was able to convince myself that I lived on the edge of the world. And a part of that is me just being an annoying Chicagoan, thinking that Chicago is the only place in the world. But I mean, it is true that commuting up and down the lake every day and looking to your left and seeing nothing but the lake, it really feels like all you have is right in front of you.
There’s this balance where it’s like you can swim in the lake in the summer and skate on it in the winter, but at the same time it can so quickly take you in its terrifying current. So it’s this balance between loving this wonder and being so intimately close to it and understanding that it is so much bigger and more powerful than you. I just think that is really interesting.
When you take it further out and start looking at the Rust Belt, I am fascinated by the ways in which this region was built on the back of its power, right? Between shipping and manufacturing, it’s so dependent upon the lakes.
And Chicago in particular—I love the history of Chicago because it’s so implausible that the city was able to become what it is. It was only able to become what it is because of the lake, but at the same time, the city had to dredge itself eight feet out of the lake’s muck; like, we literally had to raise our city up because the lake kept taking it. We had to reverse the river. The lake allowed for this region to become what it is, but at the same time, we had to dominate it in a way. Which brings all those difficult questions about what does that mean, what is our responsibility around it all, you know?
Victor Ladis Schultz
The Great Lakes in this volume are often the site of epiphany. I’m thinking of Antonio Díaz Oliva, in his lovely essay, walking along Montrose Beach as he realizes he needs to leave academia, or you in the intro dangling your feet over Lake Michigan, contemplating where you wanted to live after grad school. Is a natural wonder like a Great Lake a locus of epiphany, or did it feel recurrent here only because good writers often gravitate toward epiphany?
Michael Welch
It’s probably a little bit of both. It does go back to the inherent intimacy around living along the Great Lakes, and I feel like it fosters this deep connection with the land and yourself, right? I don’t want to go full Ralph Waldo Emerson on it, but I do think there’s something about being in nature and being alongside something that feels so much bigger than you that makes you kind of turn inward, and I think you can see in the anthology that it just clearly fuels the creativity of the writers living in this region.
What’s also really interesting about the Great Lakes is—and I write about this in my intro—that if you live in the Rocky Mountains, you know exactly how to get home because you look at the mountains and you go in that direction and you know it leads you home. Growing up, I couldn’t see the lake from where I lived, but I always knew that east led you toward the lake. You could kind of feel its push and pull a little bit, and I think there’s just something … I don’t know, it feels crazy to say, but it feels like a little bit mystical, and there’s just something really, really compelling and spiritual about it almost, and you can see it in the way that it’s bringing out these kinds of creative epiphanies in the authors.
Victor Ladis Schultz
Maybe because I’ve never been a big Bloody Mary drinker, Sarah Pazur’s essay taught me what a snit was (from Wiktionary: “A beer chaser commonly served … with a Bloody Mary cocktail in the upper Midwest states”). The book is filled with other references to food—Great Lakes walleye, coney dogs in Detroit, garbage plates in Rochester, wild rice near Grand Portage. Frankly, it made me hungry at times. Are we spread too far and wide to make any unifying statements about food, or is there in fact a Great Lakes cuisine?
Michael Welch
As I was building the anthology, I wasn’t even thinking about the theme of food. Now, as you’re saying it, I can see it. Okay, it’s not as sexy as living along the ocean where you can bring in these beautiful fish and oysters and all that good stuff, but we live along a really rich area for fishing. I grew up in Chicago, and I spent seven or so years in Milwaukee, so I’m accustomed to fish fries, which are a deep tradition in the Midwest, and I think that comes back to how it’s so beautiful that you can live off that land and just pull the fish straight out, and then it becomes the centerpiece for the community to come around and enjoy.
It’s also blue-collar, working-class, accessible food. Like, there is this tradition of shift work, and then getting off of work, and then this is the thing that sustains you, and it leads to really interesting and delicious combinations, but it is very much about how do we keep going, you know? It’s very down-home with the earth, no frills to it. And there’s something beautiful to that. I love that.
Victor Ladis Schultz
On an Inland Sea abounds with transition—Lina Tran’s discussion, in her essay on Milwaukee’s last public drinking well, of the water below meeting the public above; Megan Neville’s statement about the Great Lake of her beautiful poem (“All we think is her is only / passing through”); Sara Maurer’s meditation on the ever-milder winters of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. What is it about the Great Lakes and being on the edge of things? Where does this sense of being on the edge that we all seem to feel come from?
Michael Welch
What’s interesting about the Great Lakes is this idea of horizons, and you look out across and you don’t see land on the other side, but you know in the back of your head it is there, right? It is this kind of grand body that has an end, that has a boundary, that has a border. It’s not like the oceans; you can drive from one end of the lake to the other and you can see everything from Chicago to Duluth to the UP, right? You can cross these boundaries and these borders.
And then, in the last third of the book, we get into how these are really delicate ecosystems where we literally are living on the edge at this moment in time, right? They are these grand, powerful wonders, but they are also incredibly delicate.
Victor Ladis Schultz
In “Tree World,” RS Deeren gives us a fascinating history of the emerald ash borer, an invasive insect that has decimated the ash tree population of the Great Lakes. Deeren uses the ash borer to illustrate how unchecked appetites work in both nature and politics: “Once it’s eaten everything, the only next step is to starve.” How can this book and its readers help to keep rampant consumerism and destructive practices from ravaging the region as the ash borer did to ash trees?
Michael Welch
Oh my god, that’s a good question. If I had the real answer, all our problems would be solved.
It goes back to the way our history as a region has been one of how we exploit the lakes, while at the same time understanding that we do have to live in harmony to some degree, and that balance has never been perfected. We’ve seen so many examples in our history of going too far and having to pull back in order to save these lakes.
What is really scary right now is that it feels like … like the people who are in power, they do not care about that balance at all. I mean, we see it everywhere. It’s just like, how much can we take and take and take from the people and from the land? And there is this element of consumption and feeding upon it, like the ash borer, but at some point there will be nothing left.
I go back to Dan Egan’s book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. He talks a lot about the Aral Sea [formerly the world’s third-largest lake, located between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan], and how they exploited it so much that it is now completely dried up. It was this massive body of water that no longer exists. And I think, this is the largest body of fresh water in our hemisphere, right? It is probably the most important resource that we have as a country. And there is no care going into it right now.
In fact, everyone in power is looking at it like, how much can we get out of it? And then we have the Asian carp, this invasive species that’s batting at the door. If they get into the Great Lakes, it will decimate the ecosystem. We have this boom in AI and more data centers that are chugging water, and that’s going to come straight from the lakes. We have encroaching climate change, where we have regions in this country that don’t have water anymore. And, eventually, where is that water going to come from? People are already asking, can we find a way to get it from the Great Lakes? I think we’re at this moment where if we don’t protect it, or if we don’t really look to the future, we might eventually see exactly what happened to the Aral Sea, where these wonders will no longer exist.
And that’s a catastrophe.
Victor Ladis Schultz
Kathleen Rooney contributed an essay, “The Queen of Sherwin Avenue,” that’s playful on the idea of setting-as-character. If the Great Lakes region were a character, what kind of character would it be? (Or would it be five characters?)
Michael Welch
Oh, man [laughing].
I feel like it would be five-way conjoined twins or something. And they’d all have their own personality and they’d be bickering, but they’d be completely connected.
Or it’d be like—have you ever read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead? They basically take these minor characters from Hamlet and turn them into existential bickering partners. I feel like it’d be like that, because all the regions, all the cities, all the people who live along the lakes, they’re all fighting over which lake is the best. Yeah, it’d just be bickering in a really fun way.
ANTHOLOGY
On an Inland Sea: Writing the Great Lakes
Edited by Michael Welch
Belt Publishing
Published March 10, 2026
