Tom Drury Rewrites 'Flyover Country' From the Ground Up

Novelist Tom Drury wants to change one word. In a talk delivered at the Palais Claudiana in Innsbruck, Austria — later published in the 2025 anthology Flyover Fictions: Polarization in U.S.-American Culture, Media, and Politics — Drury proposes replacing "flyover country" with "flownover country."

The shift moves the viewpoint from the passenger in the airliner, "drinking gin and tonic in the glow of one screen or another," to the people on the ground. "That's who I was, growing up, the one on the ground, the one being flown over," Drury said.

The stakes are more than lexical. Drury's new novel, West of Loveland, published by Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic, grew directly out of the Innsbruck conference. His epilogue for the anthology — a short story called "Watchmaking," about a roadside gun found by a teenage boy and his aunt — became the novel's first chapter.

What did being 'flown over' actually feel like?

Drury grew up in a rural town of a little over 200 inhabitants, surrounded by thousands of acres of corn and soybeans, with pigs, cows, horses, chickens and "the occasional alpaca." The town counted three churches (Baptist, Methodist and Catholic), two taverns, a grocery store, a hardware store where both his parents worked, a railroad depot, a gas station, a grain elevator where Drury worked as a teenager, a hatchery, a farm implement dealership and a barbershop.

At night, with almost no light pollution, he lay on the grass and watched the stars. He saw satellites, airplanes miles overhead and, once, what he describes as "a lighted saucer passing over our house and disappearing behind a row of grain bins." He searched for it the next day. He found no trace.

Drury rejects the reading of flyover country as insignificance. "Being flown over on those summer nights of my childhood didn't make me feel insignificant," he said. "Instead I felt a mysterious sense of possibility, of a world and universe infinitely larger than the town."

He concedes the alternative framing — that to be flown over is to be dismissed, "the martyr's position" — but argues it could also be "to be invited or called to." The Milky Way, he recalls, "really did seem like a road going somewhere."

How did a small town produce a novelist?

Drury is candid about the limits of his start. Asked where the family came from, an elder answered Illinois — one state east, not the "vast family saga" he hoped for. Requests to do anything unusual met the refrain "I don't think that's necessary," and necessity began to feel like "a cop." He was hard of hearing from an early age, which he says "wraps you in a cocoon and keeps you there."

The household's intellectual anchor was a twenty-volume set of The World Book Encyclopedia, acquired by his mother, who pressed perforated update stickers into the margins each year so her children would not miss "the latest developments in world knowledge." His father read Perry Mason novels and Zane Grey westerns.

Drury insists the middle of the country in the late twentieth century "was not a bad beginning point for someone dreaming of being a writer — and besides, it's the only beginning point I have, so I might as well make the most of it."

He cites the essayist Meghan O'Gieblyn, who has written of the difficulty of living in the Midwest "without developing an existential dizziness, a sense that the rest of the world is moving while you remain still." Stillness, Drury counters, can be creative for the young — as long as they don't take it for a lifelong condition. Quiet, he notes, can be found anywhere: the railroad yards along Mission Road in Los Angeles, a remote table in the New York Public Library, the far reaches of Tempelhofer Feld in Berlin. Flyover country, he concludes, "seems less a place than a state of mind."

What changed at Iowa City?

At the University of Iowa — 30,000 students in a city of 50,000 — Drury saw the San Francisco Ballet, the Romantics, and Emmylou Harris and the Hot Band, and studied the industrial revolution, CIA intervention in Southeast Asia and nuclear proliferation. Someone suggested he take an undergraduate fiction workshop. He declined, saying he hadn't done or seen enough to have stories. "Which, of course, was completely wrong," he now says. "The material was in my memory and imagination, waiting for me to gain the perspective and voice needed to tell it."

He first flew in 1980, his senior year, circling over the fields in a light plane hired from the Iowa City airport. His second flight took him to Boston. His subsequent novels — including The End of Vandalism, which drew on a college paper on methamphetamines — suggest where the dreaming led.