Michigan State University Assistant Professor Tim Conrad received a 2025 Midwest Book Award in the Fiction – Short Story/Anthology category for his debut short story collection, “The Machine We Trust,” published by Cornerstone Press in April 2024. Conrad teaches creative writing and literature at MSU through the Department of English.
The Midwest Book Awards Contest, through the Midwest Independent Publishers Association, is the premier contest for small, independent, and university presses in the region. Awards recognize creativity in content and execution, overall book quality, and the book’s unique contribution to its subject area.
“It was a deliberate decision to publish ‘The Machine We Trust’ with an independent publisher. It was a deliberate decision to choose someone who likes Midwestern content and boosting up-and-coming Midwestern writers,” Conrad said. “It’s nice on some level to feel seen by people who are about these things.”
He also appreciated working with undergraduate students from the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Points during the publishing process with Cornerstone Press, which is a teaching press.
After growing up in Ohio, Conrad didn’t always think he’d come back to the Midwest. Now, he intentionally claims that part of his identity and explores it further through “The Machine We Trust.”
“It’s a collection of stories largely set in the Midwest, but it’s a slightly hyperbolic version of it,” Conrad said. “There’s a house-trained buffalo, a giant Paul Bunyan statue, a sheep camp where the campers are given a flock of sheep. It’s very much Middle America.”
Some of these characters and stories have been with Conrad since working on a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a doctorate in literature and creative writing from Western Michigan University.
“There’s certainly a contemplation of masculinity buried in these stories,” he said. “Coming of age in any dominant culture means inheriting scripts, many of which are rather flawed, and my characters often find themselves alone when these fail them.”
That sense of alienation along with the delightful weirdness in what may be quietly hiding around the Midwest is at the heart of many of these short stories.
“A lot of my characters are sort of figuring out the ways in which that cultural connection isn’t going to happen for them or how it’s going to be more complicated than they thought,” Conrad said.
Divya Victor, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Director of the MSU Creative Writing Program, said the more she read “The Machine We Trust” the less she judged the characters for not knowing exactly how to get some things right.
“Tim’s stories enact a kind of compassion that we need to practice so urgently — compassion not only built on the sand dunes of demographics or ever shifting political identification, but deeper, elected affinities with those whose humanity we must come to learn if we are truly to face ourselves,” Victor said.
Likewise, Conrad said that reading fiction can enable us to explore the different possibilities there are for people with a bit of distance and objectivity from everyday life.
“Fiction is so useful because these are not real people,” he said. “It permits a kind of thinking and conversation that isn’t possible through the news cycle or even through our own lived experiences. We’re not very good at imagining each other’s lives, and fiction can help us have some humility about that.”
Conrad is currently working on his next book about a Midwestern community affected by an environmental disaster.
