A Decade of Diaries- "Everyday Life in Middletown" project comes to an end in 2025
Aimee Robertson-West
'Everyday Life in Middletown' is a decade long publication gathering anonymous Middletown diarists' daily lives and routines in Muncie, Indiana for the purpose of both scholarly research, connection, and community-building in Muncie as Middletown, USA. In total, diarists have submitted and published 445 diary entries and 25, so far in 2025. Dr. Patrick Collier says that the collection of these diaries will come to an end by the end of 2025, and from this collection, comes forth a book from these the anonymous contributors.
Dr. Patrick Collier began coordinating Everyday Life in Middletown in 2016 alongside the Center for Middletown Studies and serves as a 'Facing Middletown' facilitator.
He reflects upon "Facing Middletown", post-industrial Muncie, EDLM diarists' narratives, and how they can be leveraged for a deeper understanding of Muncie's changing identity.
“The tradition of Middletown Studies has taught me that—while Muncie may not be typical or representative—it is a place where transformations in U.S. history have powerfully hit home repeatedly. And I value the fact that scholars have worked to capture how people lived these transformations. We need more conversation. We need to know more about how our neighbors feel and think and how they live their lives. Only that will overcome the hostility and stereotyping that, while part of human nature, are particularly destructive and pervasive in the current political and media environment.”
Dr. Patrick Collier, Everyday Life in Middletown, Ball State University
Read Dr. Collier's full blog detailing EDLM's history, diarists' stories, timeline, and a few of the entries which will be including in the EDML book below:
Everyday Life in Middletown Blog
Published June 26, 2025, Dr. Patrick Collier
"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."
Facing Middletown and Everyday Life in Middletown Stories
Facing Middletown aims to capture unvarnished stories of life in Muncie, Indiana, in 2025, 100 years into the Middletown Studies, and as EDLM diarists prepare put their pens down at the end of the year, EDLM diarists' 445 entries serve as snapshot in time, from 2015-2025, help provide an evergreen window into Muncie folks' lives, are important in framing what is most important in the lives of the people living in Muncie (*those who have the capacity and ability to participate).
Here are excerpts of some of their June 2025 stories outlining the wide variety of Muncie experiences and voices, published on the Everyday Life in Middletown Blog.
Diarist C46 Day 28
EDLM, June 4, 2025
Everyday life no longer in Middletown….
I did it. I moved away. I imagine a reader for these who is likely not you. Someone following my specific journey through my journals. Someone waiting for a conclusion, a denouement, and as I tear up a bit, I image this entry will be that. Perhaps you, too, are sad at the ending, or angry, disappointed, or dare I say, satisfied. Perhaps I am all of those things.
When last we left Diarist C46 (that’s me), my wife had gotten a job offer in Boston. We were excited about it, although it was one of several choices. It was the one we took. I had a good long freak out right after the fact, and although it felt epic (was epic) it’s also something I’ve learned is par for the course for me. So, here we are in Boston. I have yet to find a job here, but I will be able to work remotely at my Middletown job through the end of the year. Plus, I am back in the area in June (twice) for my mother, who we got to agree to also move to the area. So, my break from Middletown is not clean (could it ever be?). It’s a jagged, painful thing. I think of the way they have to sometimes further break bones to mend them, and it seems an accurate metaphor. Healing feels like an uphill journey today.
Diarist N02 Day 28
EDLM, June 4, 2025
"Lunch today was with a new pastor friend. I drove the streets that are now once again so familiar after a five year absence. Routes are second nature once again. I’ve learned how to position the car so as to miss the potholes that are now mostly filled in this time of year and the rougher sections of streets that can feel washboard-like, and the manholes that don’t come up to pavement level. There’s a sense of satisfaction in this, small as it is. I parked at the church this friend serves, and we walked to a lunch spot he picked out. He shared his life story, and I shared some of mine. It was good to feel more fully connected.
A month ago, I found out I would step into the role of radio host of a show that gets recorded ahead of time and then broadcast in a thirty-minute slot weekly on a local station. It’s a show about Muncie featuring guests who share about their lives and the ways they invest in making Muncie better. The format and feel are like listening in on a conversation between friends in a coffee shop or on a front porch. Today was a recording day, and my guest did an amazing job sharing about the concept of neighborhoods, neighborliness and how important connections are with people in the midst of everyday life no matter where we live or what we face or what we enjoy. A successful show is one where sharing is real and meaning is gained. Today was a prime example for which I’m grateful."
Diarist A33 Day 28
EDLM -June 4, 2025
'I started my day at 6:19. Today consists of two weekly meetings I look forward to attending. They are with people with whom I resonate and they help me feel less alone in a society and world that is becoming more and more hostile and dangerous.
In a world and time of scams, lies, blatant disregard for law and order, abusive uses of AI, cutting Federal funding for needed country-wide social services, undermining the checks and balances in our government that holds our elected officers responsible for their actions, distrust of our government and our neighbors is running rampant. When my neighbor with an AR-15 practices his weapon sounding like a machine gun disturbs the neighborhood, we all wonder about how this neighbor will use such a weapon.
So my first meeting consists of a brunch with three people including myself. We talk about what’s happening in our lives and how we’re dealing with those life issues. We don’t talk about the weather nor sports. We talk about things that matter the most to us, making it through our daily living."
Diarist C45 Day 28
"Some of these people along this divide I call my peers: I work alongside them or went to school with them. Many are good people at heart, with generosity for their friends and neighbors that represents the “good” of Muncie for me-compassion and understanding for those in need of it.
I also have friends with little or no connection to the area; they came here to work at the university or elsewhere. Some of them have adopted Muncie as I, a jaded townie, never could have. They’ve sung Muncie’s praises as I’ve been detached and sniffed, “yeah, just you wait.” This schism has noticeably affected them, a few are making plans to move on.
“America’s Hometown” isn’t theirs; it’s mine. It has worn them down over time, and that pains me today. "
The full collection can be found here: June 2025
As a way to help celebrate and capture the storytelling of the EDLM project, Facing Middletown is including EDLM and encourages its diarists who wish to participate and enlist other community writers and storytellers for the Facing Middletown book, and are recruiting Middletown Documenters to contribute their own content or go on the record for the Facing Middletown documentary.
What do you hope "Facing Middletown" will explore and accomplish?
Contribute a blog post and send to facingmiddletown@facingproject.com