In the dark heart of a Minneapolis winter, a young boy struggles to understand his mother’s failing health as she teaches him Polish, the language of her dead mother.  From a distance, a frustrated English professor dines with her mentally ill ex-husband in a park on which a mansion once stood. A retired garbage collector finds solace in the ballet, and the owner of a liquor store tries to find companionship on the streets and in the bars of Minneapolis. Equal parts bitterness and beauty, the sixteen interconnected stories in Darci Schummer’s Six Months in the Midwest are plotted snapshots of a city in its most unforgiving season.