Mermaid House
Lebanon, Illinois

By Ryan Byrnes

For someone who only ever lived in Midwestern suburbs, I rarely encountered anything pre-dating World War II. Mine was a world of strip malls and gas stations and Arby’s drive-throughs (the quintessential post-church activity). But as a second grader, after packing into the minivan with my siblings for a thirty-minute haul to nearby Lebanon, I could travel two centuries into the past. It felt like what the Celtics used to call “thin places,” where the boundaries between the ordinary and the magical meet.

You see, Lebanon is a small but historic town. With just under 5,000 people, it boasts the oldest university in Illinois and a preserved nineteenth-century main street complete with verandas and gothic windows and four blocks of red brick-paved streets. There, I first saw the Mermaid House.

According to the Lebanon Historic Society, in 1830, retired sea captain Lyman Adams built the Mermaid House, which he named after his professed belief in mermaids. A squat two-story house of hand-sawed oak, it is the ideal rustic prairie home.

Charles Dickens spent a night at the Mermaid House during his tour of North America from January to June 1842, when he traveled by steamboats, railroads, and wagons to speak at major American cities. During his visit to St. Louis, he made a quick excursion to the prairie country in Lebanon. He praised the inn in his travelogue American Notes for General Circulation, writing, “In point of cleanliness and comfort it would have suffered by no comparison with any English alehouse, of a homely kind.” Unfortunately, the nearby prairie did not leave such a lofty impression on him. He described the landscape as “oppressive in its barren monotony” and “scarcely one … to remember with much pleasure.”

Given the historic buildings and the town’s connection to Dickens, the main street took on a Victorian character in the local imagination, so it was only fitting that every holiday season the town put on a Victorian Christmas parade referencing Dickens’ most famous story, A Christmas Carol. Local high school drama clubs would sing carols in period costumes. Shopkeepers would decorate their facades with wreaths. As darkness fell, the town would ceremoniously switch on the Christmas lights, turning the whole street to gold.

One such Christmas, when I was a senior in high school, I took my then-girlfriend to the parade. We rode in a horsedrawn carriage, then I insisted on lining up to see Santa along with the local five-year-olds. In a shed behind the antique store, Santa would sit on his throne, and parents would take their kids to sit on his lap, say what they wanted for Christmas, and snap a photo.

At age eighteen, emboldened by my embryonic frontal lobe, the idea struck me that it would be really funny to get a picture sitting in Santa’s lap, so I dragged my unenthusiastic girlfriend with me. Dickens would have been proud. After waiting in line I finally reached the Big Man’s throne, and we ended up getting a portrait with Santa — me sitting on his knee and my then-girlfriend standing in the background looking like she was about to yell “Bah humbug!” (We did not stay together long.)

After seeing Santa, we walked to the Mermaid House, which the Lebanon Historic Society had preserved and furnished with donated period-pieces like chairs and dressers. Members of the historic society gave a guided tour, recounting the events of Dickens’ stay.

I had read Dickens in school — A Christmas Carol in seventh grade and A Tale of Two Cities in tenth grade — and I always regarded him as so high above me in skill and fame, from another plane of existence. But when I stood in his bedroom just as he would have seen it, I felt connected, as if I might turn around and see Dickens hovering like the Ghost of Christmas Past. At that moment, I came to understand that the Mermaid House is one of those thin places straddling the border between this world and the otherworld, where if you listened carefully, the indelible whispers of the spirits occasionally broke through.

Ryan Byrnes is a book editor in the New York City publishing industry and the author of two books: Royal Beauty Bright and My Dear Antonio. Readers can also find his work in LitHub, Fine Books and Collections, December, National Catholic Reporter, and more. He also contributes to the show The Saints on Relevant Radio. Follow him on Instagram at @ryan.byrnes.writes.

Photo by Edward Moore, 1935. Courtesy of Library of Congress, HABS ILL,82-LEBA,2.

The post Charles Dickens – Lebanon, Illinois appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

12th Street Beach
Chicago, Illinois

By E.N. Couturier

Standing at the concrete edge of a Chicago beach, you can almost rest your eyes from civilization.

As a teenage wannabe farmer feeling trapped in the city, I loved the lake for this reason. Behind me, the apartments and factories and train tracks weren’t just chaotic; they were a puzzle I couldn’t solve and a hand I couldn’t grasp.

I recognized this terrain of postindustrial memory immediately in the first story I read by Stuart Dybek, who’s written numerous collections about the city in the 1960s and 70s, cataloging and untangling a change I sensed, a lost world that stabbed at me.

His work consistently hits home, but none more than “Undertow,” which connects to my own family history while echoing my younger experiences of turning away from the roaring city humans had built to the organic strength of Lake Michigan.

In this chapter of the 2003 novel-in-stories I Sailed with Magellan, 13-year-old Perry rides through Chicago with his father, “Sir,” and younger brother, Mick, toward 12th Street Beach on a summer day.

Sir drives their rattling junk car past lumberyards, an electric plant, Chinatown shops, shabby streets, El stops, the telephone book printing factory where workers stare from the windows like inmates and the open-air bazaar on Maxwell Street where on Sundays he takes Perry to hunt for scrap wood and used plumbing fittings among frightening characters.

Then, sudden cold air and the beach, where the breeze “blew straight in over a horizon that was a blinding gleam, and beyond the horizon I could picture the forests of Michigan.”

The family has always come here to swim, but today their father plans to take them into deeper water, to the Rocks. Sir swam there as a boy, picking rocks up from the lakebed and carrying them back to the concrete beach with Johnny Weissmuller, an Olympic swimmer who went on to play Tarzan onscreen in the 1930s. The old-time swimsuit Sir still wears gives Perry a weak feeling, memories before their mother got cripplingly nervous.

“You shoulda seen this lake,” Sir tells his sons. “… when I was a kid you could see the bottom off the Rocks.”

Before I’d ever heard of Dybek, I heard similar stories from my father, who was raised in 1960s Chicago.

All four of his grandparents and their extended families left farms in the old country for this city. Some never adjusted; they planted backyard gardens their kids were ashamed of, couldn’t hold factory jobs, raised hunting dogs that paced the kennel fence unblinking when grandchildren came over.

Wandering Chicago beaches and parks alone after school, I thought about them and tried not to remember that I was at least an hour’s drive away from any working fields. I was drawn to a life out there, with the physical world beyond people, but couldn’t figure out how to go, if it was still possible for me.

My father also wanted such a life, but he never got it. First, he needed the money, then he had the job, then people depended on it, then there was my mother, then there was me, then the three of us moving between other cities. We tried the country once, a mostly empty tract of desert where few people lived and little could grow. We left it to return to Chicago when I was 15.

I’d heard so much about the city, riding the train, running down the sidewalks, knowing the neighbors; I wanted all of it to still be real.

Sitting in someone’s mother’s SUV on a summer weekend, listening to friends argue over the white boy rap on the stereo, I could almost detach from the moment and step into another, of my father’s Chicago and the one known by two generations before him.

They swam with Weissmuller too, I’d heard.

In truth, their world was gone, the families and the factories and the people they knew. My dad said so himself with no audible disappointment. Driving through his streets and going to mixers after basketball games at his all-boys Catholic high school, I wanted to understand what had once been there and what it meant that it was lost.

At the same time, I missed living on open land as I knew they once missed it, though in the past I had hated the isolation – hearing insects, seeing animals other than the remarkable coyote. There was so much I had not learned, so much I feared it was too late to understand, about life in nature

Perry experiences something similar in “Undertow” watching his father search for scrap lumber: “His ability to gauge instantly the dimensions of things both mystified and intimidated me. It was a gift I seemed to lack completely, one expressed in a language I was ignorant of, with a vocabulary one needed to gain admittance into the practical world of men.”

His father has another language of secrecy — Polish — and, later in the story, speaks inaudibly to his son under the water at a life-and-death moment.

Perry is afraid at first to jump into the lake, where Sir is washing himself with laundry soap after a hair-raising “torpedo dive.” Mick is more interested in climbing a pile of limestone on land. Out beyond the Rocks blink lights that Sir says belong to an ocean liner.

A bystander warns Perry that the undertow is strong, says that someone went down and never came up earlier that day.

In the water, Perry loses his nerve once and then calls for his brother to watch as he dives, peeling through cold layers until he sees rocks, the ones his father saw when he swam with Tarzan.

No ancient history to be seen there; only seaweed and beer cans. Perry lifts a rock, but the current pushes him in, toward a cavern beneath the beach walkway where he fears he’ll disappear under the city forever.

He accepts he’s about to die, but Sir appears, pushing him up, appearing to say something his son can’t hear.

Could I understand my father? Could I know what people I never met had felt, in a city far from a home they’d never return to, when they looked out at the water and could catch a fish again, could feel a current or a fresh breeze?

Approaching shore, Perry realizes the beach is a solid wall. He shares a smoke with two Mexican boys on the concrete. He thought the big ship was coming in over him, he tells them. They laugh and say it’s only the pumping station. Even the real Tarzan wouldn’t swim out there.

In the dark, the lights appear to be slowly moving.

In time, my own memories — on top of other people’s — started to bind me to the places I passed walking toward city beaches: the sidewalk where I slipped on ice and skinned my knee after softball practice, the park we sat in to watch fireworks on the fourth of July. I listened to music on the public high school’s radio station and imagined something was knitting these sights into a larger whole, a dome of meaning containing my life or a current determined to carry me somewhere. Reaching the water, I would look out over it and think, like Perry, that I could see the forests of Michigan on the other side.

In a 2016 interview with The Rumpus, Dybek said each story in this book is built around a song. At first, I couldn’t locate one in “Undertow,” only a fragment Sir sings in the car, seemingly in passing. His singing embarrasses his sons, who laugh and cover their ears:

“Workin’ on the railroad, workin’ on the farm, all I got to show for it’s the muscle in my arm…”

“Looks like I’m never gonna cease my wanderin’,” he goes on.

E.N. Couturier is the author of Organic Matter (Autofocus Books, 2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in jmww, Farewell Transmission, Offrange and elsewhere, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize.

Photo by John H. White, 1973. Courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration, NWDNS-412-DA-13844.

The post Stuart Dybek – Chicago, Illinois appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

358 Bus Stop, Torrence Ave. & Pulaski Rd.
Calumet City, Illinois

By Ava Tomasula y Garcia

“forgive my geography, it’s true i’m obsessed

with maps.” –José Olivarez, “Wherever I’m at That Land Is Chicago”

The Calumet Region coheres into shape and sense through the totalizing language of maps. The gridmarks through which reality has been arranged here for over two hundred years are that of longitude, latitude, scale, treaty boundary, x-marks-the-spot. Isn’t that the work that maps do, after all? They make the real, real. Chart, fix, occupy, extract. They make the given world seem inevitable.

I’ve been looking at these maps for a long time, trying to understand how land becomes resource and then gets thrown away. How people continue to live on it and love it.

José Olivarez is a poet from Calumet City, the city that takes its name from this Region. I think he gets it. His images always seem to return home to the Region. This is true even when he’s battling, word by word, the terms of that return: this is one of the most segregated and polluted areas in the lands now called the United States. Looking at the maps, the Calumet Region emerges as a total sacrifice zone; a waste dump for centuries of capitalism; an overdetermined and overburdened 90-ish-square miles stretching from South Chicago through Northwest Indiana along the southern shore of Lake Michigan.

A hard place to call home. Even harder not to go back to the map to describe it; harder still not to get trapped by the dense tangle of border lines and scale markers and RxR crossings which would choke you. To not feel like there’s no way out of the world its representations would have you believe are inevitable.

Blueprints to the city-sized steel mills, past and present. Hazardous waste containment sites marked out on a grid. So-called “early settlement” maps of Indiana and Illinois show how the Potawatomi Nation was rounded up and cornered by gunpoint. How Menominee himself refused to sell Neshnabé land even after he was viciously detained by settler militia men. See how quickly land speculation is mapped into reality in the wake of the Trail of Tears: limestone quarries marked out, coal veins sought, railroad lines laid down.

Chicago booms into existence on the map, literally constructed from the “raw materials” of the cleared Calumet: water, wood, limestone, coal, sand for cement, and clay for bricks. The world’s first refrigerated train cars, carrying meat from the Chicago stockyards across the country, cooled by ice cut from Calumet lakes and rivers and running the rail lines that crisscross the Region today. Plat maps showing how houses butt up against the Standard Oil refinery, now BP. 

My family’s history of living and working around the Region walks in lockstep with a history of illness: cancer and dementia from so much pollution, from day in and day out drinking in the soils and waters that industry has determined must be wasted for bigger profits. It seems like illness is hard baked into what it means to be from here, and, for me, so is leaving. When Olivarez writes, “i needed to believe suffering was honorable,” the line hits hard.

Yet what I love most about Olivarez’s work is that, while always being grounded in place, he doesn’t write about the map. He doesn’t “mistake the map for the territory,” as Sylvia Wynter put it. This poetry doesn’t go around, in Olivarez’s words “pretending the bones / are the real thing.” He’s after life, not its flattening. When I take the bus up Torrence Ave. through Cal City, past the train lines, past the scrap metal yard, past the recycler plant, I’m riding through territory which exceeds those bones. The land doesn’t give up. Look one way and you see intermodals speeding by on miles of burnt-out rail lines. Look the other way and you see sand cranes and egrets burst out of the dune grass. A cloud of starlings flits through the sunset. Marsh water floods the road. Heavy industry mixes with the watery, oh-so-alive earth.

Olivarez finds the little cracks in the totality. His images of life in Calumet City mix with my own memories, peeling themselves off the map: Olivarez in “Cal City Winter” as a kid on another frozen winter morning, “jumping up & down at the bus stop / trying to warm up.” My own memories, waiting in the car for Berta to get off work at the Burger King at River Oaks Mall, breath curling in the December air. Biting into a gordita from Loli’s, steaming hot down my throat. Springtime bugs gliding back and forth on the Little Cal River, weaving a gossamer haze, summer heat shimmering, a thousand mirages. People always say that we have the prettiest sunsets, then joke that it is because of the pollution. The road the car snakes along was once the shore of an ancient lake, was taken over by settler stagecoaches, was a sand mining pit, was paved over for scrap trucks to traverse. You settle into place.

This is what no map will ever show but sometimes a poem does: the way individual lives layer up moments of anger, pain, and love — how these emotions sediment themselves into place as tracks for others to walk whom you may never meet. This is what living in the Calumet means, too. Olivarez’s poetry has become my map to the Cal Region. Not a map as in chart, fix, occupy, extract. A map as in “i’m always out south / of somewhere. i know the sun rises / in Lake Michigan & sets out west.”

With it, I’m trying to navigate those questions that I haven’t been able to figure out for my own life: “I want to learn what the birds know— / to love a home when it is abundant / & to leave when the love stops.”

Olivarez’s map is a question in answer to my questions. Where does a person begin and the place they’re from end? Can you ever leave a home? Can a home ever cease to be that — can it be ground out, like a cigarette butt on a cold winter morning? When you leave, do your memories go with you? Or do some of them stay behind, settling into the landscape?

Surely, some mark of the love a place gave you and that you gave back stays in the soil. Surely.

Ava Tomasula y Garcia was born in 1994 in Chicago and grew up in South Bend, IN. She currently lives in New York City, studying medical anthropology as applied to the so-called “undiagnosed” illnesses of the Calumet Region. Before, she worked at the Southeast Side of Chicago’s Centro de Trabajadores Unidos.

The post José Olivarez – Calumet City, Illinois appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Buy tickets here to participate in the live and silent auctions. To place a proxy bid, please email tina[at]newterritorymag.com

Featured artwork in our live art auction:

“Power’s Island”

This linocut print is from a series of six prints based on six maps of the Mississippi River along southern Illinois and Missouri created by the United States Coast Survey in 1865. The maps detail the river and its environs from St. Mary’s, Missouri, to Cairo, Illinois. Abstracted from the indications of towns and property owners on the originals, the prints emphasize the mercurial nature of the river: its swooping S-curves, its powerful cuts and islands, its sometimes explosive interaction with the earth, and its human-like corporality. The print is layered with egg tempera paint made with natural pigment from southern Illinois creek stones.

This series of river maps accompanies Josephson’s feature story “River Meanders” in The New Territory Issue 13.

Starting bid for this print at The Pageturner Fundraiser: $75

Marika Josephson and Her Connection to the Lower Midwest

I am the co-owner of Scratch Brewing Company, a farmhouse brewery nestled next to the Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois. Scratch makes beer with a sense of place, using Midwestern ingredients that are grown on our own farm or that grow wild in the woods around the brewery to create unique beer that expresses what is special about our part of the Midwest. My art follows a similar tack, exploring what is unique about southern Illinois utilizing found materials natural to our environment.

“It is my hope that through my work, and through venues like The New Territory Midwesterners are able to bring the stories and beauty of this part of the country to life for other people who aren’t as well acquainted with it.”

Hope for Art/Literature in the Midwest

Southern Illinois is a confluence of many biomes and consequently has some of the richest biodiversity in the country. I’m happy that nobody knows how beautiful it is so we don’t have to share it with anyone else! However, it is my hope that through my work, and through venues like The New Territory Midwesterners are able to bring the stories and beauty of this part of the country to life for other people who aren’t as well acquainted with it.

Buy tickets to The Pageturner here to see and bid on Marika’s work and experience Scratch Beer for yourself! Thanks to Marika for donating a case of Black Cherry beer and for donating this beautiful print.

The post Marika Josephson, 2023 Artist appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

27240 N. Longwood Dr.

Forest Haven, Illinois

By Jenny Mueller

“Our trees are aspens, but people / mistake them for birches” — so begins Lisel Mueller’s “Another Version,” set in 1970s Midwestern suburbia. This proves to be a territory of error. After mistaking the aspens, which spread along the southern edge of the property where Lisel and Paul Mueller had lived nearly 20 years, their visitors romanticize the couple “as characters / in a Russian novel, Kitty and Levin / living contentedly in the country.” My parents surely matched Tolstoy’s Kitty and Levin in the strength and longevity of their marriage.

But not all happy families feel happy. Nor, by the end of the 70s, did we live in “country” anymore, even though the guests still think so, gazing out with pleasure on the scene.

Our friends from the city watch the birds

and rabbits feeding together

on top of the deep, white snow.

(We have Russian winters in Illinois,

but no sleigh bells, possums instead of wolves . . .

The city friends came from Chicago and its neighbor-city, Evanston. My parents had moved from Evanston in the late 1950s, buying one acre in Lake County, to Chicago’s north. There they built one of the first houses in “Forest Haven,” a tiny subdivision near the interstate. The house stood at the dead end of one of the subdivision’s five streets, in a northwest corner lot separated by barbed wire from a farm that bordered all of Forest Haven’s north end, as well as our portion of its west. In my childhood, in the 1960s, I gazed west through the wire at the edge of the backyard, looking past the small cattle herd that grazed in the sunset, toward the dark line of woods where the pasture ended and my sight ran out. Past that lay the railroad, another small new subdivision, and the Des Plaines River. Contrails burned their courses over me, arrowing back and forth from O’Hare — newly opened to passenger traffic, half an hour down the interstate.

In those early days, it was almost country around the house where Lisel Mueller’s poems were born. She came to this writing late in life — already 41 when her first book was published in 1965. By 1997, when her selected poems won the Pulitzer, she had nearly stopped writing. Glaucoma diminished her ability to read, and she could no longer drive. One day she found my father at the kitchen table, trying and failing to write his own name. He was losing his language to Lewy-Body Disease. She sold the house and moved them to a complex in Chicago, five minutes’ walk from both groceries and my father’s nursing unit. She never wrote another book of poetry.

In “Another Version,” we seem to be at the comfortable end of the 70s American lyric, with its quiet voice, personal sorrows, nature ready-to-hand for muted unities. While the city-slickers admire the peaceable kingdom outside a contented country home, an old man is dying inside. “He is my father,” Mueller writes,

he lets go of life in such slow motion,

year after year, that the grief

is stuck inside me, a poisoned apple

that won’t go up or down.

But “like the three sisters” in Chekhov’s play, “we rarely speak / of what keeps us awake at night.”

like them, we complain about things

that don’t really matter and talk

of our pleasures and of the future:

we tell each other the willows

are early this year, hazy with green.

“Another Version” begins with the visitors’ error and ends with their hosts’ secrecy. The misunderstandings pile up like northern Illinois snow. Russian allusions mask a German story. The old man was Fritz Neumann, who first arrived in Illinois as a political refugee. As a child in Nazi Germany, Lisel was forced to keep quiet about her father, whose known leftism had marked him as an enemy, someone against whom her schoolmates and neighbors should inform. Neumann, too, kept quiet when at home, but often he was far away. For much of the 1930s he took ill-paying temporary teaching work in France and Italy, while his wife raised two daughters alone in Hamburg. In 1937, luck landed him a scholarship to study at a teacher’s college near Evanston. His wife and children joined him in the US in 1939, ending the years in which Lisel clamped her lips tight to suppress her fears — the child’s terror that her parents might disappear, made very real by her father’s two arrests. Now Lisel became a Midwesterner. She lived all her adult life in Indiana and Illinois. She wrote often of her own luck. But she never lost her night fears, and when an interviewer asked if she considered the Midwest home, she dodged the question, answering, “Let me say what countless other displaced persons must have said: I am more at home here than anywhere.”

Her father remained on the move: from teaching job to teaching job in America, then returning to his native Hamburg after the death of his wife in the 1950s. Remarried unhappily, he kept traveling, steamshipping across the Atlantic for long US visits. One night in the 1970s, he touched down at O’Hare and never left. A stroke had stricken him with aphasia. He retained, however, a teacher’s memory for history: treaties, battles, empires, republics.

But how many people understood that there were non-Jewish German political refugees? In my experience, the old man who came to die with us represented little-known history that always puzzles Americans, even now. My mother sometimes invoked a more famous poet, Brecht, as a short-hand. In poems about her parents, she borrowed Brecht’s description of European exiles “changing countries more often than shoes,” and she quoted Brecht’s sorrow at talk of small pleasures in terrible times, his despair that a casual “talk about trees is almost a crime / since it means being silent about so much evil.”

Undoubtedly, Lisel Mueller talked about trees: aspens and willows, the great maple that still stands at an edge of the front yard — if I can trust the internet. But I can’t, of course, since the house is currently listed on Zillow as “uninhabitable.” On my laptop, I can see that the windows are boarded in the upstairs room that became my mother’s study, from which we saw the long views north and west. In that study, she wrote the books for which she won awards, poems that were popularized on the radio by the era’s voice of the Midwest, Garrison Keillor. The Poetry Foundation praises her work “for its attentiveness to quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.” Happy families in suburban nature, quietly sad, the great luck of a long, loving marriage. But she also wrote, almost always, of displaced persons, and in a journal she commented, “My preoccupation with history marks me as outside the mainstream of American poetry. No matter how long I’ve lived and written here, that has not changed and will not change.”

In “Another Version,” when the daughter can’t speak of her father, whose life was determined by history, she talks about trees instead. Her poem makes the pain of such evasion its point.

Suburbia is full of oscillations, migrations. My father, who worked in the city, drove back and forth for years on ever more crowded roads. As the subdivisions multiplied along them, our yard filled up with deer, displaced from the cleared woods. My mother likened them to “refugees,” “risking death on the road / to reach us, their dispossessors.” My sister and I moved to Chicago — which made us the city visitors gazing out on the aspens, itching to return to urban streets. There, we were sure, our authentic lives waited.

But some things never change. In 2020, reviewing an anthology of poems responding to the pandemic, the New York Times took furious aim against its “tepid” contents’ resort to natural imagery. There were too many poems “about flowers. Or birds. Or trees.” The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, had been “wise to rage against tree poems,” the critic complained. And perhaps the book really was tepid. But what an astonishing charge! As if we could still see no urgency in trees. As if we still believed that trees crowded out our witness of history, not the other way around. As if we hadn’t all learned to pronounce a new urbane word, Anthropocene, to slip inside our poems. As if grief, the poisoned apple in my throat, were only for childhood and not for aspens, “country,” snow.

Jenny Mueller lives in St. Louis. She is the author of two books of poetry, State Park and Bonneville, both published by Denver’s Elixir Press. She is also the editor of Moonie, a posthumous e-book of poetry by Brian Young, published by Fence Digital. She is the younger daughter and literary executor of Lisel Mueller. Unlike her mother, Jenny has been able to do years of coursework in creative writing, a privilege she tries to pass on to her students at McKendree University in Lebanon, Illinois.

Photo by Marianne Connell.

To read “Another Version” in its entirety, please visit the website of the Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, where Lisel Mueller is a featured poet.

The post Lisel Mueller – Forest Haven, Illinois appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

South Chicago City Dump
Chicago, IL

By Emiliano Aguilar

Chicago’s South Side is littered with the remains of its industrial past. From the façade of the former US Steel South Works to sites bustling with activity, such as the Pullman National Monument. I grew up in the shadow of Chicago, over the state line in the appropriately named East Chicago, Indiana. My hometown and much of Northwest Indiana, often referred to as “Da Region,” looked more like Chicago and shared more of its history than other parts of Indiana. We even have our own ruins, such as the abandoned warehouse of the Edward Valve Company, the half-scraped ruins of Cleveland Cliffs (formerly ArcelorMittal and before that Inland Steel), and the ever-shrinking Marktown.

This world comes alive in the short stories of Hugo Martinez-Serros, whose family arrived to work in the region’s steel industry. Like them, tens of thousands of people arrived on the South Side to labor arduously in often unsafe environments. Ethnic Mexicans arrived as solos, single men, ahead of their families. These pioneers paved the way for their families and extended networks.

In “Distillation,” first published in The Last Laugh and Other Stories (1988), Martinez-Serros recalls a family drive from their home on the South Side to a municipal dump across the neighborhood. Recalling the weekly Saturday drive southward from their home through alleys crossing 86th, 89th, and 95th Streets, Martinez-Serros describes their final destination vividly: “Before us was the city dump — a great raw sore on the landscape; a leprous tract oozing flames, smoldering; hellish grounds columned in smoke, grown tumid across years.” The narrator, along with his family, sifts through the trash, looking for items to salvage. Together they search for items to sell and discarded produce as a means to survive during the Depression.

As clichéd as it might be, what is one person’s trash if not another person’s treasure? I first read Hugo Martinez-Serros after picking it up from the free box at the Purdue University Northwest library. While the book had seen better days, it showed clear signs of love: dog-ears, a weathered spine, yellowed pages, scribblings from an earlier reader, and a fair amount of shelf-wear. Salvaging this copy from among discarded textbooks and novels, I discovered Depression-era South Chicago. While familiar to me in my work as a historian, thanks to scholars like Gabriela F. Arredondo and Michael Innis-Jiménez, the world Martinez-Serros described differed greatly from the region I knew as a lifelong resident.

Northwest Indiana and Chicago’s South Side are part of the Rust Belt. Once an industrial sprawl of hundreds of thousands of jobs manufactured hundreds of items, the region began to decline in the 1970s and 1980s. However, the Rust Belt is not simply a ruin, some vestigial piece of our shared past. For decades, cities have worked to revitalize their communities and, in some cases, evoke their industrial heritage. In the 1990s, Northwest Indiana communities turned to the gaming industry and lakefront casinos to supplant the loss of manufacturing jobs.

These revitalization plans did not exclude piles of trash. In the 1990s, the City of Chicago built Harborside International Golf Center on top of the old dump. Childhood searches for scrap to sell or barely expired food were replaced by golfers scouring the rough for balls that went astray. In high school, I played on one such dump-turned-golf course as a part of my varsity team. Like Martinez-Serros and his family sifted through the refuse and remains at the municipal dump, I played on the former dump. These carefully designed courses of bright green fairways are nestled among industrial complexes. On clear days, you can see the iconic Chicago skyline.

The region’s residents turned heaping piles of trash into a site of recreation and frustration. While the narrator retold joyful and almost play-like salvaging, this was coupled with the frustration and fear of his brother falling into a pile of trash. This joy and fear of garbage-diving became replaced with the joy of a long drive and the frustration of a mixed putt. However, the presence of the golf course for recreation is a mixed bag. While many praise the efforts of turning trash into treasure, changes to the Chicagoland landscape are not limited to trash heaps. In some cases, rich historical sites, such as those on the Most Endangered List, are under threat of removal in the name of progress. While some residents are content with this change, others view it as a loss of the shared heritage and history of the area. Although many deride the area, which still suffers from the harmful legacy of environmental injustice, those of us who remain continue to chip off the rust and show that Da Region is a vibrant home.

Emiliano Aguilar Jr. is a native of East Chicago, Indiana. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend. His manuscript in progress, Building a Latino Machine: Caught Between Corrupt Political Machines and Good Government Reform, explores the complexities of the ethnic Mexican and Puerto Rican community’s navigation of machine politics in the 20th and 21st centuries to further their inclusion in municipal and union politics in East Chicago, Indiana. His writing has appeared in Belt Magazine, Immigration and Ethnic History Society’s Blog, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of America History, The Metropole, the Indiana Historical Society Blog, and Building Sustainable Worlds: Latinx Placemaking in the Midwest (University of Illinois Press, 2022).

Photo by Cameron Smith, culinary director at Infuse Hospitality in Chicago. He can be found on Instagram at @iamfood0079.

For the most recent version of the Calumet Heritage Area Most Endangered List, please visit the Calumet Heritage Partnership.

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Lovejoy State Memorial
Alton, IL

By Evan Allen Wood

Elijah Parish Lovejoy was shot by members of a mob and succumbed to his wounds on the evening of November 7, 1837, in Alton, Illinois. Decades later, the community erected a 110-foot-tall monument honoring him. The monument has a central granite column with a winged statue of Victory cast in bronze on top. Looking at the monument from the eponymous Monument Ave. it appears neatly framed by the stone retaining wall and staircase leading into the cemetery. Beside it are two smaller columns with a curved whispering wall wrapping around behind.

Lovejoy had been publishing The Alton Observer, an anti-slavery newspaper, for the better part of three years, and on the day he died a mob formed—not for the first time—intent on destroying the Presbyterian minister’s press. Lovejoy’s editorials were written in a straightforward voice, and he often invoked his Christian faith. In a characteristic example from September 8, 1837, he wrote: “It is the duty of us all to unite our hearty and zealous efforts to effect the speedy and entire emancipation of that portion of our fellow-men in bondage.” Although his friends rallied to his side, an exchange of gunfire left the 34-year-old editor dead. Nobody was prosecuted in the weeks that followed, and Lovejoy’s body had to be buried in a secret location lest the citizens who’d participated in his killing decide to press their harassment beyond the grave.

It’s hard to look past the irony of a community tacitly allowing a mob to kill one of its citizens then several decades later erecting a grand monument heralding the same man as a defender of the free press and superior moral convictions. The cynical view might hold that the monument constitutes an attempt for the river town to paper over the reality of its past. But allowing Lovejoy to rest in an anonymous grave is an even less preferable course. It would not be unreasonable to ask how a community could best practice restorative justice for a killing that was, by that time, sixty years gone.

Abolitionist organizing wasn’t a safe proposition anywhere in the United States in the 1830s. Mobs tarred and feathered or otherwise chased away abolitionist speakers, editors, and groups from Nashville to New York. It’s fair to posit that the consequences tended to be more dire in states where slavery was legal like Missouri, but abolition, which entailed immediate emancipation of all people kept as slaves (as opposed to gradualism which called for a slower end to the practice), was still a fringe view among anti-slavery advocates in the US at this point.

Elijah Lovejoy knew he was risking his life by continuing to publish his paper, originally called The St. Louis Observer. He moved upriver from St. Louis to Alton to avoid mob justice on the western banks of the Mississippi, where his paper’s offices had been raided and his press destroyed. Alton, despite being in a free state, was not a safe haven for Lovejoy. His press was again destroyed and tossed into the river after it had been shipped to its new home, and mobs would harass Lovejoy and his Observer multiple times before his death.

Each new instance of peril seemed only to strengthen Lovejoy’s resolve. He spoke out on his own behalf at community meetings and walked the streets, damn the consequences. That his life was in danger was something he often acknowledged in editorials and addresses, but he was unwilling to abandon his cause. In his final recorded remarks, apparently from a public meeting of Alton citizens, he remarked that “if I die, I have determined to make my grave in Alton.” Lovejoy’s determination in the face of mortal danger was commendable; perhaps the monument is a fitting tribute.

But one can’t help but think of the thousands of lynching victims across the nation who gave no act of provocation at all, let alone publishing inflammatory editorials. As the National Lynching Memorial has demonstrated, these victims of racial violence are worthy of monuments, as grand as can be built.

Monuments can’t undo the pain caused by the deaths they commemorate any more than they can pardon the communities complicit in them. But a society with a clear sense of its own history is one that properly remembers its heroes and villains. A tour of public statues and monuments across the US at present reveals our ideas about our past are sometimes misguided if not outright delusional. During the time it was erected, Lovejoy’s monument would have stood in contrast to the statues of Confederate generals going up around the country as part of the burgeoning Lost Cause movement. Correcting the historical record in statues could be looked on as a comparatively low-cost act of civic maintenance as opposed to an activist victory, but it should be done all the same.

Lovejoy’s death accomplished more for the abolitionist movement than he could have dreamed of with his paper. The incident made headlines across the country and generated increased sympathy for the abolitionist cause. In an 1857 letter Abraham Lincoln described Lovejoy’s death as “the most important single event that ever happened in the new world.” The moral implications of that statement go beyond the scope of this essay, but it is true that his sacrifice advanced the cause of abolition. The monument at Alton tells us he gave everything he could for a cause that was urgent and just. Let’s hope it stands another hundred years.

Evan Allen Wood’s writing has appeared in The Riverfront Times, Backpacker, Feast, and elsewhere. He is an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he writes short stories about people losing their minds and planting trees. Find him on Twitter at @HorseEagle9000.

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Blackburn College
Carlinville, Illinois

By Karen Dillon and Naomi Crummey

As professors in the English department at Blackburn College, we have always been aware of the legacy of the college’s most famed writer, Mary Hunter Austin, who was born in Carlinville and graduated from Blackburn in 1888. Immediately after graduation she pioneered west with her family, and in the landscapes of California and the Southwest she became celebrated for her understanding of nature and unconventional feminism. In Austin’s canonical work of American nature writing from 1903, The Land of Little Rain, she recounts the story of a Paiute woman, Seyavi, who survived a massacre by hiding in caves with her young son. After describing the landscape in which Seyavi struggles to survive, Austin remarks, “That was the time Seyavi learned the sufficiency of mother wit, and how much more easily one can do without a man than might at first be supposed.” As Seyavi earned the respect of her people by raising her son without a husband, Austin, too, cast off convention to follow her own path. Though Blackburn played only a small and short-lived role in her life, we feel a kinship with Austin and the intellectual and artistic foundation the college laid for her.

Blackburn does not appeal to everyone. It is a tiny, student-managed work college in a small Midwestern town abutted on two sides by farmland; there is plenty of hard work but little glamour. Blackburn can sometimes feel isolating, but as a small, student-centered school, it also, in Austin’s own words from her 1932 autobiography Earth Horizon, provides space for professors and students alike “to walk about in it, making fruitful contacts with [each other], as [we] couldn’t have done in the larger universities.” Austin briefly left Blackburn for a nearby teaching college but despised the “rasping insistence on a regime that violated all the natural motions of her own mind.” Austin’s fiction also emphasizes the desire for natural motions over convention. In the short story “The Walking Woman,” the titular character “had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it…. it was the naked thing the Walking Woman grasped, not dressed and tricked out, for instance, by prejudices in favor of certain occupations.”

Austin returned to Blackburn precisely because it welcomes and nurtures the individual mind; it gave her freedom and space to learn as she was inclined, leaving her, as she wrote in Earth Horizon, “so far as her professional proclivities go, without so much as a thumb-print of predilection; and that I count entirely to the good. I am quite sure she could never have escaped from one of the larger, better regimented institutions with so free an intelligence and so unhampered a use of herself.” The campus newspaper The Blackburnian, for which Austin was a writer and editor, may provide evidence of the intellectual freedom Austin was known for at Blackburn. In the March 1887 edition of the “Peculiar Characteristics” section, a 19th century version of a shout-out column to students’ and professors’ unique talents, quirks, and physical characteristics, Mary Hunter is recognized simply for her “ideas.”

As we pass the bust of Austin that presides over the halls of the science building, we continue to draw inspiration from her free-spirited feminism and artistry. In the college archives, there is a copy of the February 1888 edition of The Blackburnian, which notes, “Miss Mary Hunter has not been attending her classes for the past week. Too busy writing, we suppose.” We like to picture Austin, confident and even a bit arrogant (she switched her studies from English to science because for the former she believed she needed only herself and books, but the latter she felt required a proper teacher), walking through the green spaces of campus, writing and imagining alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Like the seemingly arid spaces Austin’s best-known works so meticulously open for readers, the Blackburn campus offers a path for those who seek a space in which to walk about unhampered and forge meaningful connections.

Karen Dillon has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2011, where she teaches U.S. literature and first year writing. She has published two books since being at Blackburn: The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities (co-edited with Naomi Crummey in 2015) and The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture (2018). She is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Naomi Crummey has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2005, where she teaches writing and literature. Her personal essays have appeared in Prairie Fire, Kudzu House, and Grain, and she co-edited The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities, in which she co-authored a chapter entitled “’They’re not learning for our world; they’re learning for theirs’: Changing the First Year Writing Experience” with Karen Dillon. A Canadian citizen, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

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South Side Community Art Center
Chicago, Illinois

By Angie Chatman

4724 South Evans Avenue was located a block south of Cottage Grove, one of the main thoroughfares through the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago. The three-flat building, now demolished, initially housed four generations of my family. The oldest generation — my great-grandfather Ernest Hezekiah Fambro, along with his two sons, Curtis and Timothy, his wife, Nellie, and her mother, Amelia Beasley Ball — had moved to Chicago from DeKalb County, Georgia, in 1916. This was early in the Great Migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the industrial North of the United States, which continued through the 1960s.

My relatives weren’t the only Negroes to settle in Bronzeville. Gwendolyn Brooks and her family also migrated to Chicago, in response to lynchings and other forms of racial unrest in Topeka, Kansas, as well as for economic opportunities. Brooks lived in other places after her literary successes brought more lucrative teaching assignments, but those were temporary addresses. Chicago was home. This is obvious from the title of her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945, as well as Bronzeville Boys and Girls, published in 1956.

Due to national and local laws mandating segregated housing, at its peak 300,000 Negroes lived in Bronzeville, in the area between 39th and 51st from Cottage Grove to Halsted (until the Dan Ryan Expressway was built in 1961 and cut the western boundary line of the neighborhood to State Street). Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performed the first open-heart surgery at Provident Hospital, the first African American owned and operated hospital in the country. Loraine Hansberry’s 1959 stage play, A Raisin in the Sun, was based on her family’s experience living in and attempting to move away from Bronzeville.

Once, on a Saturday morning my mother took us to the South Side Community Art Center, a three-story brick building on Michigan Avenue. We were going to hear Mrs. Brooks, who was then the first African American Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, read her poems. My younger siblings and I sat on the linoleum floor on mats of woven fabric, fans moving the air like a barge on the Chicago River. Mrs. Brooks’ voice rose above the hum, like that of the soloist in the choir. I don’t remember what poems she read, only that I recognized the tenor of the words. Her poetry had the same rhythm and cadence of conversations among my relatives during a backyard cookout in the sunshine.

My mother had promised we’d stop for ice cream after the reading. She took a detour on the way and pulled over in front of 4724 South Evans. Stairs led up to the entrance. Every apartment had the same layout: an open living room, three bedrooms, one bathroom, and a kitchen. There was a small yard in the back. My siblings and I were dismayed that a family of six shared one bathroom.

I never lived in that building on 47th and Evans; it’s now an empty lot. For my mother, though, it was the telescope she used to focus on fond memories of carefree days with her three older sisters: days full of hopscotch, double-dutch jump rope, roller skating to the Hall Branch library — a mile and a half away — and movies at the Regal Theater. Ms. Brooks’ also uses her experiences in Bronzeville as a lens with which she can zoom in and out to comment not only on the quotidian activities of Black folk, but also display how dysfunctional racist practices are for both Black people and white people.

I have not lived in Chicago for over 25 years. Yet, as the Black Lives Matter movement grew from Minneapolis, to Chicago, to cover the globe, I turned my telescope towards home. It occurs to me — each time there’s another murder of a Black man/woman/child by police, and as people of color face a disproportionate impact from COVID-19 — that “We die soon.” Too soon.

I turn also to Brooks’ Annie Allen, published in 1949, especially a poem entitled “Beverly Hills, Chicago,” about a drive through Beverly, a then all-white neighborhood on the South Side:

Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people.

At least nobody driving by in this car.

It is only natural, however, that it should occur to us

How much more fortunate they are than we are.

Angie Chatman is a native of Chicago. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Pangyrus, The Rumpus, Blood Orange Review, and Hippocampus Magazine. Her essay, “Ode to Poundcake,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She won a WEBBY award for her performance in the “Growing Up Black” episode of the World Channel’s Stories from the Stage. Angie can also be heard on The Moth Radio Hour’s podcast in the episode titled “Help Me.” Angie now lives in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood with her family and rescue dog, Lizzie.

Photo courtesy of the South Side Community Art Center.

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1525 N. Campbell Ave.
Chicago, Illinois

By Olga L. Herrera

I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s in the Little Village neighborhood on the southwest side of Chicago. At the time, the area was in transition between Eastern Europeans leaving for the suburbs ahead of the incoming Mexican immigrant families, who bought up the neighborhood’s turn-of-the-century working-class homes. If I had read The House on Mango Street when it was published in 1984, I would have been convinced that Sandra Cisneros was writing about Little Village. That’s how real it felt, with versions of Lucy and Rachel from Texas living down the street, and Cathy Queen of Cats who is moving away because she says “the neighborhood is getting bad.”

The House on Mango Street, however, was based on Cisneros’s childhood in Humboldt Park in the 1960s on the near north side of the city. Even though our two neighborhoods felt similar, they have distinct characters. A tiled archway over the eastern end of the neighborhood symbolizes Little Village’s Mexican identity, while in Humboldt Park, enormous metal Puerto Rican flags arch over a diverse mix of eateries on Division Street, including a Mexican taqueria and a Colombian cafe. Recently, gentrification has been changing the demographics and character of Humboldt Park more swiftly, making a significant change on Cisneros’s old street.

The House on Mango Street was partly inspired by her memories of the house her family bought when she was a young girl, at 1525 N. Campbell Ave. If you do an online image search for the “real” house on Mango Street, you will find images of a red brick two-story house with a flat roof and a small front yard bordered by a black wrought-iron fence. It looks just as Esperanza describes. But it’s not a picture of the original house.

At a symposium I attended in 2017, Sandra Cisneros explained that this image had circulated for years but was, in fact, a photograph of the house directly across the street. The red house in the picture is 1524 N. Campbell Avenue, and it is a mirror image of her house, with the front door on the reverse side. Her childhood home had been demolished in the early 2000s, and a new condominium building was constructed in its place in 2005. You couldn’t see her original home anymore, she said, but the one across the street would give you a good idea of what it looked like.

These two houses tell the story of gentrification in Humboldt Park. One is a modest two-story house with painted brick, a metal awning, and narrow windows. The other is a sleek three-story building with large windows that open to balconies on each floor, with a garden level below. Located between two larger, older apartment buildings, it bears elements of their style, but because the footprint of the plot belonged to that smaller house, the new building at 1525 N. Campbell is wedged into the space, with the northern exterior wall angled away to make room for a narrow gangway. Ceilings have swept upward, and bay windows and a new third floor have sprouted. It has an attenuated look, seeming to both belong and not belong.

The differences represent not only changes in architecture but also in affordability and the families who can live in this building. Gentrification reverses the mid-century trend of white flight to the suburbs. Now wealthy families move in, and less affluent immigrants and families of color have fewer chances to live in this culturally significant neighborhood. In a city notorious for segregation, the Humboldt Park neighborhood has been home to a diverse community that includes Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Eastern Europeans, and African Americans. The House on Mango Street brings that rare diversity to life. Since the mid-1990s, residents have fought to preserve the neighborhood’s character by organizing around issues of affordable housing, community development, and park use. Now, when I walk over to Division Street in Humboldt Park and see El Paisano Tacos across from Nellie’s Puerto Rican restaurant, I see that the community has held on to those cultural differences that make this a special place.

Olga L. Herrera is associate professor in English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN. Her research and teaching interests include Latinx and Chicago literature, and she thinks that she will always be fascinated with the complexities and contradictions of cities. 

Photo by Marie Villanueva, who was born in Quezon City, Philippines, but has lived in Chicago since her family landed in O’Hare Airport in 1979.  She is the author of “Nene and the Horrible Math Monster,” a children’s book loosely based on her experiences growing up as a Filipino immigrant in Chicago’s West Side.  She is also a contributor in the anthology, “Children of Asian America.” Marie lives in Chicago and continues to write adult fiction.  Photography is one of her many artistic pursuits.

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