Harvey Pekar Park
Cleveland Heights, Ohio

By Joseph S. Pete

The modesty is the point at some landmarks such as Michael Jackson’s shoebox-sized childhood home in Gary, Indiana, or the small brick ranch home where Pope Leo XIV grew up in Dolton, Illinois. Harvey Pekar celebrated this modesty — he championed the average, the everyday, the quotidian. Known for the long-running American Splendor comic he wrote with the help of rotating guest artists, he was the bard of the banal, the elegist of the everyman, the master of Midwestern mundanity. It’s only fitting that the local landmarks where fans can pay homage to Pekar in his native Cleveland would be unassuming.

Pekar lived in the inner-ring suburb of Cleveland Heights, which posthumously honored him with Harvey Pekar Park at the corner of Euclid Heights Boulevard and Coventry Road, a drag he often frequented. The modest park, located at the end of a sidewalk, has some benches and painted beach chairs, a small plaza, concrete steps that double as amphitheater seats for outdoor performances, and a few banners featuring panels of his comics. It could easily be overlooked by a passerby.

Pekar’s old stomping grounds lie far from I.M. Pei’s glittering, glassy Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum on the Lake Erie lakefront or Frank Gehry’s splashy avant-garde building on the campus of Case Western Reserve University. Pekar’s native Cleveland is a humble Rust Belt burgh that inspired the Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video to joke “come and look at both of our buildings.”

The city has been so snake-bitten by misfortunes like the infamous Cuyahoga River fire that there’s an entire book called Cleveland’s Greatest Disasters. The “Mistake by the Lake” has produced some great comic artists, including Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and Derf, who penned the alt-weekly staple The City.

A Veterans Affairs clerk by day and graphic novelist by night, Pekar advanced the art form of comics like Superman had before him, even though he only did the writing and not the illustrations, penning scripts the cartoonists brought to life. Superman propelled flights of superhuman fancy to new heights of popularity while Pekar grounded comics in gritty novelistic autobiography that appealed to adult readers, helping pave the way for future generations of confessional zines and graphic novels often both written and set in coffee shops.

He was inspiring to fledgling writers like me, showing that it was possible to be ordinary in daily life and extraordinary on the page, that everyone’s story could make for compelling writing.

Pekar collaborated with accomplished artists like Robert Crumb, Gary Dumm, Alison Bechdel, and Ed Piskor to elevate the pedestrian into the epic, imbuing lofty meaning into stories of workplace drudgery, vinyl record hunting at garage sales, and trudging through the snow with a haul of library books. His work reached a wider audience with the American Splendor biopic that starred Paul Giamatti and featured a scene of haunting melancholy in which Pekar stood hunched over the rail on a pedestrian bridge, watching the river of headlights flow on the highway below.

I’ve visited many of the landmarks associated with Pekar over the years. As a lifelong Midwesterner, I usually visit Cleveland at least once a year and once swung by both Cleveland and Detroit in a weekend.

I’ve seen the Louis Stokes Cleveland Veterans Affairs Medical Center where he worked, the Lee Road branch of the Cleveland Heights–University Heights Public Library where he read and checked out books almost daily, and the grand Lake View Cemetery where he is buried near tombstones commemorating the likes of Elliott Ness and President Andrew Garfield.

But the best place to pay homage is Coventry Road, his old haunt where one Redditor described him as “just another guy you’d see around the neighborhood doing normal stuff.” It’s not only home to Harvey Pekar Park, but also to two of his favorite hangouts: Tommy’s Restaurant and Mac’s Backs–Books On Coventry.

The neighboring businesses are connected, so one can browse the stacks for books in the three-level bookstore while waiting for a table. The funky bohemian restaurant blends classic deli favorites with hippie-ish vegetarian fare. When I visited the restaurant, I could imagine Pekar grousing in his cantankerous, curmudgeonly way over a corned beef or tuna salad sandwich. Mac’s Backs has crowded floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves crammed with used books on every subject imaginable. Fliers, posters, and zines plastered on the stairwell down to the basement serve as a cultural history of concerts, plays, author appearances, and other bygone events.

One can envision Pekar hunting for new reading material or gathering material over coffee and conversation next door. One can picture the disheveled everyman striding stoop-shouldered down the sidewalk, absorbed in whatever mundane matter he would next alchemize into art. It’s almost like a living history museum for one of America’s most splendid graphic novelists.

The descendant of steelworkers, author and award-winning journalist Joseph S. Pete hails from the Calumet Region just outside Chicago, where the oil refinery flare stacks burn round the clock, and the mills make clouds. His literary work and photography have appeared in more than 100 journals, including Proximity Magazine, Tipton Poetry Journal, O-Dark-Thirty, Line of Advance, As You Were, Chicago Literati, Dogzplot, Proximity Magazine, Stoneboat, The High Window, Synesthesia Literary Journal, Steep Street Journal, Beautiful Losers, The First Line, New Pop Lit, The Grief Diaries, Gravel, Junto, The Offbeat, Oddball Magazine, The Perch Magazine, Bull Men’s Fiction, Rising Phoenix Review, Thoughtful Dog, shufPoetry, The Roaring Muse, Prairie Winds, Blue Collar Review, The Rat’s Ass Review, Euphemism, Jenny Magazine, and Vending Machine Press.

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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.

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Dollis Hill House
London, England

By Thomas Ruys Smith

It’s the first real day of spring and I’m in Dollis Hill — an unremarkable suburb of North London that sits just inside the North Circular, the multi-lane road system that encircles the centre of the capital and is synonymous with traffic congestion and an entrenched atmosphere of urban decay. Still, in Gladstone Park, the sun is out and so are the local residents: in the ruins of what was once Dollis Hill House, a children’s birthday party is winding down just as a group of women begin an impromptu karaoke session; our miniature schnauzer Winifred is making the acquaintance of a fluffy white pomeranian apparently named Snowflake. This might seem an unlikely location for a ghost-hunt, but that’s why we’re here.

If you wanted to seek for the restless spirit of Mark Twain, there would be worse places to begin, at least according to the man himself. Interviewed in 1907 as he embarked on what he knew would be his final trip across the Atlantic, Twain was clear that he intended to spend his afterlife in the modern Babylon that had often served him as a second home: “I may never go to London again until I come back to this sphere after I am dead,” he told a reporter, “and then I would like to live in London.”

As an academic based in the UK, I’ve spent much of my career exploring Mark Twain’s relationship with the Mississippi River, tracing the way that the river wound its way through his life and work. In surprising ways, that muddy water often washed up at my own front door across the Atlantic: British writers had a surprising influence on the creation of the Mississippi as a powerful global emblem of America. Now, though, I’m reversing that transatlantic equation. It seemed time to pursue the traces of Mark Twain in my own backyard — in London, the city in which he spent roughly three crucial years on numerous trips, from his inaugural visit in 1872 to his final victory lap in 1907. A number of Twain’s London residences still exist, most famously the Langham Hotel which hosted his early visits and the house he rented at 23 Tedworth Square in affluent Chelsea, which bears a blue plaque erected by English Heritage to announce to passers-by that Mark Twain, American writer, had once lived there in 1896-7.

For me, though, there is something especially evocative about Dollis Hill House, occupied by Twain with his wife Olivia and daughter Jean in the summer of 1900. Compared to the glamour of his first trips to London as a literary lion ensconced in the Langham, or the awful gloom of his secluded residence in Tedworth Square after the death of his daughter Susy, there is an appealing softness to Twain’s time in Dollis Hill: after years of personal turmoil, including bankruptcy, the months he spent in the house were a relatively sunny sojourn. By 1900, his fortunes had been largely restored, enough for his family to return to America after a period of financial exile in Europe, and Dollis Hill House was a final hiatus before the end of this odyssey.

Twain’s description of this time exudes a warmth and peace that was rare in his later years: “Dollis Hill House comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I have ever occupied. … It is within a biscuit-toss of solid London; yet it stands solitary on its airy hill, in the centre of six acres of lawn, and garden, and shrubbery, and heavy-foliaged ancient trees.” His only complaint was the lack of a telephone. Today, of course, London has swallowed up Dollis Hill and what had been “country, pure and simple” to Twain is now surrounded by urban sprawl. Even on a warm spring day, “paradise” seems a stretch. However, as Twain himself noted, the land around the house had just been “bought for a park, to be for all time a memorial to Mr. Gladstone” — a frequent visitor to the house during his time as Prime Minister — which meant that, to some extent, the landscape that Twain loved really would “remain as it is.” Unlike hotels or his other residences that still function as private homes, this Twain-imprinted place remains immediately and freely accessible to all.

There’s also something about Dollis Hill House’s ruin that adds a poignancy, and a piquancy, to its association with Twain. A series of fires in the late 1990s left it a derelict shell. Though money was earmarked for its restoration, it became a casualty of austerity when former Prime Minister Boris Johnson canceled the funding during his time as London Mayor. A final fire in 2011 precipitated its demolition. Now, it remains an absent presence in Gladstone Park: a short course of bricks marks out the building’s floorplan and a fragment of one wall remains. People make their own use of this liminal space — like today’s birthday party.

An absent presence is also how I’ve come to think about Mark Twain as I search for him in London. Today, I can’t swear that the park-goers in Dollis Hill are thinking much about its famous former resident, but across the closing decades of the nineteenth century London was infatuated with the writer who seemed to embody their dreams, and sometimes nightmares, about America. In 1907, local newspaper The Hendon and Finchley Times proudly claimed him, “Our friend Mark Twain, who is associated with this district owing to his residence at Dollis Hill House.” Another paper judged that Twain’s connection to Gladstone Park would “add a certain … literary flavour in the public mind to its natural attractions.” These are vivid and hyperlocal examples of what Twain’s some-time associate Ralph Ashcroft declared in 1907: the English — and Londoners in particular — were “part-owners with the American nation of Mark Twain.”

In turn, Twain himself was infatuated with an urban space that was like no other on the face of the planet. “Everything in this monster city interests me,” Twain announced during his first time in London. And it always did. I would argue that outside of America, there is no other location that meant as much to him, or that had as much influence on his sense of self. Just as this ruined corner of London will always be a little paradise for Twain’s ghost, so London should always be a part of our understanding of this iconically American writer. And for me, there is something particularly significant about having this enigmatic shell on my doorstep, a short drive away from my own home along the grey river of the North Circular. Tracing the outlines of the rooms of Dollis Hill House as my daughters eat an ice cream purchased from the old stable block and modern life buzzes throughout this liminal shell, I can conjure up Twain as a near-neighbour, a fellow suburbanite, a Londoner, available for afternoon calls. In Gladstone Park, the sun is shining, and Mark Twain is lounging in a deckchair beneath the trees, forever.

Thomas Ruys Smith is an academic and writer who specializes in the study of nineteenth-century America. He is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and co-editor of the journals Comparative American Studies and New Area Studies.

“Gladstone Park, at Dollis Hill, to Be Opened on May 25.” The Illustrated London News, 1901.

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Ambassador Bridge
Michigan–Ontario

By Ramya Swayamprakash

I grew up in India. I have now lived in the United States, and in Michigan, for almost a decade. But I cannot claim to be from Michigan or India — it is hard to call a place your home when your connection to it is defined by a temperamental piece of paper. Emotionally and geographically, I feel like a vagabond, without a place to root me. As much as I feel that lack of place, my entire adult life has been guided by rivers. I have followed them to their sources high in the Himalayas, chanced upon some of their most magical beginnings in Tibet, and written about their entrapment in peninsular India. I grew up listening to stories about these rivers. Rivers have been home, intellectually.

Yet, when it came to the river that I have written and thought about for the past decade, I did not know of it until I met it. The first time I flew over the Detroit River in 2013 was the first time I even heard of it. Growing up in India, I was familiar with New York and San Francisco. Much of the Midwest was a blob, with the Great Lakes at its center. At the time, Detroit was just beginning to be in the news because of its financial situation. When the captain announced we were flying over the Detroit River, I did a double take and wondered whether this was a chicken and egg situation — which came first, the river or the city. The answer as I was soon to find out, was inconsequential.

The larger story has always been how this river strait has become what author Paul Vasey calls “a fabric” of our lives, a part of “our vocabulary.” I was recommended Vasey’s 2013 memoir The River: A Memoir of Life in the Border Cities by one of my advisors, and I read it during the summer of 2017 when I was in Windsor, Ontario, finishing up archival research for my dissertation. In the shadow of its more famous neighbor, Windsor was an interesting vantage point to be researching from and reading about. I used The River as a sort of guide to walk the city and get to know it better. The Detroit River looms large in Vasey’s imagination in ways that I had not factored until I read the book and walked the city myself. The river was as much a way-finding device as it was the edge of theater — you could watch an entire city go by on the other side if you sat long enough. There was a rootedness to the river that I had not yet found on the other side of the river and border. I spent a wonderous afternoon speaking with retired ship captains at the Marsh Collection in Amherstburg, understanding the river and specifically the infrastructures that I would then spend half a decade writing about—and continue to gush about.

The river was everywhere, and never too far that summer in Windsor. The air was muggy and humid, and winds blew little or no smoke from Zug Island. It reminded me of summers long ago, in Bombay, a lifetime and half a world away. That summer, as I kayaked across from Walkerville to Peche Island, it was breathtaking. The summer sun lit up the water into a magical shade of blue, and the ruins of Hiram Walker’s mansion seemed to come alive. If you squinted enough, you’d experience some time travel. From the main shipping channel on the other side of the island, the familiar but jarring sound of a massive laker — a ship that plies the Great Lakes — might wake you up from your reverie, just in time to head back to the mainland, and across the border.

These memories are perhaps just my rose-tinted glasses, but as I remember it, the river seemed more open, more welcoming, on the Canadian side. A decade ago, it was also just easier to get to the Detroit River from the Canadian bank and sit by it, watching it, just as Vasey did, “rolling past with ducks and gulls on its back, the ocean on its mind.” It was a centering experience. As trucks crawled by on Ambassador Bridge, standing under it at Assumption Park, I would gaze at the Michigan Central Station.

Walking under Ambassador Bridge along the riverfront trail, near some maintenance workers, I spotted a laker. This park, where Vasey talks about the history of Jesuits’ landing along the southern bank of the river. On that summer day, as I looked onto Assumption Church and the bridge, Vasey’s descriptions of the park swam in my head. It was the however the people of Windsor whose descriptions really occupied my mind. Vasey paints Windsor with the love of an insider-outsider, a feeling I understand deeply.

My biased view of the river may have been filtered by the political border, which while silent and unproblematic for most North Americans, remains an anxiety-inducing experience for immigrants and those individuals with “weak” passports like mine.  Taking a day trip to Windsor was a thrill, not least because I was crossing into another country with ease. I was even welcomed with a smile! Crossing back into the U.S. was a lot scarier. For those of us with weak passports, borders are real, and as much as I enjoyed The River, I found myself jealous of the author’s obliviousness to the barrier. I wanted to feel that obliviousness for a minute.

I do not quite know how to explain my relationship with this river. It is unremarkable on the surface but every time I am near, it feels like home. While I may never be oblivious to the border, the river has never judged me for the misfortunes of geography. Standing on its banks, geological time rolling by while I try and write about humans, I feel humbled, mesmerized by everything this body of water — which flushes every twenty hours or so — has seen. I have spent a decade trying to understand and tell these stories. These tales and their river have grounded and sustained me. As a person, I am very much a work in progress, but this river and everything it does are the closest thing I have to a “home,” at least one rooted in place.

Taking my toddler to meet the river last spring was a special homecoming, my worlds colliding in the best possible way. Yet, when my toddler asked to go to the Canadian bank where the parks looked cooler, I had to say no. My child holds a stronger passport than I do. The border that was immaterial to them was very much visible to me, with a weak passport in my back pocket. If we crossed over, my toddler could return at the drop of a hat, but I could not. One does not need a wall to see the border divide everywhere — you just need to carry a weak passport.

As I write this, sometimes my toddler wistfully asked for their passport to cross the border “home” to go shop at Target, since the Great White North lacks that convenience. For the first time in their life, the border has become visible. As a parent, I feel guilty about taking away their obliviousness. As a scholar, I hope this will enable more careful attention to and, someday, abolition of borders, at least in our minds. Either way, we will wait, gazing at the sun-kissed waters of the Great Lakes, thinking about making homes.

Ramya Swayamprakash is an Assistant Professor at Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan. A transplant to the Midwest, Ramya researches and writes about rivers, infrastructure, and borders. Her work has appeared in the Michigan Historical Review and Water History, among others. She co-hosts Heartland History, the podcast of the Midwestern Historical Association.

For further reading on passportism, the discrimination against people holding passports from certain countries and its uncritical acceptance by citizens of wealthier nations, see Shahnaz Habib, Airplane Mode: An Irreverent History of Travel (2023).

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U.S. Highway 30
LaPorte County, Indiana

By Dawn Burns

“My main interest is in making the ordinary strange and wonderful.” –Michael Martone, interview with David Hoppe, NUVO, 2013

On my basement wall above a small writing desk hangs a three-piece canvas print of Northern Indiana farmland with U.S. Highway 30 in the background. The picture’s not much to look at, yet when I found this triptych of ordinariness in a Lansing, Michigan, thrift store, I was overcome with wonder, feeling I knew the exact location — 4494 W. U.S. Highway 30, Hanna, Indiana, 46340 — an address as precise as my memories are approximate. An address to which I could mail a postcard because it once was my home.

Growing up, I watched all manner of vehicles drive by the intersection of U.S. 30 and County Road 450 West from my upstairs bedroom window. Traffic sped by in both directions as eternally as bread slices fall away from the giant Sunbeam loaf at 350 Pearl Street in Fort Wayne, the city 92 miles east where extended family lived and where Michael Martone was born on August 22, 1955, in St. Joe Hospital, one week shy of 18 years before me and, as he notes in Brooding (2018), in “the same year as . . . the commencement of the Interstate Highway System.”

Michael Martone in fours, like the four squared corners of a county township, like how Indiana looks flying over, like he writes in “The Flatness” (2000), a grid inscribed into the skin of the Midwest which “transmits in fields and waves,” which “is a place of sense”:

Growing up in Hanna, I knew no Michael Martone. Michael Martone’s whereabouts were no concern of mine. When I watched traffic, not once did I conjure a writer from Indiana who wrote about Indiana. Instead, I asked myself four questions: “Who are the people driving by? Where are they coming from? Where are they going? What if they break down?” Sometimes cars did break down and my dad would help. As travelers sat around our kitchen table, I’d hear the answers to my questions. I liked finding out these facts; I also liked daydreaming my own fictions.

I would not meet Michael Martone until 1997 (or was it 1998?) when he visited my Notre Dame MFA cohort of creative writers. By then I no longer lived on U.S. 30 and we did not meet because of unforeseen car trouble. Though I bought his 1990 collection, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, I would not fully read it for another twenty years, concerned I might be influenced. Still, simply by publishing a book with Fort Wayne in the title, he’d given me permission to write about Indiana.  

No doubt I’ve got my facts wrong about my thrifted picture. I would not stake my Hoosier credibility on the highway being U.S. 30 any more than I would on the landscape being Northern Indiana. About “the flatness,” Michael Martone writes, “They are thinking about Northern Ohio, about Indiana, about the long stretch through Illinois and on into Iowa. It is flat.” My picture could be from any of these states, or none. Who am I to say?

What I’ve long loved about Michael Martone — about all the Michael Martones — is how his writing both secures and blurs, for he makes Fort Wayne and all of Indiana as-real-and-not-real as Art Smith, “bird boy of Fort Wayne,” whom I can read about both on the Smithsonian’s website and in The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne (2020).

In Michael Martone’s mythologies, Dan Quayle will always be out snipe hunting, Jacques Derrida will always be eating an Awful Big, Awful Good pork tenderloin at a Winesburg café, and mayonnaise will always be pumped through the Trans-Indiana Mayonnaise Pipeline.

To his mythologies, I add my own. Dawn Burns, in fours:

Of all Michael Martone’s work, Winesburg, Indiana, a 2015 anthology featuring stories by more than two dozen Indiana authors, best illustrates how we patchwork our mythologies together but, like a highway mirage on a hundred-degree day, can never arrive at the places we seek.

When I asked Michael Martone if he’d ever driven from Fort Wayne to Chicago, he said he’d driven “many times up the old Lincoln Highway 30 that parallels the old Pennsy RR to see White Sox games and the art museum and Science and Industry Museum.” “That,” he said, “is why I put Winesburg, Indiana, near there near Columbia City.”

Funny to find out at last the happenstance of how Michael Martone came to place Winesburg smackdab in familiar family territory for me, my eight sets of aunts/uncles/cousins radiating out across Indiana from my two sets of grandparents — Burns and Tschantz — in  Whitley County, my own nuclear family of four the satellite flung out furthest to that rental home at the corner of U.S. 30 and 450 West where a postcard can no longer go, the abandoned house long gone, burned for firefighting practice by the Hanna Township Volunteer Fire Department in 2008.

I imagine my childhood home ablaze, black smoke rolling across all four lanes of traffic, every passerby slowing to notice, only I was not there to watch them from my second story window. I wonder if Michael Martone’s childhood homes still stand. I could find out by asking, but I haven’t. Maybe one day when visiting friends who live near Winesburg I will drive the extra twenty miles to Fort Wayne and find out.

I do not write much at my basement writing desk below the three canvases that, put together, show the height of summer in maybe-Indiana on maybe-U.S. 30. I thought I would, and I’ve tried, but most often I choose my second-floor home office where, if I stand and look out the window, I can view the fence separating my small yard from the backsides of Eastside Lansing businesses and the parking lot which packs full on the weekends for the bars and live music. From my window’s angle, I cannot see the Everybody Reads bookstore from where I ordered Michael Martone’s Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana (2022) from my good friend Scott, but it comforts me to know the bookstore lives beyond my sight.

I like the idea that I wrote this sitting in my basement where the picture transported me away from the sound of the washing machine, the smell of litterboxes, the sight of cinderblock walls surrounding me on three sides. I like the idea, but I don’t like to sit too long where dampness might settle into my skin, like the skin of Indiana where mildew blooms white, strange and wonderful across the landscape of the ordinary.

Dawn Burns is thoroughly Midwestern, having lived her whole life in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Often her characters are Midwestern too, like Evangelina from Elkhart, Indiana, in Evangelina Everyday (2022) who may appear simple and uncomplicated but has a rich inner life. Dawn’s MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame prepared her for a lifetime of writing, creative community building, and teaching. Dawn is founder of the SwampFire Retreat for Writers and Artists, and a recipient of excellence awards from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Ohio Arts Council. An assistant professor at Michigan State University, Dawn is committed to writing and storytelling as acts of personal and social change both in and beyond her First Year Writing classroom. You can find Dawn at dawnburns42.com.

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Arkansas River
Wichita, Kansas

By Amy Barnes

For thirty years, I’ve had the closing line of a poem stuck in my head: “snow fills all the empty graves.” My creative writing teacher at Wichita State University read the poem to an eager circle of young writers. It’s an evocative image of community, grief, emptiness, frigid midwestern winters in a way like no other poem or prose I’ve read. I periodically searched for the impactful words without success.

I spent my childhood in Kansas. School didn’t close when it snowed, and the mail came like clockwork through wind, snow, and sleet. My adult life, married and with children, has been in a series of Southern states, where a light jacket serves in January, and inches of snow keep the mailman away for a week.

My mother recently sent me a book of photographs from my colder childhood years in the Midwest — mostly images of me standing awkwardly next to boyfriends while wearing gaudy, poofy 80s prom dresses. My own adult children are now the same age I was in the photos. But there were also peripheral surprises in the snapshots: grandparents, my first car, first bike, first date, a Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor. 

In one image, I’m caught mid-twirl holding hands with one of those young men, in the middle of the frozen Arkansas River in downtown Wichita. It was more than a sheet of ice that winter. It was thick and turned into a temporary ice-skating rink for lovers and ducks alike.

For the first time since 1996, I recently went back to the region, in part to promote my Belle Point Press collection Child Craft at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, a creative writer’s conference in Kansas City, Missouri. In Tennessee, where I live, there was an unexpected seven inches of snow that paralyzed the area. By contrast, Kansas City was temperate and dry.

In 1991, I was still enrolled at Wichita State University taking creative writing courses from the venerable Albert Goldbarth as a 20-something with little writing and even less life experience. He spoke eloquently of snow, grief and people, read his own poetry aloud to the class, and critiqued our fledgling attempts at imitation. All in a circle. Like mourners around an empty winter grave that stood poetically in my head for decades.

While prolific, Goldbarth is resolutely reclusive. I went in search of that memorable poem, one that I thought was his. While I didn’t locate that specific poem, I came across something in my searches that felt more relevant. The non-fiction piece “These Quiet Poems” by Rick Mulkey and Susan Tekulve appeared in The Georgia Review. The authors open by talking about being Goldbarth’s students two decades earlier, perhaps even when I was also a student. They’re walking along the same Arkansas River that I once ice skated on with a long-ago beau. Goldbarth takes them to a series of his installed, poetic plaques etched in stone that read:

“Snow. Rain. Stream. Sea.

Dew. Mist. Boiled for tea.

The life of water never ends.

It merely has different bodies.”

Those simple words, lined up like a Burma Shave advertisement, summed up everything I felt once I got to AWP: a sense of place, different bodies of water/snow/self, poetry, a return to a new/old home, reading Albert Goldbarth differently three decades apart. Skating on an iced-over pond in my 20s. Writing in my 20s. Writing in my 50s.

At the conference, Goldbarth and I texted briefly, in the same state for a moment. We crossed paths — riding the pink Barbie trolley in opposite directions. We both had off-site readings ironically at the exact same time, a few miles apart. When I asked about the poetry that had eaten at my thoughts for years, he had a quick answer: Maxine Kumin.

I left Kansas City with that name. When I got home, I found myself entranced by not just that one poem I’d sought out, but also her other stunning work — on grief, loss, change, community, war, snow, and life. She died a few years ago, but I discovered so much exploring the profound words she left behind. It was a fitting end to my literary quest only a few hundred miles from where it began.

Those boys buried in plastic photo album sleeves are scattered like snowflakes now and I’ve mailed copies of my collections to the professor, before our empty graves are filled.

Amy Cipolla Barnes is the author of three collections: Mother Figures, Ambrotypes, and Child Craft (Belle Point Press, 2023). She has words at Spartan Lit, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, -ette review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Rumpus, and many other sites. Her writing has been long-listed for the Wigleaf Top50 in 2021-2024, included in Best Microfiction 2025, and The Best Small Fictions, 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor, Narratively Chief Submissions Reader and course instructor, and also reads for The MacGuffin. 

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Lakeview Park

Lorain, Ohio

By Ashley Burge

As a teenager, I entered what Toni Morrison calls her narrative “village” through her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), and I was pleased to see three young Black girls traverse the familiar experiences of home life while prodding the unfamiliar territory of adolescence. I found much comfort in these girls’ fantasies and fears, and I wept, as I still do, over their tragedies. I was also entranced by the way Morrison framed her beautifully tragic characters in picturesque settings of nature and growth and beauty. Any serious Morrison reader is well attuned to her complex and intriguing characters, sparse but rich prose, and “unspeakable” thematic materials. I remember sprawling on my bed admiring these Black girls amidst golden-brown autumn leaves or tight red rosebuds. To me, these snapshots of nature were a buffer to the hopelessly tragic story that would soon unfold.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses the backdrop of Lorain, Ohio, her midwestern hometown, to illuminate the traumas inflicted on young Black girls and women in the 1940s. Specifically, she represents the Edenic Lakeview Park, with its beautiful rose gardens, situated among the pristine beachfronts on West Erie Avenue, as a pathway to cathartic revelation and renewal. For Morrison, nature and the natural world are a catalyst for survival, so the book’s version of Lakeview, called Lake Shore Park, is an ideal space to anchor her vision.

Lakeview Park has become a landmark in Lorain County with its approximately 2,500 roses planted in a rotary wheel. The park sits on Lake Erie, its circular design symbolizing wholeness and rebirth. In a more just world, it would be the ideal space for Morrison’s tragic protagonists to transcend the confines of intersectional oppression. But in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, spaces such as these were inaccessible to the three Black girls who epitomize themes of victimhood and survival in Middle America. In The Bluest Eye, these girls, Claudia, Fredia, and Pecola, are accosted by the traumas of racism, sexism, and classism well before they have escaped the naïve joy and confusion of adolescence. The tragic character Pecola does not understand or question her obsessive desire for blue eyes, but she is awestruck when the green-eyed “high-yellow dream child” Maureen Peal enchants teachers, parents, and students. Portrayed as a type of Persephone embodied in Morrison’s season themed narrative, Maureen disrupts the equilibrium of the girls’ identities and symbolizes the overwhelming otherness of Black girlhood in America. In these young girls’ experiences with racism and sexism, Morrison interrogates the worst possible scenarios for those who are othered, marginalized, and dismissed, and she indicts the communities that are complicit in their annihilation.

In many ways, The Bluest Eye is an autobiographical rendering of Morrison’s own othered identity in the small Midwestern industrial town of Lorain, Ohio. Morrison adamantly affirmed her Midwestern roots throughout her career. In conversation with Collette Dowling, she said, “Everything I write starts there…. Whether I end up there is another question, but that’s the place where I start…. It’s my beginning, my ‘thing,’ and I have distorted it, piled things on, I have done whatever it is that writers do to places, and made it my own. So it is mine now.”  Even while claiming the Midwest as her own, she confessed to Robert Stepto, “I know that I never felt like an American or an Ohian or even a Lorainite.”

Morrison’s allegiance to the Midwest shows in her ability to carve out the validity of Black identity in a region that often silences diverse voices. Morrison’s family faced such disenfranchisement. Before relocating to the Midwest for better opportunities, they had deep roots in the South, with her mother being from Alabama and her father from Georgia. She often recounts the story of 88 acres of land that were legally taken from her Native American maternal great-grandmother to show how white supremacy and systematic oppression renders land inaccessible to Black and brown people.

Morrison emphasizes this extension of day-to-day oppression in The Bluest Eye as she traces the growth and then disintegration of Pecola’s character. Before a pivotal scene in which Pecola is rejected by her mother and humiliated in front of the little white girl who her mother cares for, Morrison details the natural beauty of the white neighborhood that these young girls cannot access:

“We reached Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables. It was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water. Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.”

Here, Morrison embosses the fictionalized Lake Shore Park onto Lorain’s own Lakeview Park, with its lush rose gardens, manicured lawns, and picturesque lakeside. The tragedy of its beauty is that these young Black girls in 1940s Lorain are denied access to the dream of smelling those rosebuds, playing on those lawns, or frolicking on that lakeside. They are shut out from its beauty in nature and, therefore, alienated from their community, which adds to the despair that leads to Pecola’s demise.

When I reflect on my first immersion into The Bluest Eye as a teenager, I realize that my delight in Morrison’s poetic rendering of nature points to the reclamation of spaces that have been historically inaccessible to the Black community. Within that legalized denial enacted prior to the 1960s there was not only the unspoken denial of the ecstasy of nature but also the disenfranchisement of property, wealth, and mobility that still plagues Black Americans today. I was not personally denied access to Lorain’s natural enclaves, but the tragic narrative of denial was a tangible specter that haunted my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama even in my adolescence.  

These are, perhaps, the sentiments that impressed upon me as I empathized with Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola. And these are, perhaps, the sentiments that many Black Americans must navigate as they encounter the traumas connected to public parks and natural resources in America. It would not be difficult to surmise that Morrison incorporates the tragic denial of Lake Shore Park in her narrative because her desire to access its beauty and nature also dominated her own dreams as a child. However, Morrison’s novels never persist in the tragic nor linger too long into despair. At their core, they are about healing that can lead to survival and subjectivity. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison took the pang of rejection and adorned the park with flourish and meaning and gravitas and three little Black girls whose voices would have otherwise been silenced. Now, Lakeview Park is forever hers, and through her reclamation, it becomes ours.

Dr. Ashley Burge is an Assistant Professor of African American literature at Augustana College–Illinois specializing in 19th and 20th century African American literature. Her research and teaching emphasize the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. She also explores Black feminism and ecocriticism in her writings. Her essays have appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, the Pennsylvania Communication Annual, the African American Encyclopedia of Culture, and the critical anthology Through Mama’s Eyes. Her current book project establishes a theoretical paradigm that transmutes trauma and fragmentation to wholeness and subjectivity in African American literature. 

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Riverside Park

Independence, Kansas

By Autumn Finley

Growing up in a flyover state, I never much considered the literary merit of my home in the southeast corner of Kansas. Apart from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, the novels I read were never set here. Then, in my senior year of high school, my drama teacher, Heather Wilson, introduced our class to the works of playwright William Inge. We were performing Picnic for the spring play, and we also read snippets of his other plays set in a fictionalized Independence, Kansas. I knew that Independence Community College had the Inge Center and the Inge Festival, but I had never processed that there was a famous playwright born and raised less than thirty miles from my family’s farm.

Learning about Inge made my corner of Kansas feel important. Our class took a field trip, looking at the homes in the historic areas of Independence to gain inspiration for our set. The professors at ICC opened the Inge home for our class to tour. It was then used as a home for their Playwrights in Residence program, and we saw the staircase and landing which likely inspired scenes in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. We visited the Inge cemetery plot, paying our respects while marveling at how a literary giant rose to fame from our tiny corner of the lower Midwest.

However, the place I associate most with Inge is a small picnic spot by the Verdigris River, which can be accessed down a slight ravine beyond the larger picnic areas at the Riverside Park and Ralph Mitchell Zoo. A lone concrete table was nestled in the bottom of the ravine, time wearing it down to a pocked finish, but the area was well-kept and mown for park-goers.

As the spring semester of my senior year rolled to a close, with opening night looming, our cast met up for our own picnic by the Verdigris, overlooking the murky water and an old concrete bridge. We munched on our sandwiches, mulling the fleetingness of our youth, understanding that the innocence of our own childhoods was fading, much like the realizations many of the characters have throughout the play. Helen Potts, a middle-aged character, reflects on the juxtaposition of day-to-day life and the energy of the teenage and young adult characters, saying to her neighbor, “I feel sort of excited, Flo. I think we plan picnics just to give ourselves an excuse … to let something thrilling and romantic happen to us—” The play hinges on love, both romantic and familial, and how those bonds shape people’s choices and dreams. For me and my classmates, our own hopes and plans echoed around the picnic table, the sound eventually carried down the lazy Verdigris.

Now, all that remains of that concrete picnic table is the base that anchored it to the ground. The bridge has been reduced to its pillars, likely worn down by flooding and the passage of time. Despite the rubble and debris dotting a ravine along the bank, the area remains a serene spot to enjoy views of the park to the west and the tangled woods around the river to the east.

A few years after graduation, I took the time to watch the film version of Splendor in the Grass. I knew the screenplay was Inge’s, but I was impressed by how much control he managed to maintain over the set design. The film featured Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean (Deanie) and Warren Beatty as Bud, and there they were on my TV screen, cast into a familiar setting of clapboard houses and screened porches. In that technicolor Independence, Kansas, were the high school students clad like so many photos from yearbooks past, and there was that concrete bridge and picnic area, nearly identical to my childhood memories of the place. Although rendered a brighter green than I remembered, there was the park where I had played with my family before riding the carousel, which still only costs a nickel, the same place I had gathered with friends on field trips. That same place was depicted by the Hollywood-cast coeds, swimming, chatting, and enjoying the everyday pleasures of growing up in small-town USA.

The screenplay itself is a marvel—the storyline, plot, and dialogue rich with commentary about young love and lower Midwest culture in the early twentieth century, yet it was the set design that swelled my pride. Independence seemed so important and large on the screen, perhaps as important as the British settings I was used to studying in college. Inge saw the importance of those literary connections too, tying his work to William Wordsworth’s poem of the same title. In an early classroom scene, Natalie Wood as Deanie recites:

“Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass,

Of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind”

This universal truth of innocence lost, growth, and distance in time persists as grass withers, dies, and grows again each year. Time moves forward despite personal and communal setbacks. Park benches and picnic tables are rearranged; bridges crumble and fade into memories. Still, we can take strength in the shared understanding of our community places. Inge bridged a gap in my understanding—that my childhood places were worthy of being a literary landscape.

Autumn Finley grew up in Altamont, KS, but has lived and studied in various communities across Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. She is currently an Associate Professor of literature and composition at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO.

Photo by Liz Finley.

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Rural Kingman County

Murdock, Kansas

By Taylor Krueger

During Sarah Smarsh’s childhood, driven by poverty and necessity, she moved frequently between the Kansas prairie and nearby metropolitan Wichita. Born on the precipice of the 1980s Farm Crisis, Smarsh received an inheritance of generational poverty and a nomadic lifestyle. During her youth, she would move between Kingman and Sedgwick counties 21 times before she turned 18. Her experience of the Kansas landscape and the people who call it home deeply influence her work as a writer and journalist, highlighting economic inequality and culture in rural America and bridging the cultural divide between urban and rural spaces.

“The countryside is no more our nation’s heart than are its cities, and rural people aren’t more noble and dignified for their dirty work in fields. But to devalue, in our social investments, the people who tend crops and livestock, or to refer to their place as ‘flyover country,’ is to forget not just a country’s foundation but its connection to the earth, to cycles of life scarcely witnessed and ill understood in concrete landscapes.”

Like Smarsh, my roots run deep through the soil of the Kansas prairie. One side of my family has grown and harvested wheat in northwest Kansas for five generations. On the other, my grandfather was raised on a farm and began his career driving a Wonder Bread truck through southeast Kansas, delivering the final product to consumer’s grocery shelves. Intergenerational values of self-reliance, moderation, and grit are narratives that shaped my upbringing.

My first encounter with Smarsh’s writing was Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth (2018), which highlights the tension between rural values and the systemic issues that undermine them.

“I was raised to put all responsibility on the individual, on the bootstraps with which she ought pull herself up. But it’s the way of things that environment changes outcomes. Or, to put it in my first language: The crop depends on the weather, dudnit? A good seed’ll do ’er job ’n’ sprout, but come hail ’n’ yer plumb outta luck regardless.”

As a licensed marriage and family therapist, I’ve learned the context that shapes us is not evenhanded, contrary to the myth of meritocracy. The principles of self-reliance that have helped rural people endure harsh conditions for centuries are the same values that create barriers to mental health care. In a place where your value as a human being is dependent on being useful, shame becomes common. Many of my psychotherapy clients believe they are the source of the problem. My training in systems theory, however, leads me to highlight reciprocal relationships, emphasizing instead that individual problems are systemic, created by larger forces in the family, community, and society.

Smarsh describes her early years observing the doctrine of self-reliance in a trailer next door to a farmhouse owned by her Grandma Betty and her husband, Arnie. The farm was located west of Wichita in the lowlands of south-central Kansas, straddling the High Plains and the Red Hills, with distinct red-brown soil stretching across the horizon. To the north is Cheney Reservoir, a man-made lake used to provide a water supply to the people of Wichita, with boats bobbing on the surface and campgrounds lining the shore. The reservoir borrows water from the nearby Ninnescah River, which means “sweet water” to the Osage Nation, who would be driven off their land nearly a century before the reservoir was constructed.

On a winter afternoon, I drive slowly around unmarked roads near Cheney Reservoir towards Kingman County, witnessing the expanse of prairie earth, water, and sky. I park my car north of the unincorporated community of Murdock, population approximately 37, near a boundary of barbed wire. The sound of stillness familiarly greets my ears as I reorient myself to the “isolation of rural life,” that Smarsh describes in Heartland. In early February, the fields are hushed and hibernating. On an unseasonably warm day, the colors glare under the winter sun. The enormous sky is a bright, clear blue with sweeps of watercolor wispy white clouds low on the horizon. Red dirt sticks to the tires of my car. Green rows line wheat fields stretching forward to tree lines ahead, limbs barren until spring comes around again. I watch the roots resting quietly, pausing as the cold air sits still in anticipation. My father taught me that wheat knows intuitively in its cells the exact right moment to spring forth from the earth, green stalks transforming into waving gold strands for harvest. Undeterred by hailstorms, fire, and drought, the crop continues to grow and change. In this Kingman County wheat, I see the great mystery of knowing your roots are deeply planted, and still not knowing what will become.

There is a mystical relationship that ties Kansans to this land. Smarsh reminds us in Heartland that even in leaving, “no matter where you ended up, like every immigrant you’d still feel the invisible dirt of your motherland on the soles of your feet.” In the same way Kansans are connected to the land, she writes, we are also connected to each other:

“Of all the gifts and challenges of rural life, one of its most wonderful paradoxes is that closeness born of our biggest spaces: a deep intimacy forced not by the proximity of rows of apartments but by having only one neighbor within three miles to help when you’re sick, when your tractor’s down and you need a ride, when the snow starts drifting so you check on the old woman with the mean dog, regardless of whether you like her.”

Standing on the side of the road in Kingman County, with only the wind for company, I feel small in my skin. In this sea of grass and red dirt, I am engulfed by the beautiful, terrible, and uncontrollable earth. Yet, in my aloneness, I am comforted by the sight of farmhouses rising quietly ahead. Looking out at this wild, expansive ecosystem of the prairie, the generosity and gregariousness of small, isolated communities provide me with a sense of hope in the face of systemic ambiguity. Despite the great spaces between rural people, a unique camaraderie binds us together. I’m reminded of a principle in systems theory indicating how change in any one part of the system evokes change on a larger scale. Through her wisdom and writing, Sarah Smarsh calls for collective change in our communities by providing clear testimony about the people of rural America, the landscape, and the reality of systemic issues that affect us every day.

Taylor Krueger is a licensed marriage and family therapist providing psychotherapy to women and children in her rural community. She studied literature and psychology at Kansas State University, and received her Master of Science in family therapy from Friends University. She was raised in Rooks County, Kansas, and her writing is influenced by the places she has called home. She lives in Newton, Kansas, with her husband and two young sons.

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Vegetarian Settlement Company

Allen County, Kansas

By Pete Dulin

Concern loomed like a thunderhead in this untamed place. Miriam Davis Colt, her family, and other settlers intended to make their home in the Vegetarian Settlement Company, a planned community within Octagon City envisioned to become a city “of considerable wealth and importance.” Colt’s family arrived on May 12, 1856, at the proposed site in the Territory of Kansas, south of present-day Humboldt.

With the Missouri border in her wake, Colt beholds the vast Kansas Territory and its potential: “A broad green sea of prairie is spread out before us, and in the distance large mounds stretch themselves along the horizon.”

Soon, however, Colt realized the settlement was not developing according to plan. Six years later, she published a detailed memoir titled Went to Kansas: Being a Thrilling Account of an Ill-Fated Expedition to that Fairy Land, and Its Sad Results.

I drove two hours southwest from Kansas City, Missouri, to see this Fairy Land. A roadside historical marker divulged no secrets. Vegetarian Creek, woodlands, and grassy fields refused to gossip. Time, heartbreak, and death have eroded the imagined potential of this land.

Promissory plans for the Vegetarian Settlement Company originated in 1855 in New York City. A circular proclaimed that morally pure families could raise and educate children at the settlement away from “vice, vicious company, vicious habits of eating and drinking, and other contaminations of old cities.” Colt’s family and other investors sent significant funds, life’s savings for some, to underwrite the development, based on the circular and correspondence with company directors.

Unspoiled prairie and woodland suitable for settlement, farming, and investment near the Neosho River was only part of the allure. Colt believed her family would find community “with people whose tastes and habits will coincide with our own.”

Colt, her husband John, their young son and daughter, her sister, and her husband’s parents departed in mid-April. Traveling weeks from upstate New York led them to Kansas City. Oxen pulled supply wagons ten days toward the promised land. Arriving at nightfall, Colt’s rain- soaked party encountered men and women at the site cooking supper over a campfire and living in tents and wagons.

“The ladies tell us they are sorry to see us come to this place; which plainly shows that all is not right,” wrote Colt. Their lament was a harbinger of struggles ahead.

Settlers found no purported development or shelter from “furious prairie winds” and “terrific storms.” They ground corn with hand mills. Without a sawmill, they cut timber to fashion crude log cabins.

Summer’s blistering heat and plentiful mosquitos battered the spirits of these starving settlers. The river and creek yielded scarce, undrinkable water. Fever caused by malaria led to illness and death. Foraging, subsistence farming, and the generosity of distant neighbors provided meager sustenance. Colt wrote that Osage tribe members took tools and housewares and raided field crops. News of Kansas-Missouri border ruffians to the north spurred concerns.

Colt and her family abandoned the stillborn community four months later. Her sister and in-laws remained behind and died within months. Colt wrote on September 2, 1856, “We start out upon the world again. Many a dark shade has passed over us since last Spring.”

When I visited the settlement site, spring was still a month away. Bluebell, bloodroot, and prairie larkspur have yet to bloom. This soil was once fertile enough to plant dreams. What happens when fragile hope withers and roots immersed in the prairie do not take?

Colt’s experience prompts wonderment at my own mother’s uprooting and journey.

She met and married my father, a U.S. soldier stationed at a base near her home in central Thailand. Mom left her family, friends, and rural village in the early Sixties and emigrated to Kansas City, Kansas.

Love, hope, and opportunity do not fill an immigrant’s pockets. Wayfinding in life involves unexpected outcomes and consequences. Bearings may be lost along the path chosen.

Mom arrived at an unfamiliar place. Routines formed with each word spoken and decision made, and the fog of how little she knew slowly lifted. Understanding bloomed, its tender roots sunk into non-native soil.

She gradually learned English, earned citizenship, and acclimated to American customs. My parents eventually moved out of my grandparents’ home, bought a house in Kansas City, Missouri, and raised four children.

What happens when dreams exact unthinkable personal cost?

Colt and her beleaguered family stopped in Boonville, Missouri, en route to the “known world.” Her husband John, 40, and son Willie, 10, suffered from fever, malnourishment, and likely malaria. Willie died on September 24, three weeks after leaving the settlement. John perished on October 4, cradled in the “cold embrace of death.” Colt buried them, returned to New York, and bought a five-acre lot.

My mother remained entrenched despite life’s unpredictable storms – divorce, the death of a son, tangled family ties near and far, and health issues prompting thoughts of her mortality and legacy.

What happens when choices and consequences become uneasy cousins?

Colt and fellow settlers faced stark choices. Shed the weight of sunk costs, sever the cumbersome tether of hope? Colt sharpened her survival skills against the grindstone of trial and trauma.

She chose how to lead the remainder of her life, persevering to raise her daughter Mema, publish her tale for income, and establish a home and farm. Her memoir closed with a prayer to “have grace to bear all the remaining reverses that may come in my pathway.”

Footsteps from the past can no longer be heard. The settlement represents more than the sum of broken dreams. Their unrealized vision still exudes the faint residue of reality, a premise to ponder on our journey.

The territory is not new, only our presence on it. Leaving this land and thirsty creek bed, I deposit questions like seeds in soil foreign to me.

What remains when we depart a place? The lips of John and Willie offer no answers. Perhaps my mother knows.

Colt’s story implies that we eventually abandon the place we sought to settle. We will exit the land and return to earth. Death awaits, an assured outcome.

Until then, I am a vessel of my own making. I choose what to carry, what to leave behind. No oxen in sight. My wagon bears hope and conviction, fear and wonder, loss and what remains, grief, sorrow, some fortitude.

Our words and our will, they form within us, born of the same substance, depositing, eroding, ever shifting.

February wind blows against me. I head in that direction and return home, unsettled.

Pete Dulin is the author of Expedition of Thirst: Exploring Breweries, Wineries, and Distilleries Across the Heart of Kansas and Missouri, Kansas City Beer: A History of Brewing in the Heartland, KC Ale Trail, and Last Bite, and is currently working on his next book. A professional writer for more than 20 years, Pete’s work has appeared in many print and online publications. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

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