Editor’s Note

This past weekend I attended the Celebration of Life for my friend, Doug Sheldon. He was a great guy, smart and principled and funny, and cancer got him much too soon.

He contributed an essay on Sherwood Anderson to Literary Landscapes. His print magazine Here piece, on the Chicago bar Cunneen’s, was nominated by The New Territory editors for a Pushcart Prize.

Doug was a Hemingway scholar, and among the materials illustrating Doug’s life his wife Kim included this passage from A Farewell to Arms:

“If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill them to break them, so of course it kills them. The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

– Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

His final tattoo was a nurse, with a banner across the bottom reading “no special hurry.”

I hope for that for us all — that even when hurried along by our own circumstances we can leave this earth in no special hurry.

Literary Landscapes, Vol. 19, dwells, dawdles, and remembers. The essays take us from Bloomington, Indiana, to the highways of the Gypsum Hills in south central Kansas. We have urban landscapes alongside rural, homes alongside natural areas.

Please read, enjoy, and share. And if you have an idea for a Literary Landscapes essay of your own, I would love to receive your pitch! See here for a list of potential sites and a bit of description about the goals of the series.

Andy Oler, Departments Editor
The New Territory