Selected Reading
An archive of all that’s available online from The New Territory. Shop our back issues for more.
Sorry For Your Loss
“My warmth had been lost to a summer long gone, a summer never returning. Even if the sky and the storms remained in denial, the earth stayed honest.”
Rĕk’e-nĭng
The work of racial reckoning belongs to those of us who’ve benefited all these centuries, and this work has to be done before we can begin to get to reconciliation.
A Thread of Blackness
I was fresh out of college with idealized images of life after graduation when my new husband dropped two bombs on me. The first: He’d decided to go active-duty military. The second: We would be moving to Wyoming soon, and he would go ahead without me to find us a...
Slavery, Freedom and African American Voices in the Midwest
Conflicts over race and slavery in the Lower Midwest have often set the stage for critical national conversations.
So Far, And Yet So Close
“I’d been operating under the hope — nay, the naive assumption — that sports were the great equalizer.”
Somebody Has To Be First, but Nobody Has To Be a Martyr
Meet Kendall Martinez Wright
Shop Talk: The Borders/Boundaries of a Region’s Shared Archives
Kansas City-based publisher Chad Onianwa talks magazines, place, and making space for collaboration.
Charles Dickens – Lebanon, Illinois
Charles Dickens in Illinois. Finding places where the whispers of the spirits occasionally break through. Literary Landscapes by Ryan Byrnes.
Harvey Pekar – Cleveland Heights, Ohio
Harvey Pekar Park at Coventry Rd & Euclid Heights Blvd—a modest park honoring the master of Midwestern mundanity. Literary Landscapes by Joseph S. Pete.
Renee Nicole Good – Minneapolis, Minnesota
Renee Nicole Good at 34th Street & Portland Ave—protestors murdered by ICE in the Minneapolis Bloodlands. Literary Landscapes by Ellen Lansky with Greta Gaard.
Stuart Dybek – Chicago, Illinois
Stuart Dybek and the way memories bind us to place. Literary Landscapes by E.N. Couturier.
Danez Smith – St. Paul, Minnesota
Danez Smith & Black Youth Healing Arts Center—what it takes to create spaces for poets of color to thrive. Literary Landscapes by Chandler Peters-DuRose.
Mark Twain – Hannibal, Missouri
Discerning fact from fiction regarding Hannibal’s most famous resident. Literary Landscapes by Cindy Lovell.
Mark Twain – Elmira, New York
The quirky characters and social dynamics of Twain’s time in Elmira, New York. Literary Landscapes by Matt Seybold.
Mark Twain – Hartford, Connecticut
Twain’s Midwestern books, written in his beautiful and eccentric Hartford home. Literary Landscapes by Jacques Lamarre.
Mark Twain – London, England
A ruined corner of London that will always be a little paradise for Twain’s ghost. Literary Landscapes by Thomas Ruys Smith.
Mark Twain – London, England
Twain in London, between the upheavals of travel and the resumption of familiar routines. Literary Landscapes by Susan Kumin Harris.
Suspending All Data Plans and Disbelief
When a friend suggested we take a trip to Southeast Oklahoma to attend a Bigfoot conference, I laughed. What started as a joke grew into curiosity and, ultimately, a plan. Committing to attend was a game of chicken, and yet, as the warm October weekend approached, no...
Small Town, Big City
Rob Roensch recasts the coming-of-age tale deep in the Midwest in his third book and debut novel, In the Morning, The City Is the Prairie. Matt, a college dropout, can only cycle through his second shift at the local Costco, stalling out his life, relationships and...
“Live As A Woman”
On my 17th birthday, in a small Michigan town much like the one depicted in The Waters, I sat between my grandmothers as they reminded me that each of them had married at 17. Of course, one of them laughed, she hadn’t stayed married for long. I knew this; she had left...
Paul Vasey – Michigan–Ontario
Crossing the border, over and again, compelled by visa regulations, connecting with Vasey’s connection to the river but envying his obliviousness to the barrier.
John G. Niehardt – Branson, Missouri
Best known as a Nebraska poet, Niehardt’s three decades in Branson are marked only by a small boulder with a bronze plaque, sitting on the corner between the Koi Garden Plaza strip mall and the Branson Visitors Center.
Michael Martone – LaPorte County, Indiana
Blending fact and fiction across the ordinary landscapes of northern Indiana. Literary Landscapes by Dawn Burns.
Albert Goldbarth – Wichita, Kansas
Ice skating on the Arkansas River, learning poetry and grief from a venerable teacher, finally finding an elusive line. #LiteraryLandscapes by Amy Barnes.
José Olivarez – Calumet City, Illinois
José Olivarez & Calumet City—maps might make the world legible, but poetry reveals “the little cracks in the totality.” Literary Landscapes by Ava Tomasula y Garcia.
On Sunflowers, and Hope, in Times of Drought
On feeling parched in Minnesota.
Toni Morrison – Cleveland, Ohio
Euclid Ave mural—on Black women lifting up one another, because as Morrison said, “the function of freedom is to free someone else.”
Toni Morrison – Chesapeake Bay, Maryland
Driving along the Bay, trying to experience the place concretely, seeing the links between past and present, proximate and distant.
Toni Morrison – Lorain, Ohio
Toni Morrison’s childhood home—Black American resilience amidst the shared, cruel landscapes of white supremacy in Lorain, OH.
Toni Morrison – West Point, New York
Speaking to Plebes, Morrison makes “the auditorium, alive with the resonance of storytelling,” a space of racial belonging.
Toni Morrison – Lorain, Ohio
Lakeview Park—exploring the traumas experienced by young Black girls in The Bluest Eye and reclaiming the park as a space for healing.
Bienvenido Santos – Wichita, Kansas
Bienvenido Santos & Ablah Library—seeing ghosts in the palimpsest of Wichita State University.
William Inge – Independence, Kansas
William Inge & Riverside Park—a picnic next to the Verdigris River, in real life and on stage.