Selected Reading
An archive of all that’s available online from The New Territory. Shop our back issues for more.
Fantastical Regionalism
Bad Houses is a rich collection, with many of its finest stories playing out in the greater Midwest, grounding fantasy in a regionalism that rings true in its tone and its observation. My encounters with Stintzi’s work had previously been limited to brief pieces...
Uniquely Wichita
Each fall, the Tallgrass Film Festival attracts thousands of filmmakers and film enthusiasts from all over the country to Wichita, Kansas. As the largest independent film festival in Kansas, Tallgrass aims to showcase some of the best films in the world while also...
Three Kinds of Riots
We Midwesterners might be better known for our politeness than our sense of humor, but I like to think we can be pretty funny. Take St. Louis-based Janelle Bassett, author of the Prairie Schooner Raz-Shumaker Book Prize-winning short story collection, Thanks for This...
Hope, Humor and A Hell of a Good Time
George Frazier’s Riverine Dreams takes us away
A Mirror and A Lens
The legacy of Chasing Amy
Can The Land You Fear Be The Land You Love?
And other impossible questions in Melissa Faliveno’s debut novel
From Pawn Shops To Orchards To Empty Fields
Challenging notions of rural experience
“The Wet Want Inside Me”
Desire, Otherness and the 21st-Century Mistress
Both Astonishing and Mundane
A year of truly seeing the natural world in This Is How A Robin Drinks
Stuart Dybek – Chicago, Illinois
Stuart Dybek 1438 W. 18th St.Chicago, Illinois By Izabella Kimak I have been coming to Chicago for a quarter of a century now, ever since my mother and sisters left Poland for the United States in the early 2000s. Initially, Chicago for me meant the downtown, really....
Justin Hamm – Callaway County, Missouri
Justin Hamm Whetstone Creek Conservation AreaCallaway County, Missouri By Tom Darin Liskey The plainspoken Midwestern majesty of Justin Hamm’s poetry helped me realize that even though I had seen the world, I’d never really seen my hometown. The day after I graduated...
Ross Gay – Bloomington, Indiana
Ross Gay Sample GatesBloomington, Indiana By Ryan Kegley It is just past dawn, and I am standing in the middle of the Bloomington Community Orchard, the one-acre edible public park that poet, professor, gardener, and self-proclaimed joyologist Ross Gay co-founded. It...
B.H. Fairchild – Medicine Lodge, Kansas
“US Route 160 traversing the Red Hills of Barber County, Kansas, facing west,” courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Abenneth, shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
James Whitcomb Riley – Indianapolis, Indiana
Photo courtesy of the Bass Photo Collection, Indiana Historical Society.
Cunneen’s
On the border of Edgewater and Rogers Park, Chicago . . .
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...