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.

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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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The Fine Arts Building
Chicago, Illinois

By Jesse Raber

Chicago isn’t an iconic setting for Willa Cather, the great novelist of the prairies. Yet, in a sense, during Cather’s time Chicago writing was prairie writing. When H.L. Mencken crowned Chicago “The Literary Capital of the United States” in 1920, he credited the city’s literature to the “remote wheat-towns and far-flung railway junctions” of its hinterland. “The newcomers who pour in from the wheat lands,” he wrote, full of “elemental curiosity” and “prairie energy,” seek in the city’s cultural scene “some imaginative equivalent for the stupendous activity they were bred to.” Mencken’s description of country talent “pour[ing] in” to the city seems to imagine Chicago writing as a river fed by the vast “Middle Empire that has Chicago for its capital.”

But where Mencken, the consummate urbanite, saw brain drain, Cather sees back-and-forth circulation between country and city. Chicago drummers teach the townsfolk the latest songs in My Ántonia, and the South Dakota grande dame in A Lost Lady often entertains Chicago friends. The Chicago voice teacher Madison Bowers, in The Song of the Lark, trains soloists from across the Midwest and takes “long journeys to hear and instruct a chorus.” The closing paragraph of The Song of the Lark sums up the dynamic:

The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams.

The prairie towns aren’t unsoiled streams flowing into the urban river; they are points in a “network” that regularly communicates, through Chicago, with a wider world.

Cather’s Chicago itself is a symbol of hypercirculation, a “blur of smoke and wind and noise” whose disorienting flux creates eddies of creativity. “In little towns,” Cather writes in Lucy Gayheart, “lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.” By contrast Chicago, with its uncaring crowds, allows Cather’s prairie-bred artists to make themselves secret nests. Rather than exposing them to a wider swath of humanity, the city helps them find themselves and their own kind.

The most memorable of these artistic aeries is the singer Clement Sebastian’s studio in the Fine Arts Building. Practicing there, Lucy Gayheart feels “it was as if they were on the lonely spur of a mountain, enveloped by mist. They saw no one … heard no one; the city below was blotted out.” Located a few blocks south of the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, the Fine Arts Building has cultivated artistic tenants since 1898. A ten-story structure in the Richardsonian Romanesque style of rusticated stones and stately arches, in Lucy’s day it was the city’s literary epicenter, and many of its greatest occupants presented themselves as obscure “little” niches in the big boisterous city. There was the Little Room, an aesthetic society featuring Hamlin Garland and Harriet Monroe (among many others); Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, which faced obscenity charges for publishing parts of Ulysses; and Ellen von Volkenburg and Maurice Browne’s movement-launching Little Theater.

Today the Fine Arts Building still has some of that cloistral spirit. When I first went inside, during an open studio night, it was like stepping between worlds. Lush Art Deco murals cover the lobby walls, and the antique elevators have human operators. The upper floors are all dark wood trim and muted white paint, like the outside of a Tudor house. That evening, drifting between studios, each its own aesthetic universe, I bought a postcard-sized watercolor of Colorado pines, painted at the western fringe of Chicago’s old railroad kingdom.

Years later I returned to visit the new Dial Bookshop, named for the old magazine and decorated with portraits of Chicago writers, including fellow Fine Arts tenant L. Frank Baum. The store was lovely, but I wondered if this veneration of the building’s past meant that creativity had lapsed into nostalgia.  This question bothered me as I thought about what the Fine Arts Building represents today.

One evening, as I was brainstorming this vignette, I joined a six-foot-spaced circle around a fire pit on my friends’ lawn. “Does anybody happen to have any stories,” I asked, “about the Fine Arts Building?” It turned out they did. I heard about a filmmaker with an office there, working for years on a documentary about feuding martial artists. Another friend recalled her amazement at wandering into a violin-maker’s workshop — a luthier’s shop, she insists — while looking for a replacement guitar string. (The luthiers were unhelpful.) A third reminisced about how the old movie theater there casually mixed art house and mainstream films. Some of that old spirit of hidden wonders lives on, it seems. My favorite story, though, was a little older — about one friend’s dad who used to take the Greyhound there to see films that didn’t play in his hometown. He sometimes had to leave the movie early to catch the bus back to DeKalb, Illinois, way out in Chicago’s Middle Empire.

Jesse Raber is an Instructor at the Harvard Extension School and has also taught literature courses at several Chicago universities (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago). He is the co-creator of the Chicago Writing gallery at the American Writers Museum and is currently working on a literary history of Chicago.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

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Ann Rutledge’s Grave
Petersburg, Illinois

By Jason Stacy

As a boy, I found it unsettling that Edgar Lee Masters anthologized the dead in an Illinois cemetery that never existed. Spoon River Anthology’s ghosts haunted the same rich Illinois soil I walked upon, stared out at fields like the ones that rolled by the window of my school bus, and spoke in accents that echoed mine, but these people were nowhere to be found. Doubly spectral, they were the dead neighbors that never were. Reading a frayed copy of Masters’s book brought home by my mother, an English teacher, I felt as if I were peering into a legendary Illinois that dissipated the closer I got to it.

But now that I’m older, I am at peace with the legends. The trick is not to get too close.

Masters himself is buried in a very real place: Oakland Cemetery in Petersburg, Illinois, just about at the center of the state, a short drive from Springfield and down the road from New Salem, the pioneer community where Abraham Lincoln lived for a time. Petersburg is in the Illinois part of Illinois.

Masters rests only a few feet from a legend he helped make: Ann Rutledge, thought to be the one love of Abraham Lincoln’s life. About twenty yards away, down one of the main paths of the cemetery, a low iron fence surrounds a solid block of granite, on which is engraved a poem by Masters:

Out of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Ann Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union,
But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

Rutledge died of typhoid fever in 1835 and was originally buried in the Old Concord graveyard about five miles from Petersburg. After Lincoln’s death, his former law partner, William Herndon, claimed in his biography of the president that Rutledge was the one true love of Lincoln’s life. Her death at twenty-two threw the future president into an emotional crisis and, according to Herndon, Lincoln never loved any woman as much again. As the living Lincoln faded from popular memory after the Civil War, Rutledge’s ghost began to haunt the legends of the fallen president. These legends turned central Illinois into a destination for secular pilgrims, and she became the key to understanding Lincoln’s combination of melancholy and stoic fortitude.

To capitalize on the legend, local undertaker and furniture dealer Samuel Montgomery exhumed Rutledge in 1890 from the Old Concord graveyard and reburied what was left of her — two bones, a little hair, some bits of cloth — in Oakland Cemetery, where he was part owner. Montgomery hoped this location would prove convenient for visitors and fortuitous for the town. Twenty-five years later, in 1915, Rutledge was reburied again, this time symbolically, when Edgar Lee Masters planted her in Spoon River’s fictional cemetery. In 1921, at the height of Masters’s popularity, her epitaph from Spoon River Anthology was engraved on a new monument in Oakland Cemetery. These days, tourists commune with the legend of Rutledge that William Herndon perpetuated, by the grave that Samuel Montgomery filled with a few remains, under a fictional epitaph written by Edgar Lee Masters.

Outside of town, in the Old Concord graveyard, a small headstone marks Ann’s first resting place. It appeals to visitors’ desire for authenticity by telling them that this lonely spot in an out-of-the-way field is, in fact, “where Lincoln wept.” But when I drive through Petersburg, I visit Ann at Oakland Cemetery. The legend is better there.

Jason Stacy grew up in Monee, Illinois. Since 2006, he has served as a professor of history and social science pedagogy at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His latest book project, Spoon River America: Edgar Lee Masters and the Myth of the American Small Town, is under contract with University of Illinois Press.

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