Literary Landscapes Archives - The New Territory Magazine

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.

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.

Sarah Smarsh – Murdock, Kansas

Sarah Smarsh & rural Kingman County—the soil of the Kansas prairie and the complex, contradictory stories we tell about ourselves.

Miriam Davis Colt – Allen County, Kansas

Miriam Davis Colt & the Vegetarian Settlement Company—choosing what to carry and what to leave behind.

Ben Lerner – Topeka, Kansas

Ben Lerner & Topeka High School—a teenage debate champion looks down on generations of high school students.

Jotham Meeker – Franklin County, Kansas

Jotham Meeker & the California Road—migrant traces at the Ottawa Mission cemetery.

Truman Capote – Garden City, Kansas

Truman Capote & Garden City, KS—new to town to research In Cold Blood, Capote and Harper Lee are invited to Christmas dinner.

Ron Wilson – Manhattan, Kansas

Ron Wilson & Lazy T Ranch—the Poet Laureate of Kansas talking poetry and connection with the state’s Poet Lariat.

Nellie Maxey – Kinsley, Kansas

Nellie Maxey & Sod House Museum—moving cross-country to Kinsley, KS, 100 years apart.

Niki Smith – Junction City, Kansas

Niki Smith & Rock Springs Ranch—a children’s librarian on the healing possibilities of 4-H camp, in both real life and graphic novels.

Peter H. Clark – St. Louis, Missouri

Clark, a Black socialist who had been collaborating with German radicals in Cincinnati since the days of abolitionism, was well prepared for relationship-building.

R. A. Lafferty – Tulsa, Oklahoma

R. A. Lafferty 1724 S. Trenton Ave.Tulsa, Oklahoma By Michael Helsem “Everything, including dreams, is meteorological.” – R. A. Lafferty, ”Narrow Valley” A couple of years ago, my wife and I were visiting my young niece and her husband in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where they...

Sojourner Truth – Battle Creek, Michigan

Harmonia was biracial, socially lively (it was rumored to be a bastion of free love!), and included a store, a blacksmith shop, and a seminary.

Jim Harrison – Osceola County, Michigan

He believed that wandering the woods, studying birds, fishing, and a general curiosity for the natural world could “lift you out of your self-sunken mudbath, the violent mixture of hormones, injuries, melancholy, and dreams of a future you not only couldn’t touch but could scarcely see.”