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.
Paul Vasey – Michigan–Ontario
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Section: Nature
An archive of all that’s available online from The New Territory. Shop our back issues for more.
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.
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.
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.
Jotham Meeker – Franklin County, Kansas
Jotham Meeker & the California Road—migrant traces at the Ottawa Mission cemetery.
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.
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.”
Thomas Hart Benton – Shell Knob, Missouri
Thomas Hart Benton Mark Twain National Forest Shell Knob, Missouri By Aaron Hadlow There is a burled oak tree that stands on the knuckle of a ridge finger behind my parent’s house in Shell Knob, Missouri. Despite its disfigurement, the oak is otherwise straight and...
Bonnie Jo Campbell – Comstock, Michigan
Bonnie Jo Campbell H House Comstock, Michigan By Lisa DuRose The Kalamazoo River flows right through the center of Comstock, Michigan, behind the library and township hall and the 24-hour gas station. Past Merrill Park where people feed bread to ducks. It floods every...
Lisel Mueller – Forest Haven, Illinois
Lisel Mueller 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...
Sherwood Anderson – Elyria, Ohio
Sherwood Anderson & The Old Topliff and Ely Plant—on literary myths, Roof-Fix, and an escape along the railroad tracks in Elyria, OH.
Gordon Parks – Fort Scott, Kansas
Gordon Parks & the Marmaton River—walking the cracked bottom of the gulch, following the “documentarian of a watershed century.”
Lorine Niedecker – Blackhawk Island, Wisconsin
Lorine Niedecker’s River Cabin—America’s greatest unknown poet, writing in a riverside cabin that appears to shrug off the idea of annual flooding.
Hugo Martinez-Serros – Chicago, Illinois
Hugo Martinez-Serros & South Chicago City Dump—Depression-era salvage in a “a great raw sore on the landscape.”
Malcolm X – Omaha, Nebraska
3448 Pinkney Street—the site of Malcolm X’s first home offers a more complex portrait of Midwestern mythologies.
John Bartlow Martin – Herman, Michigan
Smith Lake Camp—a sanctuary in the Upper Peninsula, a place that “is not geared to make your visit painless.”
August Derleth – Sauk City, Wisconsin
August Derleth & Sauk City Rail Bridge—a local author’s erasure from the place that used to commemorate him with a bridge, a historical marker, a park, and a pie case.
Philip Levine – Waawiiyaatanong
Philip Levine & Belle Isle—“here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.”