An archive of all that’s available online from The New Territory. Shop our back issues for more.
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 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...
Harvey Pekar Park at Coventry Rd & Euclid Heights Blvd—a modest park honoring the master of Midwestern mundanity. Literary Landscapes by Joseph S. Pete.
Stuart Dybek and the way memories bind us to place. Literary Landscapes by E.N. Couturier.
A ruined corner of London that will always be a little paradise for Twain’s ghost. Literary Landscapes by Thomas Ruys Smith.
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.
Blending fact and fiction across the ordinary landscapes of northern Indiana. Literary Landscapes by Dawn Burns.
Ice skating on the Arkansas River, learning poetry and grief from a venerable teacher, finally finding an elusive line. #LiteraryLandscapes by Amy Barnes.
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 & Riverside Park—a picnic next to the Verdigris River, in real life and on stage.
Sarah Smarsh & rural Kingman County—the soil of the Kansas prairie and the complex, contradictory stories we tell about ourselves.
Miriam Davis Colt & the Vegetarian Settlement Company—choosing what to carry and what to leave behind.
Jotham Meeker & the California Road—migrant traces at the Ottawa Mission cemetery.
Ron Wilson & Lazy T Ranch—the Poet Laureate of Kansas talking poetry and connection with the state’s Poet Lariat.
Nellie Maxey & Sod House Museum—moving cross-country to Kinsley, KS, 100 years apart.
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 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...
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.
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 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 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 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 & The Old Topliff and Ely Plant—on literary myths, Roof-Fix, and an escape along the railroad tracks in Elyria, OH.
Gordon Parks & the Marmaton River—walking the cracked bottom of the gulch, following the “documentarian of a watershed century.”
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.