Blending fact and fiction across the ordinary landscapes of northern Indiana. Literary Landscapes by Dawn Burns.
Michael Martone – LaPorte County, Indiana
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Section: Novelists
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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 – 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.
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.
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...
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.”
Louis L’Amour – Jamestown, North Dakota
The most famous writer to ever come out of North Dakota never wrote anything that takes place there.
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...
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.”
Hugo Martinez-Serros – Chicago, Illinois
Hugo Martinez-Serros & South Chicago City Dump—Depression-era salvage in a “a great raw sore on the landscape.”
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.
Richard Wright – Chicago, Illinois
Richard Wright house—a modest brownstone among “great sweeping corridors of concrete and ingrained prejudice.”
Lew Wallace – Porter County, Indiana
Lew Wallace Grand Kankakee MarshPorter County, Indiana By Matthew A. Werner Indiana once had one of the greatest natural habitats in North America: the Grand Kankakee Marsh. Author Lew Wallace loved it so much, he kept a houseboat on its thruway, the Kankakee River....
Mark Twain – Hannibal, Missouri
Mark Twain Cave—underneath Hannibal, MO, where in the middle of a tour, the lights went out, and “this shared, quiet darkness felt elemental and deeply human.”
Meridel Le Sueur – Picher, Oklahoma
Meridel Le Sueur & a miner’s shack—how investigating environmental damage reveals “the hopeful and radical potential of regionalism and place.”
Jean Shepherd – Hammond, Indiana
Jean Shepherd’s childhood home—written as both a “mythical place” and an avatar of Hammond, IN, “just a few miles upwind” of steel mills, oil refineries, and polluted rivers.
Mari Sandoz – Sheridan County, Nebraska
“Even with a breeze, the place was so profoundly silent that all of my own thoughts were too loud.” — C.J. Janovy
Mary Hunter Austin – Carlinville, Illinois
Mary Hunter Austin & Blackburn College—a kinship in the desire to walk about unhampered and forge meaningful connections. #LiteraryLandscapes by Karen Dillon & Naomi Crummey.
Booth Tarkington – Indianapolis, Indiana
Booth Tarkington & North Meridian St.—striving for beauty and dignity amid the turmoil of this past year. #LiteraryLandscapes
Norbert Blei – Sister Bay, Wisconsin
Norbert Blei & Al Johnson’s—fikasugen, “Counter Culture,” and the longing for public spaces.