U.S. Highway 30
LaPorte County, Indiana

By Dawn Burns

“My main interest is in making the ordinary strange and wonderful.” –Michael Martone, interview with David Hoppe, NUVO, 2013

On my basement wall above a small writing desk hangs a three-piece canvas print of Northern Indiana farmland with U.S. Highway 30 in the background. The picture’s not much to look at, yet when I found this triptych of ordinariness in a Lansing, Michigan, thrift store, I was overcome with wonder, feeling I knew the exact location — 4494 W. U.S. Highway 30, Hanna, Indiana, 46340 — an address as precise as my memories are approximate. An address to which I could mail a postcard because it once was my home.

Growing up, I watched all manner of vehicles drive by the intersection of U.S. 30 and County Road 450 West from my upstairs bedroom window. Traffic sped by in both directions as eternally as bread slices fall away from the giant Sunbeam loaf at 350 Pearl Street in Fort Wayne, the city 92 miles east where extended family lived and where Michael Martone was born on August 22, 1955, in St. Joe Hospital, one week shy of 18 years before me and, as he notes in Brooding (2018), in “the same year as . . . the commencement of the Interstate Highway System.”

Michael Martone in fours, like the four squared corners of a county township, like how Indiana looks flying over, like he writes in “The Flatness” (2000), a grid inscribed into the skin of the Midwest which “transmits in fields and waves,” which “is a place of sense”:

Growing up in Hanna, I knew no Michael Martone. Michael Martone’s whereabouts were no concern of mine. When I watched traffic, not once did I conjure a writer from Indiana who wrote about Indiana. Instead, I asked myself four questions: “Who are the people driving by? Where are they coming from? Where are they going? What if they break down?” Sometimes cars did break down and my dad would help. As travelers sat around our kitchen table, I’d hear the answers to my questions. I liked finding out these facts; I also liked daydreaming my own fictions.

I would not meet Michael Martone until 1997 (or was it 1998?) when he visited my Notre Dame MFA cohort of creative writers. By then I no longer lived on U.S. 30 and we did not meet because of unforeseen car trouble. Though I bought his 1990 collection, Fort Wayne Is Seventh on Hitler’s List, I would not fully read it for another twenty years, concerned I might be influenced. Still, simply by publishing a book with Fort Wayne in the title, he’d given me permission to write about Indiana.  

No doubt I’ve got my facts wrong about my thrifted picture. I would not stake my Hoosier credibility on the highway being U.S. 30 any more than I would on the landscape being Northern Indiana. About “the flatness,” Michael Martone writes, “They are thinking about Northern Ohio, about Indiana, about the long stretch through Illinois and on into Iowa. It is flat.” My picture could be from any of these states, or none. Who am I to say?

What I’ve long loved about Michael Martone — about all the Michael Martones — is how his writing both secures and blurs, for he makes Fort Wayne and all of Indiana as-real-and-not-real as Art Smith, “bird boy of Fort Wayne,” whom I can read about both on the Smithsonian’s website and in The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne (2020).

In Michael Martone’s mythologies, Dan Quayle will always be out snipe hunting, Jacques Derrida will always be eating an Awful Big, Awful Good pork tenderloin at a Winesburg café, and mayonnaise will always be pumped through the Trans-Indiana Mayonnaise Pipeline.

To his mythologies, I add my own. Dawn Burns, in fours:

Of all Michael Martone’s work, Winesburg, Indiana, a 2015 anthology featuring stories by more than two dozen Indiana authors, best illustrates how we patchwork our mythologies together but, like a highway mirage on a hundred-degree day, can never arrive at the places we seek.

When I asked Michael Martone if he’d ever driven from Fort Wayne to Chicago, he said he’d driven “many times up the old Lincoln Highway 30 that parallels the old Pennsy RR to see White Sox games and the art museum and Science and Industry Museum.” “That,” he said, “is why I put Winesburg, Indiana, near there near Columbia City.”

Funny to find out at last the happenstance of how Michael Martone came to place Winesburg smackdab in familiar family territory for me, my eight sets of aunts/uncles/cousins radiating out across Indiana from my two sets of grandparents — Burns and Tschantz — in  Whitley County, my own nuclear family of four the satellite flung out furthest to that rental home at the corner of U.S. 30 and 450 West where a postcard can no longer go, the abandoned house long gone, burned for firefighting practice by the Hanna Township Volunteer Fire Department in 2008.

I imagine my childhood home ablaze, black smoke rolling across all four lanes of traffic, every passerby slowing to notice, only I was not there to watch them from my second story window. I wonder if Michael Martone’s childhood homes still stand. I could find out by asking, but I haven’t. Maybe one day when visiting friends who live near Winesburg I will drive the extra twenty miles to Fort Wayne and find out.

I do not write much at my basement writing desk below the three canvases that, put together, show the height of summer in maybe-Indiana on maybe-U.S. 30. I thought I would, and I’ve tried, but most often I choose my second-floor home office where, if I stand and look out the window, I can view the fence separating my small yard from the backsides of Eastside Lansing businesses and the parking lot which packs full on the weekends for the bars and live music. From my window’s angle, I cannot see the Everybody Reads bookstore from where I ordered Michael Martone’s Plain Air: Sketches from Winesburg, Indiana (2022) from my good friend Scott, but it comforts me to know the bookstore lives beyond my sight.

I like the idea that I wrote this sitting in my basement where the picture transported me away from the sound of the washing machine, the smell of litterboxes, the sight of cinderblock walls surrounding me on three sides. I like the idea, but I don’t like to sit too long where dampness might settle into my skin, like the skin of Indiana where mildew blooms white, strange and wonderful across the landscape of the ordinary.

Dawn Burns is thoroughly Midwestern, having lived her whole life in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. Often her characters are Midwestern too, like Evangelina from Elkhart, Indiana, in Evangelina Everyday (2022) who may appear simple and uncomplicated but has a rich inner life. Dawn’s MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Notre Dame prepared her for a lifetime of writing, creative community building, and teaching. Dawn is founder of the SwampFire Retreat for Writers and Artists, and a recipient of excellence awards from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature and the Ohio Arts Council. An assistant professor at Michigan State University, Dawn is committed to writing and storytelling as acts of personal and social change both in and beyond her First Year Writing classroom. You can find Dawn at dawnburns42.com.

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Euclid Ave. Mural

Cleveland, Ohio

By Monique Wingard

In the tapestry of life, sometimes the threads that pull us away are the same ones that guide us back home. In 2013, the job market in Cleveland had left me feeling shut out, unwanted, unworthy. I hit the road for a job in Chicago, in pursuit of a better life. After ten years away, I came back to be closer to home. When I returned, while walking through downtown Cleveland, a striking mural caught my eye. There, prominently displayed on the side of a building at 334 Euclid Ave., alongside LeBron James and Tracy Chapman, was the face of Toni Morrison — Nobel laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and Ohio’s own literary giant.

As I stood before Morrison’s portrait on that Euclid Avenue wall, it was her smile that ignited my renewed sense of purpose and belonging. The mural, commissioned by Browns player Myles Garrett and created by Glen Infante, welcomes visitors near Destination Cleveland, and it now served as a powerful reminder of Morrison’s legacy and the potential within every Black woman from Ohio to persevere in the face of adversity.

After nearly a decade away, I felt a surge of emotions as I stood before Morrison’s mural. The vibrant colors and bold lines captured not just her likeness, but her spirit — unapologetic, fierce, and inspiring. As I gazed at the mural with my mother by my side, I was struck by a sense of homecoming and responsibility. Morrison’s watchful eyes seemed to ask, “What will you contribute to our shared legacy?”

This mural takes on even greater significance in light of recent statistics. In 2020, Bloomberg CityLab published a report analyzing the livability for Black women in 42 U.S. cities, based on health, education, and economic factors. Shockingly, Cleveland — with its nearly 50% Black population — ranked dead last. This statistic is sobering, but it’s crucial to understand its context. While the label of “worst city for Black women” holds some truth, it also leaves room for change and renaissance. It should prompt us to demand that Black women and organizations in Cleveland remember their power and responsibility to advocate relentlessly for each other and for a better life in the city.

Morrison once told an audience of college students, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” Her words resonate powerfully, encapsulating the responsibility we have as Black women in Ohio — to lift as we climb, to create opportunities for those who come after us, and to transform our communities. The mural reminds us of this responsibility. It challenges us to stand up, be counted, and hold ourselves and our community accountable. It urges us to be persistent in our pursuit to change Cleveland and uplift the entire state of Ohio.

As we look upon Morrison’s face on that Euclid Avenue wall, we must ask ourselves: How can we embody her spirit of unapologetic Blackness and unwavering determination? How can we weave our own threads into Morrison’s tapestry of Black womanhood?

We can start by:

1. Supporting and uplifting other Black women in our communities
2. Advocating for policies that address the disparities highlighted in the CityLab report
3. Creating and supporting spaces for Black women to thrive in business, arts, and education
4. Mentoring young Black girls, ensuring they see the potential within themselves

The Toni Morrison mural in downtown Cleveland is more than just a beautiful piece of art. It’s a beacon of hope and a call to action. The mural entitled, “Cleveland is the Reason,” was created by artist Glen Infante in April 2021 to remind the world that he and others are proud of the people who have shaped the city. The mural reminds us of the power of imagery, our words, our actions, and our unity. As Black women in Ohio, we have a responsibility to change the narrative, to rewrite Cleveland’s story, and to continue the work that Morrison began. Let us stand tall, speak boldly, and act with purpose, knowing that we carry within us the same strength and resilience that Morrison embodied. By doing so, we honor her legacy and create a better future for all Black women in Cleveland and beyond. As Morrison would have done if she were still with us, let us be relentless in our pursuit of justice, equality, and empowerment for Black women in our city and our state.

My exodus in 2013 was born of necessity and hope — a pursuit of better opportunities in a job market that seemed to have no place for me. At the time, I couldn’t have known about the harsh realities that would later be quantified when CityLab named Cleveland the worst city for Black women. Yet, as I stood before Toni Morrison’s vibrant visage on that Euclid Avenue wall, I felt a renewed sense of purpose and belonging, despite the sobering statistics that had emerged during my absence. Chicago had been great, and D.C. okay, but neither quite felt like home. There’s a unique rhythm in Ohio that resonates in the souls of those born here, whether in my birth city of Dayton or my adopted home of Cleveland. It’s a cadence of perseverance, a melody of pride, and a harmony of shared identity that calls us back, no matter how far we roam.

Now, as I gaze up at Morrison’s unwavering eyes and electric smile, I feel a surge of determination. This has been more than a homecoming; it is a reclamation. A reclamation of my place in this city, of my identity as an Ohioan, and of my responsibility to weave new threads of hope and opportunity for others into the tapestry of Cleveland’s future and beyond.

The city has changed since 2013, and so have I, but one thing is certain — I am home, ready to stand firm and forge a new path in the state that shaped me and Toni Morrison. Armed with the knowledge and experiences gained during my time away, and inspired by Morrison’s unapologetic celebration of Black womanhood, I’m determined to be a beacon for young women — our future leaders. My mission is clear: to ignite a fierce pride in their Ohio roots, a pride so deep that it becomes an unshakeable foundation built by trailblazing Black women like Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, activist Mary B. Talbert, philanthropist Dr. Zelma Watson George, and educator Louise Troy.

Together, we’ll rewrite Cleveland’s story, just as Morrison rewrote the narrative of Black women in literature. We’ll transform this city into a place where Black women not only survive but thrive, where every young girl can see herself reflected in the success stories around her. This is our home, our legacy, and our future — and we will make it shine with the brilliance of every young woman who dares to dream here, carrying forward the torch that Morrison and countless other Ohio daughters lit for us all.

A proud Buckeye and doctoral student at Kent State University’s College of Communication and Information, Monique Wingard is a digital transformation consultant who amplifies the digital footprint of women-led organizations by shaping effective communication strategies. Her research focuses on news and media literacy among adolescent girls, with the goal of developing curriculum that enhances their critical thinking skills. She is a member of the Coalition for Independent Tech Research and the National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE). Visit moniquewingard.com for updates on her research, speaking engagements, conference presentations, and published works.

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Chesapeake Bay

Northeast Maryland

By Alice Sundman

We are driving southward on I-95, toward Washington, D.C. I am trying to take in the landscape around us, a landscape I have never seen before, but that I still, somehow, know in my mind. Here, in the midst of gray concrete and endless numbers of cars, I finally get a few glimpses of parts of Chesapeake Bay, of patches of verdant vegetation — and of a landscape in which Jacob Vaark, a character in Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel A Mercy, makes his way toward the slaveholder D’Ortega’s plantation in Maryland in the late 1600s.

For someone who grew up on a small island in the Baltic Sea, the enormous highway and the great distances are quite a contrast to my childhood windblown pines, low cliffs of red granite, and thousands of tiny islands in the archipelago of the Åland Islands of Finland. I am used to short distances ideal for cycling, to walking in the forest, to picking berries, to going for a swim in calm, shallow bays — to experiencing the place concretely, through my body and thus to get a sense of actually being in the landscape.

In the car on the highway, I am at a distance from everything. I can see water, trees, parts of the ground.… But how does it feel to actually be there, in the place?

In A Mercy, Jacob is travelling by boat, on foot and on horseback. Having sailed down the river into Chesapeake Bay, he is now struggling with the water, the sand, and the mud as he tries to find his way through the fog toward land:

“The man moved through the surf, stepping carefully over pebbles and sand to shore. Fog, Atlantic and reeking of plant life, blanketed the bay and slowed him. He could see his boots sloshing but not his satchel nor his hands. When the surf was behind him and his soles sank in mud, he turned to wave to the sloopmen, but because the mast had disappeared in the fog he could not tell whether they remained anchored or risked sailing on.”

For Jacob, the place evokes a sense of chaos, but this is due to political skirmishes and shifting territorial claims rather than the landscape itself, whose Indigenous inhabitants give him a sense of stability and of life lived in accordance with nature and the land.

Seeing the vastness of the landscape and the long distances of seemingly interminable highways, I wonder how Morrison managed to create the sense of immediate bodily experience of the landscape that Jacob experiences. For even if she most likely knew this place far better than I do, her experience from the late 1900s and early 2000s differs considerably from Jacob’s 17th century ditto.

Perhaps part of the answer can be found in her archived manuscripts, the Toni Morrison Papers, at Princeton University Library. It is well known that Morrison did thorough research for her novels. She studied reports and books of facts, and she used places she had visited or lived in as inspiration for her fictional places. But how did she create this particular fictional landscape, through which Jacob is travelling? Her archived research material for the novel includes information about Native American place names and their relation to topographical features that have most likely informed her writing. Facts about and descriptions of actual places thus form part of her creation of the fictional landscape. But more important, I think, are two crucial skills: her crafting and her imagination.

Early drafts I studied in the archive suggest that the landscape in this passage was not a priority at the beginning of her writing process; in these drafts, she focuses on sketching the contours of Jacob as a greedy settler. In later and more elaborate versions, the landscape is gradually given a greater role as she develops it into a thematic feature that becomes part of a human-place relation, which also allows her to develop Jacob into a more complex character. In her final, published version of this passage, as in other textual moments involving other characters in the novel, human-landscape interactions are crafted into complex thematic features that enrich both setting and character.

In her essay “The Site of Memory,” Morrison comments on the significance of imagination for her writing: “memories and recollections won’t give me total access to the unwritten interior life of these people. Only the act of the imagination can help me.” In addition to her drafting and crafting the landscape, she imagined Jacob walking in these regions in 1682. Her imagination enables her to create a story that invites the reader to feel a closeness to the place, despite the chronological, and sometimes geographical, distance. She invites us to experience the place along with a 17th century settler: “he took delight in the journey. Breathing the air of a world so new, almost alarming in rawness and temptation, never failed to invigorate him. Once beyond the warm gold of the bay, he saw forests untouched since Noah, shorelines beautiful enough to bring tears, wild food for the taking.”

In the car on the highway, I realize that despite the traffic, despite the concrete, despite the radically changed place, the landscape I see is also the one Jacob is sailing, walking, and riding through. This actual place, marked by the imprint of today’s humans, is interwoven with the fictional place Jacob traverses in another century. Along with these watery landscapes, I see my childhood Baltic archipelago with its narrow fairways on which thousands upon thousands of vessels have sailed through the centuries — some out fishing between the islets, others on their way toward the world’s oceans as part of a growing shipping industry — all on a sea that binds together the continents. In my mind and through my imagination, fed by my childhood island landscape, I can now experience this co-existence of times and places. For this, I thank Toni Morrison, whose drafting, crafting, and imagining made this amalgam of placescapes possible.

Alice Sundman was born on the Åland Islands of Finland and lives in Stockholm, Sweden, where she is working on a project exploring places of and between water and land in Anglophone literature. She is the author of Toni Morrison and the Writing of Place (Routledge, 2022).

Image: “A New map of Virginia, Maryland, and the Improved Parts of Pennsylvania & New Jersey.” Originally published by Christopher Browne, 1685. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

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Childhood Home

Lorain, Ohio

By Tara L. Conley

“This region (Lorain, Elyria, Oberlin) is not like it was when I lived here, but in a way it doesn’t matter because home is a memory and companions and/or friends who share the memory. But equally important as the memory and place and people of one’s personal home is the very idea of home. What do we mean when we say ‘home’”? –Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard

In astronomy, there’s an idea that describes how displacement and difference observed in a perceived object depends on the viewpoint, or the location from which the object is observed. Parallax, from the Greek word parallaxis, or change, is a multidimensional way of seeing. In literature, and by extension film, parallax is a device sometimes used to tell a story about a single event, place, or person through the perspective of multiple characters. James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920) employs parallax, as does Netflix’s Kaleidoscope (2023) and Knives Out (2020-2022), as well as David Fincher’s 2014 psychological thriller, Gone Girl. 

In my classroom, when I discuss the idea of social difference, I hold up a marker. I ask students to describe exactly what they see from their vantage point. Each description is slightly different: “it’s plastic and round,” one student says. “It’s hard to see from where I sit,” says another. The story of the marker, as told by my students, contains multitudes. The point of this exercise is to show how perceived differences depend on perception, and to demonstrate how the relationship between subject and object is mediated. Perception is never truly unidirectional, and affected by our memory, ways of knowing and being, and a sense of place and environment. We don’t so much observe objects out there as we become affected by the experience of seeing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parallax lately as I revisit previous writings on Toni Morrison, fellow Ohioan and Lorain County native. During the summer of 2019, I published a piece for CityLab/Bloomberg about visiting Toni Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain a few days after she passed. My article was among others published at the time that highlighted Morrison’s legacy as a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist and cherished luminary on the Black American experience. I took a different approach, writing instead about the shape of borders, real and imagined, that make up the regional landscape both Morrison and I call home.

In The Source of Self-Regard (2019), when Morrison asks, “What do we mean when we say ‘home’?” I think about our shared home region of Lorain County, the shape of its borders, and the houses that hold memories of growing up during eras of radical social and political transformation. Born mid-February 1931 during The Great Depression, Morrison’s early life in Lorain was marked by an era of cataclysmic economic downfall. Born on the first day of February in 1981, amidst an economic recession, my early life in Elyria was marked by the rise of neoliberal economic reforms and New Right political movements. Despite the half-century gap between us underlined by different eras of social and political strife, Morrison and I belong to a shared ancestral line of Black American travelers who migrated to Ohio, seeking an escape from the south, what sociologist Karida L. Brown (2018) calls “the battered womb of the Civil War.”

The decades spanning roughly 1910-1970 transformed Ohio’s landscapes. During this historical period, known as The Great Migration, Black people left the South to seek opportunities in Midwestern cities like Elyria and Lorain. Once bustling, the region gradually decayed as industries left, businesses shut down, and economic progress stalled. For many, including my own family members, this fostered a visceral sense of being stuck in time. Amid the circumstances, Black people were especially vulnerable to the repercussions of these changes and subject to racial resentment as social institutions crumbled around them. 

Even the Black River, a natural tributary that flows into Lake Erie and connects Elyria and Lorain, was once a thriving center of commerce. As time passed, however, it became known for its polluted and treacherous waters that claimed the lives of those who ventured too close to its shores. The story of the Black River became a parable of the sower — once-vibrant, then weathered by time, reflecting the place and dispositions of the people surrounding it. 

Black travelers have always been keenly aware of landscapes that bend and close in on us. We also recognize when it’s time to leave. Morrison understood this too. She left Lorain in 1949 to attend Howard University in Washington, DC, and soon realized the price Black Americans pay when leaving home. During an interview with Colette Dowling in 1979 Morrison says, “if black people are going to succeed in this culture, they must always leave.” She continues: 

“Once you leave home, the things that feed you are not available to you anymore, the life is not available to you anymore … So you really have to cut yourself off.”

I left Ohio at a young age, but unlike Morrison, I returned to live, teach, and make stories about home. One of those stories is my documentary film called Dry Bones, about Ike Maxwell and the summer of 1975 when Elyria erupted in protest after Ike’s brother, nineteen-year-old Daryl Lee Maxwell, was shot and killed by a White police officer. Regardless of where I lived geographically, I always remained tied to northeast Ohio. The reason I returned isn’t merely rooted in being born and raised in Lorain County; rather, it’s the region’s story of social difference that draws me back.

In 2019, when I returned home to Lorain County, I noticed how neighborhood symbols and historical landmarks came to represent racial and social division. For example, while driving towards Toni Morrison’s former childhood home—a modest two-story pale blue colonial at the corner of Elyria Avenue and East 23rd Street—it was difficult to miss the house across the street adorned with a large Trump 2020 banner waving on the porch. It stood as a clear and intentional symbol of White racist attitudes and beliefs in one of Lorain County’s most heavily populated Black cities, along with Elyria. It also served as a reminder that within shared landscapes, disparate realities exist. Four miles away in Elyria, sits the YWCA building, an historical landmark located across the street from my childhood home. When I learned Daryl Lee Maxwell was arrested in the YWCA parking lot during the summer of 1975, bleak visions emerged of a young man I never knew heading towards the end of his life. Less than one month after Daryl Lee was arrested in the YWCA parking lot, a White police officer named Michael Killean shot and killed him outside a local bar, igniting a three-day protest and uprising. These moments, separated by time and space, and imbued with rememory, reveal the legacy of White power in America, persisting through its symbols of supremacy and authoritarian acts of violence.

Morrison’s childhood home in Lorain and mine in Elyria provide vantage points to reflect on the perpetual shadow of racial subjugation in our home region. Through a contemporary political symbol of White resentment and a nearby historical landmark of a haunting past, the answer to Morrison’s question about home crystalizes for me; home isn’t merely a broken place of shared memories or a place where Black travelers come and go. Home reveals a way of seeing with searing clarity Black people’s enduring resilience across cruel landscapes.

Tara L. Conley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at Kent State University. Her writing on Morrison and living as a Black woman in the Rust Belt have appeared in CityLab/Bloomberg. Conley is currently working on a book and a film about her hometown of Elyria, Ohio. For more information on Tara’s research and creative projects, visit www.taralconley.org. 

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Lakeview Park

Lorain, Ohio

By Ashley Burge

As a teenager, I entered what Toni Morrison calls her narrative “village” through her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), and I was pleased to see three young Black girls traverse the familiar experiences of home life while prodding the unfamiliar territory of adolescence. I found much comfort in these girls’ fantasies and fears, and I wept, as I still do, over their tragedies. I was also entranced by the way Morrison framed her beautifully tragic characters in picturesque settings of nature and growth and beauty. Any serious Morrison reader is well attuned to her complex and intriguing characters, sparse but rich prose, and “unspeakable” thematic materials. I remember sprawling on my bed admiring these Black girls amidst golden-brown autumn leaves or tight red rosebuds. To me, these snapshots of nature were a buffer to the hopelessly tragic story that would soon unfold.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses the backdrop of Lorain, Ohio, her midwestern hometown, to illuminate the traumas inflicted on young Black girls and women in the 1940s. Specifically, she represents the Edenic Lakeview Park, with its beautiful rose gardens, situated among the pristine beachfronts on West Erie Avenue, as a pathway to cathartic revelation and renewal. For Morrison, nature and the natural world are a catalyst for survival, so the book’s version of Lakeview, called Lake Shore Park, is an ideal space to anchor her vision.

Lakeview Park has become a landmark in Lorain County with its approximately 2,500 roses planted in a rotary wheel. The park sits on Lake Erie, its circular design symbolizing wholeness and rebirth. In a more just world, it would be the ideal space for Morrison’s tragic protagonists to transcend the confines of intersectional oppression. But in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, spaces such as these were inaccessible to the three Black girls who epitomize themes of victimhood and survival in Middle America. In The Bluest Eye, these girls, Claudia, Fredia, and Pecola, are accosted by the traumas of racism, sexism, and classism well before they have escaped the naïve joy and confusion of adolescence. The tragic character Pecola does not understand or question her obsessive desire for blue eyes, but she is awestruck when the green-eyed “high-yellow dream child” Maureen Peal enchants teachers, parents, and students. Portrayed as a type of Persephone embodied in Morrison’s season themed narrative, Maureen disrupts the equilibrium of the girls’ identities and symbolizes the overwhelming otherness of Black girlhood in America. In these young girls’ experiences with racism and sexism, Morrison interrogates the worst possible scenarios for those who are othered, marginalized, and dismissed, and she indicts the communities that are complicit in their annihilation.

In many ways, The Bluest Eye is an autobiographical rendering of Morrison’s own othered identity in the small Midwestern industrial town of Lorain, Ohio. Morrison adamantly affirmed her Midwestern roots throughout her career. In conversation with Collette Dowling, she said, “Everything I write starts there…. Whether I end up there is another question, but that’s the place where I start…. It’s my beginning, my ‘thing,’ and I have distorted it, piled things on, I have done whatever it is that writers do to places, and made it my own. So it is mine now.”  Even while claiming the Midwest as her own, she confessed to Robert Stepto, “I know that I never felt like an American or an Ohian or even a Lorainite.”

Morrison’s allegiance to the Midwest shows in her ability to carve out the validity of Black identity in a region that often silences diverse voices. Morrison’s family faced such disenfranchisement. Before relocating to the Midwest for better opportunities, they had deep roots in the South, with her mother being from Alabama and her father from Georgia. She often recounts the story of 88 acres of land that were legally taken from her Native American maternal great-grandmother to show how white supremacy and systematic oppression renders land inaccessible to Black and brown people.

Morrison emphasizes this extension of day-to-day oppression in The Bluest Eye as she traces the growth and then disintegration of Pecola’s character. Before a pivotal scene in which Pecola is rejected by her mother and humiliated in front of the little white girl who her mother cares for, Morrison details the natural beauty of the white neighborhood that these young girls cannot access:

“We reached Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables. It was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water. Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.”

Here, Morrison embosses the fictionalized Lake Shore Park onto Lorain’s own Lakeview Park, with its lush rose gardens, manicured lawns, and picturesque lakeside. The tragedy of its beauty is that these young Black girls in 1940s Lorain are denied access to the dream of smelling those rosebuds, playing on those lawns, or frolicking on that lakeside. They are shut out from its beauty in nature and, therefore, alienated from their community, which adds to the despair that leads to Pecola’s demise.

When I reflect on my first immersion into The Bluest Eye as a teenager, I realize that my delight in Morrison’s poetic rendering of nature points to the reclamation of spaces that have been historically inaccessible to the Black community. Within that legalized denial enacted prior to the 1960s there was not only the unspoken denial of the ecstasy of nature but also the disenfranchisement of property, wealth, and mobility that still plagues Black Americans today. I was not personally denied access to Lorain’s natural enclaves, but the tragic narrative of denial was a tangible specter that haunted my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama even in my adolescence.  

These are, perhaps, the sentiments that impressed upon me as I empathized with Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola. And these are, perhaps, the sentiments that many Black Americans must navigate as they encounter the traumas connected to public parks and natural resources in America. It would not be difficult to surmise that Morrison incorporates the tragic denial of Lake Shore Park in her narrative because her desire to access its beauty and nature also dominated her own dreams as a child. However, Morrison’s novels never persist in the tragic nor linger too long into despair. At their core, they are about healing that can lead to survival and subjectivity. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison took the pang of rejection and adorned the park with flourish and meaning and gravitas and three little Black girls whose voices would have otherwise been silenced. Now, Lakeview Park is forever hers, and through her reclamation, it becomes ours.

Dr. Ashley Burge is an Assistant Professor of African American literature at Augustana College–Illinois specializing in 19th and 20th century African American literature. Her research and teaching emphasize the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. She also explores Black feminism and ecocriticism in her writings. Her essays have appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, the Pennsylvania Communication Annual, the African American Encyclopedia of Culture, and the critical anthology Through Mama’s Eyes. Her current book project establishes a theoretical paradigm that transmutes trauma and fragmentation to wholeness and subjectivity in African American literature. 

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Ablah Library

Wichita, Kansas

By Abby Bayani-Heitzman

Filipino American writer Bienvenido “Ben” N. Santos had a complicated relationship with the Midwest. He first arrived in the United States in 1941 as a pensionado, or government-sponsored scholar, to study at the University of Illinois. After World War II, he settled into a career as an educator and taught as a Fulbright exchange professor at the University of Iowa before arriving in 1973 at Wichita State University. He served as a Professor of Creative Writing and Distinguished Writer in Residence until 1982, a period that coincided with his voluntary exile from the Philippines.

During the dictatorship of Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos (1965–1986), Santos’ 1982 novel The Praying Man was banned for its perceived criticism of the Marcos regime due to its depiction of political corruption. Although living and working in the Midwest kept Santos free from political persecution, it also distanced him from the country and culture he loved.

I first learned about Ben Santos and his writing while I was a student at Wichita State; as a Filipino American and aspiring writer in Kansas, his story really resonated with me, not least because of his ties to both the Philippines and the Midwest.

After learning about Santos, I started to look at the Wichita State campus differently. I imagined him frequenting Ablah Library, which holds a collection of his personal writings and was my favorite place to study and write. Although there is no sign or sculpture at Wichita State that visibly marks Santos’ time there, I felt that I was following in his footsteps whenever I walked along the path between the library and the English department offices. I also imagined how lonely it must have been for him while he was living so far from both his home country and the well-established Filipino American communities on the coasts.

Themes of geographic distance as well as the distance created by passing time permeate Santos’ stories set in the Midwest. In the 1955 story “The Day the Dancers Came,” Fil, an older Filipino man, eagerly awaits the arrival of a Philippine dancing troupe, planning to invite them to dinner and give them a tour of Chicago, where they are performing. Fil sees the young Filipinos as a way to reconnect with and relive the happy memories he has of his home country. However, his hopes are crushed when the dancers avoid and ignore his invitations.

Before the dancers’ performance, Fil gets the idea to record the audio of the performance—the stomping of feet, the shouting and singing in dialects—with what he calls his “sound mirror,” a portable tape recorder. In this way, he seeks to preserve the past forever, creating a way to immerse himself in his idealized memories through sound.

As a member of an earlier generation of Filipino immigrants, Fil is not only separated from the Philippines he left by a great distance but also by the cultural changes that happen over time. Having not been back to the Philippines since he left as a young man, Fil knows the country only as he remembers it and is reluctant to accept that that place no longer exists. For him, “time was the villain” because it creates a distance that can never be bridged. He knows that what is lost to time is lost forever, and that clinging to a memory can warp how a person perceives the present: “Like time, memory was often a villain, a betrayer.”

Fil records the performance, but in the end, he fails to preserve his sentimental memories of Philippines, its people, and its cultures. By accident, he partially erases the tape and is left with nothing but confused noise:

“Frantically, he tried to rewind and play back the sounds and the music, but there was nothing now but the full creaking of the tape on the spool and meaningless sounds that somehow had not been erased, the thud of dancing feet, a quick clapping of hands, alien voices and words: in this country… everything… all of them… talking eyes… and the scent… a fading away into nothingness, till about the end when there was a screaming, senseless kind of finale detached from the body of a song in the background, drums and sticks and the tolling of a bell.”

Santos seems to suggest that attempting to preserve the past according to subjective beliefs as to what is important is a fruitless struggle. His stories are often concerned with finding a sense of belonging amidst the changes of modernity, and Santos surely experienced these struggles himself while in the Midwest. However, he accepted the changes that life brought and became an American citizen in 1976, while he was living in Wichita. Eventually, he returned to the Philippines — one he may not have recognized but embraced nonetheless.

When I returned to the Wichita State campus to photograph Ablah Library, I was shocked to see all the construction and renovation going on around campus. The place was still recognizable, but I felt a little melancholy that some of my favorite spots might one day disappear or be replaced. Ironically, Ablah Library itself is an example of this kind of development; built in 1962, it was designed by John Hickman, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and was modeled after Wright’s “Prairie Style” that reflected the expansive landscapes of the Midwest through a dramatic emphasis on horizontal lines. The original long, low profile and details such as a concrete cantilevered balcony over the entrance were eventually obscured by new additions to the building.

The world is a palimpsest, constantly overwriting itself. Like people, cultures, and countries, places change with time. It’s unavoidable, and it’s often necessary, but that doesn’t make it hurt less when we lose what means so much to us. Even so, while I struggle to accept change, I take comfort in the fact that no one can ever really alter the past and the impression that it has left on me. When I visit the places that hold special meaning for me, I see ghosts, traces that show: this was a person, this was a place, and this really happened.

Abby Bayani-Heitzman was born and raised in northeast Kansas, where she continues to live and work. She received her MA in English from Wichita State University and participated in the second cohort of the Kansas Creative Arts and Industries Commission’s Critical Writing Initiative. Since 2020, she has served as coordinator for the Filipino American community organization Malaya Kansas, a chapter of Malaya Movement USA

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1112 Gillespie Place

Garden City, Kansas

By Rosemary Hope

This is the story of my house and the foursome who gathered for dinner Christmas Day 1959: Truman Capote, Nelle Harper Lee, and my parents, Dolores and Clifford Hope Jr.

It was at the beginning of Truman’s seven or so years of entanglement with Kansas for In Cold Blood, his 1966 nonfiction novel chronicling the murders of the Herbert Clutter family and the prosecution of their killers. Herb, his wife Bonnie, and teenaged children Nancy and Kenyon had been killed by gunshot in the early hours of November 15, 1959.

Truman and his childhood friend Nelle came by train from New York a few weeks later: Truman to cover the murders for The New Yorker and Nelle to help with reporting.

My father was Herb Clutter’s lawyer. Shortly after Truman and Nelle’s arrival, Daddy and the estate’s administrator opened the doors to the crime scene, a tidy farmhouse outside Holcomb, Kansas, five miles west of Garden City. Truman sniffed about while Nelle took notes.

Otherwise, the pair did not get much help from the community throughout December. Truman, a flamboyant, pushy, gay man, was puzzling to townsfolk and stymied by local press and law enforcement.

He and Nelle faced Christmas alone at the Warren Hotel in Garden City. Until my mother issued an invitation.

“Come at one,” my mother said.

“Make it two,” Truman replied.

Mom always looked out for those new in town, young reporters at The Garden City Telegram, neighbors, teachers, singletons — all would all be invited for dinner. She knew who Truman was; she subscribed to The New Yorker. And for a woman who claimed she spent the 1950s with her “head in the diaper pail,” an adults-only dinner was welcome.

She fed the four little Hopes in the kitchen ahead of time. When Truman and Nelle arrived around 2:00, Christine, 10, Nancy, 8, Quentin, 5, and Holly, 3, were introduced and then whisked upstairs to play with their new toys.

Years later, I learned that Chris and Nancy had discussed their meeting with Nelle and Truman in detail. They marveled at their voices — Truman’s high, Nelle’s low — and their appearances: he was “small and pinkish,” she “dark and tall.”

Our house sits on a two-block-long, tree-lined street flanked at either end by brick pillars with bronze plaques announcing

Gillespie Place

Private Drive

Truth: the street was not private and our house, a 1908 bungalow, was among the most ordinary on it. But the trees were special. Despite the name, “Garden City” was not a grower’s paradise. The vicissitudes of a semi-arid climate and near constant wind — “hard blue skies and desert-clear air” as Truman said on page one of In Cold Blood — made growing pretty things pretty hard. My grandfather, Clifford Sr., planted and irrigated the heck the out of the elms after he purchased the house in 1920.

Nelle volunteered to help Mom in the kitchen and shared her trick for getting the air out of baking batter. “You whomp it on the counter,” she instructed while smashing the bottom of the pan on the Formica. This method has now served three generations of Hopes baking hundreds of batches of cakes, rolls, and brownies.

Mom debuted twice-baked potatoes and roast duck. Truman, who “noticed everything” according to Mom, zeroed in on the potatoes. “They lack something,” he observed. Perhaps it was sour cream and caviar (“the freshest, the grayest Beluga”), which he described in 1972 as the only way he could “bear to eat a potato.” This “most delicious ever potato lunch” was to be accompanied by chilled Russian vodka, which “must be 80 proof.”

On this day, Truman brought J&B scotch. Conversation flowed, with Truman holding court. “Most of the talk was about himself, but it was interesting,” Daddy later recalled. “He loved to gossip, especially about his rich and famous friends.” (These were likely Truman’s Swans, ladies at the top of New York society.) At some point in the meal, Daddy rose from the table and recited the kings and queens of England in order.

Back in New York in January, Nelle wrote my mother that Christmas Day with the Hopes, Daddy’s tour of the town, and other shared meals were the “high spots” of the stay.

By all accounts, Christmas lunch launched Truman into Garden City society. Once word got around town that the Hopes had hosted Truman, he was honored with dinners and cocktail parties from Garden City high society. He even collected his own Garden City Swans, who were special guests at his Black and White Ball in 1966 after the publication of In Cold Blood.

People frequently ask why my parents were not at the ball. They weren’t invited, and Daddy knew why. Although he was a Kansas state senator and son of retired U.S. Congressman Clifford Hope Sr., and although Mom wrote a daily column, “The Distaff Side,” for The Telegram, my parents were not in the country club set, not the “in” crowd. Mom did not pick up smoking and bridge as she’d been advised to do when she was society editor for the Telegram. Daddy didn’t golf. They didn’t have a modern house with a conversation pit and intercom system like those who lived on “the Hill.”

But Truman knew what he had with my parents. He retained Daddy as his Kansas lawyer throughout the writing of the book and filming of the 1967 movie. He relied on Daddy’s insider view of Kansas politics, particularly the 1960 gubernatorial race, which could have threatened the death penalty in the state. Daddy is one of five mentioned in the book’s acknowledgments.

Truman genuinely liked my mother. He insisted on writing a guest column for her, and it was a charming recount of his luncheon with Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, at the home of royal photographer Cecil Beaton.

I liked to tease my parents that I was Truman Capote’s love child. I mean, there are similarities between my baby pictures and his “fat years” photos. And he sent Mom a bottle of Chanel No. 5 when I, her fifth child, was born in June 1961. My fantasy stems from the story I was told over and over: Truman showed up at the house midday in early 1962 wanting my mother to join him at the Warren Hotel coffee shop for a gab session. She answered the door, baby me on her hip, making dinner, phone ringing. She plopped me in his lap, noticing his look of horror and confusion as she ran to answer the phone. Like any other Garden City housewife, Mom had no nanny for the baby, no cook for lunch. Truman left alone for the coffee shop, perhaps a bit sticky from our encounter.

The four from Christmas dinner 1959 are gone now. My parents lost touch with Truman after the filming of the movie. Nelle and my parents remained friends, with sporadic correspondence through the years. The house on Gillespie Place, with some replacement trees on the driveway side, remains in the family.

Rosemary Hope resides in verdant eastern Kansas, with twice the rainfall and half the wind of her beloved western Kansas. She lives on a tree-lined street with her husband, cat, dog, and rabbit, and an easy-to-grow organic garden. She is a medical writer and editor.

Photo at top: Hope family home, winter 1960. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 because of its association with Clifford R. Hope Sr., who represented the southwest Congressional District in Kansas in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1927 to 1957.

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Rock Springs Ranch

Junction City, Kansas

By Macy Davis

Niki Smith never names Kansas in The Golden Hour. She doesn’t need to. Every page of the 2021 graphic novel shows Kansas. It starts with the cover, which looks through wheat in the foreground to kids on a hay bale, the county fair in the background, a golden sunset lighting the scene. A few pages into the book, a Kansas state highway sign brings the reader directly into northeast Kansas. Many chapters end with landscapes dotted with cattle. A girl from Eudora wins the bucket calf event at the county fair. The main character, Manuel Soto, even fills out a form which clearly names “Douglas County” at the top. But the linchpin in this Kansas story is when Manuel and his friends go to agriculture club camp at White Springs Ranch.

The real-life White Springs Ranch is called Rock Springs Ranch, and it’s the Kansas State 4-H Camp, owned and operated by the Kansas 4-H Foundation. As a 12-year Kansas 4-H member, that last 15 miles of the drive, after you turn south from Junction City, was always the most exciting for me. My county extension agents hauled vans full of kids across the state, and even with a stop in Junction City, we were ready to be out of the car for good as we drove that last stretch, leaving behind the relative flat-land of U.S. Highway 77 to dip down into the creek bottoms. This small change made Rock Springs feel just different enough that you could forget you weren’t that far from home. When I read The Golden Hour for the first time, I gasped when Manuel and his friends got off the bus at camp. Then I immediately recommended this book to many of my 4-H friends, because Smith’s White Springs Ranch is clearly Rock Springs.  The name White Springs alone convinced me, but my favorite detail is the illustrations of the rings of cabins surrounding picnic tables and a bathhouse sheltered by trees. I felt like I should be unrolling my sleeping bag, tossing on a swimsuit, and getting ready to chow down on s’mores.

Manuel and his friends don’t spend long at White Springs, just a few pages really. Manuel ends up leaving camp early after the sounds of gunfire from the rifle range trigger his PTSD from witnessing a school shooting. Throughout the book, Manuel uses photography to ground himself in moments of anxiety. Often, he photographs the Kansas landscape, but the photos he captures of camp primarily focus on his friends and the fun they’re having.

The camp photos are on a two-page spread, highlighting the joy of the experience without a trace of the black and white shading or fractured yellow line work through which Smith indicates Manuel’s panic. For Manuel, camp represents freedom and friendship, which are both big steps after the trauma he experienced. To go away to camp for four days, Manuel worked with his therapist and his mom to determine he was ready. Even with its less-than-ideal ending, Smith captures just how meaningful a few days at 4-H camp can be.

Summer camp offers kids a space of freedom. It’s a place rife with new experiences and activities, and one full of new people who don’t know you. At camp, you can test boundaries and try out new elements of identity without the oversight of your family. That makes any camp special, but 4-H camps are unique, not least because their typically shorter sessions mean they serve far larger quantities of campers than the average overnight camp. It’s estimated that 1.5 million Kansans have camped at Rock Springs since the 1940s.

Graphic novels have a unique burden of proof in depictions of setting, particularly when representing real places, because they can show the whole picture, rather than just relying on the reader to supplement written descriptions with their own imagination or prior knowledge. It’s either right, or it misses the mark. Smith’s White Springs Ranch captures not just the look of Rock Springs but the feeling of being a camper there.

As a children’s librarian, I’m well aware of the underrepresentation of nuanced experiences of rural life in children’s literature. Urban and suburban kids are oversaturated with depictions of their lives, while rural kids may only see historical fiction or books that tell them the places they’re from are places to escape. I don’t feel like I ever saw Kansas or my lifestyle represented in contemporary fiction when I was a kid reading everything I could get my hands on. As much as I love historical fiction, it’s not the same.

The scholarship of children’s literature often relies on Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop’s argument that children should be able to find mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors in literature. Bishop explains, “When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part.” The growing rural-urban divide makes it essential that representation of rural areas be presented with depth and compassion. Smith’s graphic novel counteracts outdated, negative images and depicts rurality as it is.

My favorite Rock Springs memory is when one of my friends from a different county and I made up goofy choreography to the song “Pour Some Sugar on Me” at the Kansas Youth Leadership Forum when we were in high school — choreography we continued to utilize through college when we both ended up living in Alpha of Clovia 4-H Cooperative Leadership House at K-State. Manuel’s friendships and experiences in agriculture club remind me of my own experiences as a 4-H member embracing spontaneity and forming relationships that continued beyond the boundaries of Rock Springs.

Smith is a former 4-Her herself (even naming Manuel’s hometown after her 4-H club), and her use of Rock Springs as part of Manuel’s story offers rural youth positive representation that speaks to a specific experience while nonetheless representing a broad audience. After all, there are approximately 15,000 4-H members in Kansas. If this is a story that I, an adult almost 10 years removed from my 4-H experience, felt seen by, I can only imagine how young readers will feel. Even with the trauma Manuel experiences, he finds stability in the landscape, making The Golden Hour a love letter to a Kansas childhood.

Macy Davis is a proud Kansas 4-H alumna, Boston-based children’s librarian, and poet. She holds both a Masters in Library and Information Science and a Masters in Children’s Literature from Simmons University. Her work has been published in the I-70 Review and Wizards in Space. She spends her time reading, writing, planning storytime, and starting too many craft projects.

 Photo courtesy of the Kansas 4-H Foundation.

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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 had moved — a place I had never been. At first all I could think of was that immense, windswept plain, many times traversed by me, with speeding wheels, with wings, never stopping, the very incarnation of a blur. Then it dawned on me that the science fiction author R. A. Lafferty, whom I had idolized in the ‘70s), had spent almost his entire life in Tulsa. In the same house.

I had no luck finding any of his books in a bookstore there to show them, but at one point we were out on a walk, and I had summoned up from the Internet a not-quite-exact location of the house he had lived in. According to Natasha Ball on “Lafferty Lost and Found,” the house is “a shaded brick bungalow where Trenton comes to a T.” We went looking and found what seemed to be it, the corner house at 1724 S. Trenton Ave. I didn’t have a camera along, but it was satisfying to have seen it, anyway. It was a quiet, slightly gentrified neighborhood of older houses near a small lake, with good-sized trees on every block, which reminded me of the place in Oak Cliff I myself had grown up in — a good place to be a kid running wild on bicycles, where it seemed nothing bad could ever happen.

“Their brains differed from ours, their concepts must have been different, and therefore they lived in a different world.” – The Devil is Dead

Who is R. A. Lafferty, you may ask? He has fallen into obscurity but seems to be making a little bit of a comeback these days, praised by the likes of Neil Gaiman. To know him better, first run out and grab a copy of Nine Hundred Grandmothers. That’s a good start. Lafferty is best known for his inimitable short stories, which are only incidentally concerned with the tropes and themes of regular science fiction, and told in a jocular but slightly jarring voice that is a little like a tall tale and a little like a homegrown surrealist who has some really important things to say that he absolutely will not divulge, except in hints and sideways jokes. If you read enough of him, you start to dimly discern the vast, convoluted architecture of Lafferty’s universe—not an easy task, since so many of his books are out of print and not a few of them were published by small presses that never printed a large run in the first place.

To my understanding, there is a highly esoteric Thomist-Catholic aspect to it.  He apparently also believes we inhabit a multiverse in which time and space are sometimes illusory and sometimes not; survivals from the distant past (such as Neanderthals) or visitors from the future are not unheard of—and they’re not often used for the science-fictional story, they’re just THERE. He often makes reference to obviously bogus works, yet he’s also curiously erudite in real ones. There’s a wild Zen side, too, but you never can be quite sure when he’s being serious & when he’s pulling your leg.

“I was always for the underdog, and, doggy, you’re way way under.” – Fourth Mansions

It’s been said that aspects of the surrounding town are always seeping into his works, and not only the more ostensibly realist ones. But by and large, Tulsa is not present in any immediately named way — any more than the environs of the great mystical poets—unless you count the almost complete absence of that most-20c. experience: riding in a car (Lafferty didn’t drive). But two things I know. One is that Lafferty always identified with the underdog, the misfit, the underclass, and the socially disfavored; he has some striking stories and one historical novel (possibly his masterpiece, Okla Hannali) about Native Americans, whom he invariably credits with greater perception of reality.

In his many worlds, there is a pervasive, bone-deep precarity: the irruption of personal and/or apocalyptic violence is never out of the question, at any moment. I have to think the terrible 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, which happened about three miles from his house (although he was only seven at the time) must have been something he couldn’t not have known about and reflected on.

“We are living in the narrow interval between the lightning and the thunder.” – Arrive at Easterwine

And then there are the tornados — 98 since 1950, according to the National Weather Service. Idyllic the place might be, but hardly peaceful. On that particular, mild, sunny afternoon, we drove past two blocks of torn-up buildings that hadn’t yet been rebuilt, havoc from the last big one. It looked like a bomb had gone off, levelling everything; the car fell silent. You see such scenes in newsreel footage, latterly Ukraine maybe: never in these States, not like this. All the other cars kept right on rolling, on to their intended destinations, untroubled and I daresay sound of sleep. They raise their families, go to their neighborhood churches, my niece and her new husband among them. This is where they choose to live.

“We could always make another world,” said Welkin reasonably.
“Certainly, but this one is our testing.” – “Sky”

M. H. was born in Dallas in 1958. Shortly afterwards, fish fell from the sky.

Photo by Abby Boehning.

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Mixed Coniferous Forest
Osceola County, Michigan

By Camden Burd

“What we think of our hometown is our first substantial map of the world,” Jim Harrison wrote in his 2002 memoir, Off to the Side. A hometown takes the mishappen clay of a person and molds them, stands them up, and positions them in some vague direction. For Harrison (1937-2016), that was Reed City, Michigan — a rural town in Osceola County, situated in the northern portion of the State’s lower peninsula — where his family lived for much of his childhood. It was there, in a region defined by poor soil, long winters, and geographic isolation, where Harrison would cultivate the literary perspective that informed his essays, poetry, and novels.

There was nothing romantic about rural life in mid-twentieth-century Michigan. It was rural, not wild, definitely not idyllic. Hardship abounded. Harrison remembered ever-present poverty, in his family and others. “Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly,” he wrote. “Symmetry, balance, ultimate fairness seem to be abstractions remote to our occasionally naked sense of reality, as startling as walking out of a crisp and idealized civics class at a country school and into a lavish party of congressman and lobbyists.” He recalled eating at friends’ homes — minimal meals that included catsup sandwiches or a plate of beans. It is no wonder that his boyhood heroes included Eugene V. Debs and Walter Reuther.

But Harrison did not conflate sympathy with sentimentalism. He never waxed nostalgically about the inherent values of his neighbors. Poor residents of rural Michigan — like their wealthy counterparts — could steal, lust, and lie too. Reed City also exposed a young Harrison to the tragic throughline of humanity. After a childhood accident involving a feuding neighbor and a glass bottle, he lost vision in his left eye. The accident, and a subsequent failed surgery, left him in a severe state of depression which would come and go throughout his life. Years later, his father and sister were killed in a car accident while driving on a Michigan highway. For Harrison, the human experience was defined by hardship — which was not shared equally.

The environments of northern Michigan provided temporary respite from his own depression and the realities of rural life. Amid the scattered forests and fields surrounding Reed City, Harrison found a landscape that absorbed him.  “The natural world would always be there to save me from suffocating in my human problems.” 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.” It is important to note that Harrison rarely framed such excursions as an antidote to the modern world. His conception of nature did not fit the simplistic framework of “civilization vs. wilderness” — a dichotomy he believed mostly spoke to upper- and middle-class men who invented the concept to bolster their own ideas of masculinity. “There is nothing quite so fatuous as a man self-consciously trying to act manly,” he writes in Off to the Side. Harrison did these things for one simple reason: “Because that’s how I grew up.”

After several fits and starts Harrison received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Michigan State University. He worked in publishing for a short time in Boston and later received an offer to teach at SUNY Stony Brook. But he couldn’t shake the landscapes of his youth and, after two years of teaching, moved back to Michigan, first to Kingsley and then to a farm in Leelanau County. He took regular visits to a small, remote cabin near Grand Marais. In Off to the Side, he notes that these places “would appear nondescript and scrubby to those who favor the cordillera of the Rockies but to me it was homeground, similar to the terrain around Reed City where I had grown up.” Grand mountain ranges seemed almost vain to the writer, who preferred a bedraggled forest on sandy soil. The excursion into the natural world was not about summits or vistas. It was about losing oneself in the commonplace environments he knew near Reed City.

Settled in northern Michigan and connected to the landscapes of his youth, Harrison found literary momentum. He wrote his first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir, in 1971 and quickly followed with A Good Day to Die (1973), Farmer (1976), and Warlock (1981). The author preferred to focus on characters of unassuming backgrounds: bad farmers, lazy detectives, floundering professionals — nearly all of them who suffered from a life crisis or deep depression. All his characters were flawed. Most were unlikeable.

Harrison’s protagonists were poor, and those who weren’t carried traits that signaled to readers the politics he carried since childhood. The protagonist in True North (2004), David, spends his life rebuking his family’s legacy — lumber barons who clear-cut the forest of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during the region’s mining boom. He despises his inherited wealth, disowns his father (a sexual predator), and commits his entire life to researching his family’s environmental destruction. It is mostly a solo project, a type of penance for inheriting the family name. Over the course of several decades, David stews, guilty and ashamed. He only finds temporary relief by staying in an austere cabin in the dense northern woods where he can take regular walks and escape his own “self-sunken mudbath.” In True North, like many of his other works, these woods are the landscapes where Harrison’s characters find brief sanctum. 

The author’s own relationship to Michigan’s rural landscapes can be seen through his characters. In short, they wander in the woods to cope with their own traumas. The forests and fields, like those near Harrison’s boyhood home, helped to lift the cognitive baggage of life. As he noted in Off to the Side, the landscape could “draw away your poisons to the point that your curiosity takes over and ‘you,’ the accumulation of wounds and concomitant despair, no longer exist.”

The place consumes you so that your mind can’t. Exploring Harrison’s boyhood landscapes, I couldn’t help but feel the scenic humility. Osceola County’s forests and prairies never stuck me as particularly iconic or overwhelmingly picturesque. However, while meandering through the brush, tall grasses, and stilted pine I found that time had been distorted, my consciousness muted. And in my own navigation of these landscapes, I also came to understand how they had been foundational in shaping Harrison’s “map of the world.”

Camden Burd is an Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Illinois University, where he researches and writes on topics related to the environmental history of the Midwest. His work has appeared in The Michigan Historical Review, IA: The Journal for the Society of Industrial Archaeology, and several edited collections. He is also co-host of Heartland History, the podcast of the Midwestern History Association.

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