An archive of all that’s available online from The New Territory. Shop our back issues for more.
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...
Hunter S. Thompson Churchill Downs Louisville, Kentucky By Charlie Cy In the spring of 1970, thirty-two-year-old writer Hunter S. Thompson returned to his hometown of Louisville to cover the 96th running of the Kentucky Derby for Scanlan’s Monthly. Less than 72 hours...
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...
Tennessee Williams 4633 Westminster Place St. Louis, Missouri By Devin Thomas O’Shea Tennessee Williams called St. Louis “cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial,” in a 1947 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, playing the heel to his...
Kathleen Finneran & North County, St. Louis—a kaleidoscopic view of how backyards hold the memories of lives lived through raging grief and easy joy.
Sherwood Anderson & The Old Topliff and Ely Plant—on literary myths, Roof-Fix, and an escape along the railroad tracks in Elyria, OH.
In 1834, 20-year-old Rachel petitioned the St. Louis Circuit Court for her freedom, after she had been held in slavery in Ft. Snelling and Ft. Crawford, WI.
John Augustus Stone & Metamora, IN—the story of a tourist town named after a play, and the details that most visitors today just don’t know.
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.
Hugo Martinez-Serros & South Chicago City Dump—Depression-era salvage in a “a great raw sore on the landscape.”
The publisher of an abolitionist newspaper, killed by a mob in 1837 after calling for “hearty and zealous efforts” to end slavery.
3448 Pinkney Street—the site of Malcolm X’s first home offers a more complex portrait of Midwestern mythologies.
Smith Lake Camp—a sanctuary in the Upper Peninsula, a place that “is not geared to make your visit painless.”
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 & Belle Isle—“here, alone, I am smudged by the warming mist of snow as the spring sun finds its way in.”
Richard Wright house—a modest brownstone among “great sweeping corridors of concrete and ingrained prejudice.”
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....
James Tate Cow Creek CrossingPittsburg, Kansas By Leslie VonHolten Each James Tate poem presents itself like a welcoming trailhead — happy, sunshiney even. It is not until you are deep in the woods of it all before you sense the lurking weirdness. For example, in “The...
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.”
Heid Erdrich & All My Relations art gallery—“imaginative language-meaning” in the American Indian Cultural Corridor.
Meridel Le Sueur & a miner’s shack—how investigating environmental damage reveals “the hopeful and radical potential of regionalism and place.”
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.
“Even with a breeze, the place was so profoundly silent that all of my own thoughts were too loud.” — C.J. Janovy