Jotham Meeker & the California Road—migrant traces at the Ottawa Mission cemetery.
Jotham Meeker – Franklin County, Kansas
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Section: Literary Landscapes
An archive of all that’s available online from The New Territory. Shop our back issues for more.
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.
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.
Peter H. Clark – St. Louis, Missouri
Clark, a Black socialist who had been collaborating with German radicals in Cincinnati since the days of abolitionism, was well prepared for relationship-building.
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.”
Louis L’Amour – Jamestown, North Dakota
The most famous writer to ever come out of North Dakota never wrote anything that takes place there.
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...
Hunter S. Thompson – Louisville, Kentucky
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 – 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...
Tennessee Williams – St. Louis, Missouri
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 – St. Louis, Missouri
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 – 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.
Rachel – Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin
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, Indiana
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 – 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.”
Elijah Lovejoy – Alton, IL
The publisher of an abolitionist newspaper, killed by a mob in 1837 after calling for “hearty and zealous efforts” to end slavery.
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.”