Thayer Hall

West Point, New York

By Trivius Caldwell

Born Chloe Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio, Toni Morrison was the second of four children and a precocious reader. She attended Howard University in 1949 and, later, taught there for seven years. In 1965, following the birth of her second son, Morrison moved to Syracuse, New York, to work for Random House. There, she edited work by African American writers Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and many others. Morrison’s oeuvre is replete with aspects of African American vernacular and themes of race, gender, and sexuality. Her tenth novel Home (2012) is a departure from much of her ephemeral work and centers around a male protagonist, a war veteran. Portraying Frank Money as a protagonist grappling with profound troubles and trauma, who embarks on a journey back home after the Korean War, underscores the significance of delving into complex notions of home while reevaluating the concept of family. It seems odd Frank Money and cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point might have something in common, yet the tragedy of war is but one way of straying from home.

The academy is nestled in the Hudson River Valley, north of bustling New York City. The old fortress, West Point, is home to almost 4,300 cadets from across our nation and territories. They represent the best of us as they prepare to lead our Nation’s sons and daughters. The Cadet Corps calls the Academy home, and along the Hudson river, they prepare to defend liberty. In the spring, the sun peaks over the adjacent mountain range, toying with cadets as they scuttle to classes under the final chill of winter. On the clearest day, the cityscape of the Big Apple appears like a distant mirage.

Sometimes, cadets travel by train toward the city’s glow. Unbeknownst to them, the river flowing broadside of their locomotive was also home to perhaps the greatest literary genius of our time, Toni Morrison. She too called a portion of the Hudson’s bank home. Morrison lived in the village Grand View on the Hudson, a quiet place to write while staring into the river’s reflection of that passing train. Her novels — including classics like The Bluest Eye (1970)and Beloved (1987) — represent the reality of the American African interior by depicting an Africanist presence in America’s soul. Teaching at West Point, I often admired cadets as they reflected on their future military service while gazing into that same soothing water. The Hudson River is more than just a canal to the Big Apple; it is an artery of the imagination.

Follow that river north and the gothic architecture of Thayer Hall emerges from the rolling hills of the Hudson highlands. Thayer Hall stands as a testament to both history and transformation. Originally conceived as the Riding Hall for the horses, this architectural gem proudly showcases the Gothic Revival style, mirroring the grandeur seen in other structures at West Point from the same era. Its robust exterior, crafted from gneiss masonry in random ashlar coursing, is accentuated by limestone parapets, window and door surrounds, and elegant belt courses. Granite additions, particularly at the bridges leading to its west side, further enhance its stately presence.

On March 22, 2013, Toni Morrison shuttled a short distance north to lecture to the Plebe (freshman) class in the Roscoe Robinson Jr. auditorium in Thayer Hall. Her work on depicting the totality of our American experience is all too familiar to cadets — those charged with reading Home as they reflect on the inner turmoil and implications of their service — especially given the experiences of Morrison’s protagonist Frank Money.

The acoustics in the auditorium transformed her writing into a symphony, harmonizing the rustle of a thousand pages turning simultaneously with the mellifluous cadence of Morrison’s jazzing voice. At once, the soundscape transformed the room into both canvas and cave, capturing the collective breath of anticipation and the energy of a captivated audience as cadets immersed themselves in Morrison’s literary imagination. The ethereal fusion of turning pages, coupled with Morrison’s voice resonating in the air, created a transcendent experience wherein the written and spoken word converged with an almost orchestral precision, inviting listeners to navigate her narrative. The auditorium, alive with the resonance of storytelling, became a sanctuary where the magic of literature unfolded in a captivating and immersive symphony. After all, Morrison makes fiction an oral art form. She is a master of manipulating sound by employing jazz characteristics in her writing.

Interestingly, that auditorium is named after a St. Louis native who ascended the military hierarchy to become the first African American four-star general in the United States Army. The formerly known “South Aud” served as a lecture facility for the Corps of Cadets long before the 1958 commemoration of the auditorium for General Robinson, who is emblematic of the pride that motivates Cadets to serve in times of war. However, the purpose for renaming it demonstrates the same exigence motivating Morrison’s fiction — belonging.

The Cultural Affairs Seminar (CAS), a cohort of cadets of color at West Point, petitioned for the auditorium’s name change because they were not satisfied with their lack of reflection in the gothic stone. Like others seeking to join the Long Gray Line to defend freedom, they wanted to be represented at the historic military mainstay. As with Morrison’s depiction of the Korean War veteran Frank Money — not to mention Shadrack, Paul D, and the Harlem Hellfighters in other novels — the cadets were willing to scratch the calcified scab of national history by using voice and action to assert their place.

Long landscapes like the Hudson River, the stone Riding Hall, and the auditorium and its acoustic flair served as the setting for the writer’s tutelage. Everyone awaited her voice, loud like the silence itself, signaling a legacy and ghosts of the past. On the hallowed grounds of West Point, she whispered Frank Money’s thoughts: “I only remembered the horses. They were so beautiful. So brutal. And they stood like men.”

Trivius Caldwell is an active-duty Army Infantry officer. He served as an Assistant Professor of English at West Point from 2011-2013. Trivius is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of English at Duke University where he studies African American literature, sound studies, and hip-hop 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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Topeka High School

Topeka, Kansas

By Molly Hatesohl

There are many things in Room 103 of Topeka High School that evince its history. Designed in 1930 during the Collegiate Gothic Revival, its granite fireplace and wrought iron chandeliers imbue the classroom with scholastic grandeur. A prodigious display of THS Debate and Forensics memorabilia encircle the room, some photos of former champs more sun-faded than others. But perhaps the most conspicuous artifact hangs high on the back wall, dwarfing the surrounding images: an extra-large portrait of Ben Lerner. Though he is, these days, an accomplished writer teaching at Brooklyn College, this particular photo was taken after he won the 1997 National Speech and Debate Championship.

I first encountered this unsmiling relic in the fall of 2012, when I nervously entered 103 as a sweaty freshman with frazzled hair. As I walked in, the room filled with a sweet, ozonic smell emanating from the huge photocopier in the back corner. It was hard at work, churning out copies of that day’s reading, ripped from the most recent issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Forewarned about the fiery longtime debate coach Pam McComas, I was eager to prove myself.

Wasting no time, Pam gathered the printouts, licked a manicured finger, and tossed stacks of paper at us. The article was titled “A Contest of Words” and was, according to its subhead, an account of high school debate and the demise of public speech written by Ben Lerner. “The individual who wrote this essay,” she said, pointing at the portrait, “is known as the 1997 International Extemp Champion, AKA, my former student.”

I took in the image of the teenager standing over me posing with four giant trophies — straight-faced, oily-haired, and undeniably adolescent. Pam continued, “This will tell you not only everything you need to know about this activity but also how to craft language. In layman’s terms, this is how you beat people up with your words.” I got the sense this was a phrase she had enjoyed using for years.

I gave the text a cursory scan, only kind of understanding Lerner’s elevated prose. His portrait’s eyes stared over my shoulder as I tried to read.

For the next four years, it felt like neither milestone nor mistake could escape Ben Lerner’s scrutinizing gaze. Upon the wall he remained, ever watchful, as I researched the federal budget for transportation infrastructure (the 2012 Debate Resolution). He was there too, when I discovered my parents, who also practiced beating each other up with their words, had received marital counseling from Ben Lerner’s father, a well-known psychologist. I wondered if Dr. Lerner saw something of his son in my father, who was also a competitive high school debater. When, during my sophomore year, Pam confronted me about my apparent lack of motivation, and I confided in her about my parents’ bitter divorce, Ben was, in a way, the only other person in the room. I couldn’t help but feel like Ben Lerner continued to look down on me throughout the tenderest moments of my coming-of-age.

With adulthood, the scopaesthesia diminished. It wasn’t until earlier last year, as I stuffed my life into a U-Haul and relocated from Kansas to Chicago, that I recognized that exacting gaze.

Surrounded by unfamiliar landscapes, and longing for ways to relate to my hometown from a new home, I reached for Lerner’s 2019 novel The Topeka School. Adapted from my first reading assignment in Room 103, Lerner’s novel features a loosely fictionalized version of his high school self named Adam, who, on the cusp of both the National Debate and Forensics Championship and his own manhood, struggles to find his voice amidst the crescendoing chorus of conservative toxic masculinity reportedly endemic to Kansas.

But, what I hoped would reconnect me to the distinctive place I grew up turned out to be something far more disingenuous. Despite its title, The Topeka School is not a book about the unique, history-laden city, nor is it about the multifaceted people who live there. It is, as Lerner has described it, “a book about the prehistory of the bankruptcy of American political discourse.”

Being a prehistory, Lerner’s book assumes an archeological tone of supposed objectivity and encourages readers to do the same. Describing his teenage persona giving practice speeches with a coach, Lerner writes, “Weird to look through the window of the classroom door with the detachment of an anthropologist… and see these two men, if that’s what they are, arguing in an otherwise empty room in a largely empty school.” Suddenly, I was back in Room 103, this time looking down from high upon the back wall, watching my teenage self figure out how to find her voice, utterly incapable of extricating myself from that particular site of our shared history.

Lerner doesn’t write to me, a Topekan, the subject of his study, but to an outsider audience. It’s as if he were a foreign correspondent, reporting back to Brooklynites about trouble brewing on the homefront. In the novel, Adam’s parents worry about how Topeka’s conservative culture might influence their sensitive and intellectual son, whom Lerner characterizes to stand out against this homogenous red state background. Topeka and its high schools serve as a mutable backdrop against which Lerner paints an imaginary Trumpland, the primordial soup that incubated all that’s wrong with America today.

Maybe I would have bought it, had I not grown up in a version of Topeka from which Ben Lerner was impossible to subtract.

This is the problem with casting yourself as the anthropologist of your own culture. In the process of observing specimens, you too are leaving your trace, creating future fossils that others will find and use to construct their own subjective histories. Lerner’s portrait, an important artifact in my memory, was the index of another young person who became himself in the very same place I did.

I don’t wish to pretend that the phenomena Lerner describes in The Topeka School don’t exist. Topeka is full of working parents and latchkey kids, homophobes and misogynists, and white boys with anger issues, sure. So is New York. I also don’t wish to pretend that Lerner or I can be separated from this history simply because we had parents who embraced therapy or because we expatriated to blue state metropolises. Now, having left my hometown, trying again to find my voice, I’m thinking a lot about how we choose to talk about the places where we grew up. I don’t want to pin the decline of civilization on the place that harbored a younger version of me. The land and people I was raised on shaped the person I’m becoming, and I want to honor that. When I write, I want to be integrated with my home, not clash with it.

In an interview promoting The Topeka School, Lerner proclaimed, “Memory lives in places… There are always pockets of the past in the landscape of the present.” He and I are embedded in the history of Topeka, just as a fossil is embedded in the ground. We may not assume the voice of the narrator, nor the anthropologist, lest we forget our own footprints.

Molly Hatesohl is a Topekan living in Chicago.

Photograph by Adam Krohe, a photography student at Topeka High School, Class of 2024.

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Blackburn College
Carlinville, Illinois

By Karen Dillon and Naomi Crummey

As professors in the English department at Blackburn College, we have always been aware of the legacy of the college’s most famed writer, Mary Hunter Austin, who was born in Carlinville and graduated from Blackburn in 1888. Immediately after graduation she pioneered west with her family, and in the landscapes of California and the Southwest she became celebrated for her understanding of nature and unconventional feminism. In Austin’s canonical work of American nature writing from 1903, The Land of Little Rain, she recounts the story of a Paiute woman, Seyavi, who survived a massacre by hiding in caves with her young son. After describing the landscape in which Seyavi struggles to survive, Austin remarks, “That was the time Seyavi learned the sufficiency of mother wit, and how much more easily one can do without a man than might at first be supposed.” As Seyavi earned the respect of her people by raising her son without a husband, Austin, too, cast off convention to follow her own path. Though Blackburn played only a small and short-lived role in her life, we feel a kinship with Austin and the intellectual and artistic foundation the college laid for her.

Blackburn does not appeal to everyone. It is a tiny, student-managed work college in a small Midwestern town abutted on two sides by farmland; there is plenty of hard work but little glamour. Blackburn can sometimes feel isolating, but as a small, student-centered school, it also, in Austin’s own words from her 1932 autobiography Earth Horizon, provides space for professors and students alike “to walk about in it, making fruitful contacts with [each other], as [we] couldn’t have done in the larger universities.” Austin briefly left Blackburn for a nearby teaching college but despised the “rasping insistence on a regime that violated all the natural motions of her own mind.” Austin’s fiction also emphasizes the desire for natural motions over convention. In the short story “The Walking Woman,” the titular character “had walked off all sense of society-made values, and, knowing the best when the best came to her, was able to take it…. it was the naked thing the Walking Woman grasped, not dressed and tricked out, for instance, by prejudices in favor of certain occupations.”

Austin returned to Blackburn precisely because it welcomes and nurtures the individual mind; it gave her freedom and space to learn as she was inclined, leaving her, as she wrote in Earth Horizon, “so far as her professional proclivities go, without so much as a thumb-print of predilection; and that I count entirely to the good. I am quite sure she could never have escaped from one of the larger, better regimented institutions with so free an intelligence and so unhampered a use of herself.” The campus newspaper The Blackburnian, for which Austin was a writer and editor, may provide evidence of the intellectual freedom Austin was known for at Blackburn. In the March 1887 edition of the “Peculiar Characteristics” section, a 19th century version of a shout-out column to students’ and professors’ unique talents, quirks, and physical characteristics, Mary Hunter is recognized simply for her “ideas.”

As we pass the bust of Austin that presides over the halls of the science building, we continue to draw inspiration from her free-spirited feminism and artistry. In the college archives, there is a copy of the February 1888 edition of The Blackburnian, which notes, “Miss Mary Hunter has not been attending her classes for the past week. Too busy writing, we suppose.” We like to picture Austin, confident and even a bit arrogant (she switched her studies from English to science because for the former she believed she needed only herself and books, but the latter she felt required a proper teacher), walking through the green spaces of campus, writing and imagining alternative ways of inhabiting the world. Like the seemingly arid spaces Austin’s best-known works so meticulously open for readers, the Blackburn campus offers a path for those who seek a space in which to walk about unhampered and forge meaningful connections.

Karen Dillon has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2011, where she teaches U.S. literature and first year writing. She has published two books since being at Blackburn: The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities (co-edited with Naomi Crummey in 2015) and The Spectacle of Twins in American Literature and Popular Culture (2018). She is originally from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Naomi Crummey has been a Professor of English at Blackburn College since 2005, where she teaches writing and literature. Her personal essays have appeared in Prairie Fire, Kudzu House, and Grain, and she co-edited The Wire in the College Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches in the Humanities, in which she co-authored a chapter entitled “’They’re not learning for our world; they’re learning for theirs’: Changing the First Year Writing Experience” with Karen Dillon. A Canadian citizen, she lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

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The Fine Arts Building
Chicago, Illinois

By Jesse Raber

Chicago isn’t an iconic setting for Willa Cather, the great novelist of the prairies. Yet, in a sense, during Cather’s time Chicago writing was prairie writing. When H.L. Mencken crowned Chicago “The Literary Capital of the United States” in 1920, he credited the city’s literature to the “remote wheat-towns and far-flung railway junctions” of its hinterland. “The newcomers who pour in from the wheat lands,” he wrote, full of “elemental curiosity” and “prairie energy,” seek in the city’s cultural scene “some imaginative equivalent for the stupendous activity they were bred to.” Mencken’s description of country talent “pour[ing] in” to the city seems to imagine Chicago writing as a river fed by the vast “Middle Empire that has Chicago for its capital.”

But where Mencken, the consummate urbanite, saw brain drain, Cather sees back-and-forth circulation between country and city. Chicago drummers teach the townsfolk the latest songs in My Ántonia, and the South Dakota grande dame in A Lost Lady often entertains Chicago friends. The Chicago voice teacher Madison Bowers, in The Song of the Lark, trains soloists from across the Midwest and takes “long journeys to hear and instruct a chorus.” The closing paragraph of The Song of the Lark sums up the dynamic:

The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams.

The prairie towns aren’t unsoiled streams flowing into the urban river; they are points in a “network” that regularly communicates, through Chicago, with a wider world.

Cather’s Chicago itself is a symbol of hypercirculation, a “blur of smoke and wind and noise” whose disorienting flux creates eddies of creativity. “In little towns,” Cather writes in Lucy Gayheart, “lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.” By contrast Chicago, with its uncaring crowds, allows Cather’s prairie-bred artists to make themselves secret nests. Rather than exposing them to a wider swath of humanity, the city helps them find themselves and their own kind.

The most memorable of these artistic aeries is the singer Clement Sebastian’s studio in the Fine Arts Building. Practicing there, Lucy Gayheart feels “it was as if they were on the lonely spur of a mountain, enveloped by mist. They saw no one … heard no one; the city below was blotted out.” Located a few blocks south of the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, the Fine Arts Building has cultivated artistic tenants since 1898. A ten-story structure in the Richardsonian Romanesque style of rusticated stones and stately arches, in Lucy’s day it was the city’s literary epicenter, and many of its greatest occupants presented themselves as obscure “little” niches in the big boisterous city. There was the Little Room, an aesthetic society featuring Hamlin Garland and Harriet Monroe (among many others); Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, which faced obscenity charges for publishing parts of Ulysses; and Ellen von Volkenburg and Maurice Browne’s movement-launching Little Theater.

Today the Fine Arts Building still has some of that cloistral spirit. When I first went inside, during an open studio night, it was like stepping between worlds. Lush Art Deco murals cover the lobby walls, and the antique elevators have human operators. The upper floors are all dark wood trim and muted white paint, like the outside of a Tudor house. That evening, drifting between studios, each its own aesthetic universe, I bought a postcard-sized watercolor of Colorado pines, painted at the western fringe of Chicago’s old railroad kingdom.

Years later I returned to visit the new Dial Bookshop, named for the old magazine and decorated with portraits of Chicago writers, including fellow Fine Arts tenant L. Frank Baum. The store was lovely, but I wondered if this veneration of the building’s past meant that creativity had lapsed into nostalgia.  This question bothered me as I thought about what the Fine Arts Building represents today.

One evening, as I was brainstorming this vignette, I joined a six-foot-spaced circle around a fire pit on my friends’ lawn. “Does anybody happen to have any stories,” I asked, “about the Fine Arts Building?” It turned out they did. I heard about a filmmaker with an office there, working for years on a documentary about feuding martial artists. Another friend recalled her amazement at wandering into a violin-maker’s workshop — a luthier’s shop, she insists — while looking for a replacement guitar string. (The luthiers were unhelpful.) A third reminisced about how the old movie theater there casually mixed art house and mainstream films. Some of that old spirit of hidden wonders lives on, it seems. My favorite story, though, was a little older — about one friend’s dad who used to take the Greyhound there to see films that didn’t play in his hometown. He sometimes had to leave the movie early to catch the bus back to DeKalb, Illinois, way out in Chicago’s Middle Empire.

Jesse Raber is an Instructor at the Harvard Extension School and has also taught literature courses at several Chicago universities (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago). He is the co-creator of the Chicago Writing gallery at the American Writers Museum and is currently working on a literary history of Chicago.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

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Earlham Hall
Richmond, Indiana

By Leah Milne

I was a Midwest transplant, born and raised on the East Coast. Before I left home, friends joked about flatland and cornfields and voiced concerns about my entering what they perceived to be a region of overwhelming whiteness. Culture shock, however, was nothing new to me. As the first in my immigrant family to attend college, I knew what it meant to feel unmoored, to walk into a room where no one resembled you.

My conference visit to Earlham College was an attempt to soften that dislocation. Books have always been my second home, so sitting in the Runyan Center listening to literary presentations, I was already more comfortable. A bonus? Zitkála-Šá went here in the 1890s. Having read her stories about being the only American Indian among over 400 college students, I felt a kinship.

Earlham Residence Hall — where she stayed — was right next door. Bright leaves floated onto the campus quad where I stood before a sweeping red-brick building. Its entrance was framed by white columns, wooden benches, and painted Adirondacks. This was what the child in me imagined all college campuses looked like. Later, I would learn that this tree-lined enclosure was called The Heart.

In “School Days of an Indian Girl,” Zitkála-Šá — known to Earlhamites as Gertrude Simmons — writes about leaving her happy childhood on South Dakota’s Yankton Reservation for White’s Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana. Her introduction to education left her homesick; she was forced to cut her hair, adopt a new language and religion, and endure numerous abuses. One wouldn’t blame her for leaving school entirely. And yet she went to college, much to the chagrin of her mother, who feared losing her daughter to “the white man’s ways.” If my visit was a modest attempt at self-encouragement, Zitkála-Šá’s more permanent move to Earlham represented a willful assertion of a new life.

Gertrude’s time at Earlham was lonely. She often isolated herself in her dorm room, and a classmate described her as “pleasant but somewhat distant.” Nevertheless, she flourished, publishing poetry in the school newspaper and performing in recitals. Her speeches, however, were where she found her voice as an activist.

After winning Earlham’s oratory contest, Gertrude was surprised when fellow freshmen celebrated by decorating the student parlor. Maybe, she thought, my classmates aren’t so bad. But then, weeks later in the subsequent state-level competition, students from one university mocked her with racist epithets. Gertrude rallied. In her soft but determined voice, she lambasted America’s prejudices, winning over all the judges save a Southerner offended by her position on slavery. She won second place.

I picture her afterwards in The Heart, staring at Earlham Hall, those columns festooned in cream and yellow drapery in her honor. Like many of Gertrude’s triumphs, this one was bittersweet. The humiliation of the night’s racism lingered, and she rushed to her dorm room, questioning her decision to leave home.

Even as she became a student at the New England Conservatory of Music and a teacher at the infamous Carlisle Indian School, she would remember this night. Maybe she stared at the stars and stripes flying above the Hall’s entrance and thought about how her speech referenced “our nation’s flag” and “our common country,” stubbornly and even hopefully insisting on a shared humanity that she knew was often denied. The image of her standing before Earlham Hall inspires me to contemplate my experiences in education, both alienating and invigorating, and the way that institutions can both fail us and uplift us. If Zitkála-Šá could make such resolute demands for equality after all she had experienced, I figure there’s still hope for me.

Leah Milne writes about and teaches multicultural American literature at the University of Indianapolis. It took her a full year living in the Midwest to learn how to properly pronounce “Louisville.” You can find out more about her publications and courses at LeahMilne.com.

Photo by Rebekah Trollinger, the Plowshares Assistant Professor of Religion at Earlham College.

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Central Elementary School
Ferguson, Missouri

By Taylor Fox

There’s a haunted feeling that comes with walking around an empty schoolyard. Barren playgrounds and darkened windows convey emptiness, dejection. It’s unnatural for playgrounds to go quiet. Yet, outside the historic Central Elementary School in Ferguson, Missouri, that eerie feeling is missing, replaced by a comforting glow provided by the towering trees, climbing vines, and community garden of fragrant herbs.

Did you know there was a time Ferguson was all a farm?

Central alumna Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry is filled with imagery that conjures up the aura of her former school. She specifically reflects on the Ferguson of her youth in a poem honoring Jamyla Bolden, a 9-year-old black girl shot and killed in her Ferguson home in 2015 when a man shot into the house, targeting someone he believed stole from him.

The poem illustrates the commonalities between the author and Jamyla, who attended Koch Elementary School, just over three miles east of Central. In the poem, Nye wishes she could pass her own lived years on to the girl who was taken too soon.

Drive down Florissant Road today, and it is hard to imagine as farmland. The asphalt street is lined with barbecue restaurants and dozens of murals honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Outside the Ferguson Police Department stands a row of signs and artwork remembering those killed by police violence in the United States.

Leaving Florissant Road and all of its restaurants, you immediately enter the quiet, calm neighborhood surrounding Central Elementary. Nye has described the area as a “leafy green historic suburb” and fondly remembers her old brick school. Built in 1880, the school flaunts a plaque acknowledging its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The original bell tower — visible from both the playground and the community garden — still crowns the old building.

Considering Nye drafted her first poem when she was six years old, it’s easy to imagine the young artist gazing out the school’s wrought iron windows onto the large garden below and piecing together her earliest works.

Nye attended Central from kindergarten until sixth grade, and in 1966 her family moved to Palestine, her father’s country of origin. She has often spoken on her experiences as a Palestinian-American going to a then all-white school and in a 2014 essay wrote, “In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.”

Nye’s poetry often reflects the parallels between her two childhood homes. Her first published collection, Different Ways to Pray, is entirely on the topic of cultural similarities and differences, using her own Palestinian-American identity as a model.

As a first generation Cuban-American with an ethnically Jewish heritage, my own parallels to Nye are too striking to ignore. I can imagine the feeling of other she must have endured in Ferguson, accepted in neither the white nor black communities. After moving to Palestine, where she may have felt even more of an outsider, she began to study culture and identity, perhaps to find her own sense of belonging. I too have felt the drive to study my heritage in order to feel enough, to feel like you deserve to claim your roots.

Despite our commonalities, it is also not lost on me that, while I cannot trace my ancestry back to Israel, we are from opposite sides of that barbed wire fence, belonging to two cultures with more in common than they are willing to admit. We are from two cultures that historically villainize the other without the effort of understanding and respect.

We share this severing too with Ferguson itself, represented by the seeming innocence of the empty Central Elementary School across town from the home where Jamyla was killed and next to a street so often shown as a scene of violence against black people — violence portrayed to make a point, without respect for the motivation behind the movement or any attempt to amend the systemic issues that have led to this point.

Taylor Fox recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a Master of Arts in Geography. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, she has spent her career learning and writing about cultures and hopes to continue sharing this passion with others. Fox has also been published in Missouri Life Magazine and the Columbia Daily Tribune.

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