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 tall. Given the oak’s stature, the other trees around it have little choice to stretch for sunlight and grow tall and straight too. As a child, I recall that oak’s bloom of leaves in the spring reached what I perceived, from the Mark Twain National Forest floor, to be a heaven, even if just a lower one. The oak is a waymarker tree and many times growing up I was relieved to pass by it, knowing that the comfort of home was not far. I fear now I would become lost if I tried to find that oak, even though those woods are quite familiar. One may become lost even among the familiar.

Thomas Hart Benton, one of Missouri’s most storied artists, knew this sense of estrangement all too well. I became acquainted with Benton’s work when I was in elementary school. On a road trip from Southwest Missouri to Columbia to watch the state high school basketball championships, my father stopped at the Capitol building in Jefferson City. My brother and I raced through the wide polished corridors of the Capitol, the stone echoing footsteps and our voices. Our father led us to the Missouri House of Representatives Lounge. Once inside the room, Benton’s many paneled mural, The Social History of the State of Missouri (1936), stilled our feet and voices.

As an adult, I can now see the mural is characterized by Benton’s depiction of laboring bodies. They are often sinewy, in fluid motion, bent under a gravity of some unidentified downward pressure that suggests the yoke of their exploiters. Their bodies rarely find repose, except for a cabal of politicians who sit smoking Roi-Tans and drinking, presumably, bathtub gin. Those bodies yield to the same gravity throughout the work but find a comfortable recumbent ease. The stylistic truth of Benton’s mural is only part of its genius.

But the dissonance is striking between the way Benton writes his own life and the subjects depicted in many of his paintings. This dissonance is best exemplified by an anecdote from his autobiography, An Artist in America (1937), recounting a hike in the woods after he planted the plank of his father’s remains in a respectable cemetery in Neosho, the site of his childhood home.

Long-absented from Missouri, Benton had returned to Neosho in 1924 to sit next to his father’s deathbed. Benton’s father was a former U.S. Congressman and as he neared death, his “cronies” also neared to tell stories. In those long hours of vigil, Benton listened, and his father’s friends became his friends. Benton was “moved by a great desire to know more about the America” he’d glimpsed in Neosho. He declared that “for the hangovers of idealistic social theory, Missouri is a grand pickup,” going so far as to laud the “individual will” deeply grooved in the “American character.”

Not long after, the artist set out on a walk in the “White River country along the Arkansas-Missouri line,” in an effort to discover the America he’d been missing. Benton stumbled through the hollows and hills of this area, growing increasingly weary of snakes and cursing the “distrusting” locals, who he blamed for giving him bad directions. He referred to a ferryman who initially denied him passage as a “goddamn son-of-a-bitch” because the ferryman feared Benton was the culprit of a bank robbery the night before. He eventually appraised the locals as “marauding and shiftless hill people,” whose “depredations,” “wild quarrels” and “wild fornications” fill the records of the county courts. Eventually he arrived at his destination in Forsyth. His evaluation of the denizens of the Ozarks was adduced from a hike he estimated to be about 50 miles. I imagine he passed by that burled oak behind my parents’ house near Shell Knob without realizing how close to home he actually was.

In 1935, Benton was commissioned to paint The Social History of the State of Missouri by the Missouri legislature. The windfall that came with the commission must have made it easier for Benton to return to Kansas City to live, though he summered in Martha’s Vineyard until he died in 1975.

Since his death, Benton’s relevance has waxed and waned, leading the editor of my copy of An Artist in America to derogate Benton an “artistic nationalist,” an “irretrievably out-of-date Jeffersonian,” with “nineteenth century” artistic vision. As an irretrievably out-of-date Jeffersonian myself, this all sounds a bit harsh. Of course Benton is problematic for reasons that are self-evident upon reading his autobiography. A privileged heterosexual white man born south of the Mason-Dixon line shortly after the twilight of reconstruction, his ethical blind spots can be easily surmised.

Benton is also regularly criticized for what is thought to be his “provincial” subject matter, verging on caricature. Despite his upbringing in Missouri, Benton’s connection to the America that he is most associated with was attenuated by the path he chose. He fled the Ozarks as soon as he could and only returned for the sort of selective excursions that permitted him to extract experience to fuel his creative work — like a gouty gourmand deigning to visit an ungentrified urban area only for a tasty treat. By the time of his trek through the woods, he’d become all but a stranger to the country. Instead, perhaps the most salient and lasting truth of Benton’s work is the politics of his curved lines. Benton’s strong yet disfigured bodies — bodies that bend down and rise up — defy any theory praising the solitary individual will. It is a truth of form and structure, if not subject. It is the truth of every stand of woods.

Aaron Hadlow is a lawyer and writer. He lives in the Ozarks with his family.

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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 spring, drowning the playground equipment. Comstock was never on my “must see” list, but Bonnie Jo Campbell convinced me otherwise.

As Bonnie and I trudged through the late spring mud, twisting through tall oaks and cherry trees, we arrived at the site of Bonnie’s childhood home, where her mother, Susanna Campbell, greeted us. Built in the shape of an H (to represent the first letter of Bonnie’s maternal grandfather’s last name, Herlihy), the house appeared like a spacious cabin, set in the deep woods. Once inside, we sat on an enormous worn couch, an occasional leaf poking out behind cushions, the artificial boundary between the outside and inside blurring in the springtime afternoon sun. The high ceilings and huge wooden beams accented the 4-by-10 picture windows, one of which overlooked a creek. Susanna entertained us with stories about her house (the expansive ranch-style cottage was built by her father in 1947), her animals (milk cows, horses, donkeys, pigs, goats, and chickens), and raising her five kids as a single mother. Stacks of magazines, books, and newspapers occupied a large portion of the room, which was warmed by tongue-and-groove wood paneling, a limestone brick chimney, and a wood-burning stove. Susanna seemed to know everyone in Comstock — store owners, local contractors, township officials, the postmaster — her connections stretching as far as the creek beside her house.

While the rural aspects of Comstock felt unfamiliar to me, having grown up in a working-class urban neighborhood in Saint Paul, Susanna’s stories rang true. That walking tour and Bonnie’s deep connections to the place evoked a sense of home in me during a time of pervasive homesickness. I was attending graduate school at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, just a few miles west of Comstock, and, when I arrived in August 1993, I couldn’t have been more disappointed.  Everything felt lackluster and limited — the restaurant choices, the bookstores, the queer community.  I was a 22-year-old snob from the Twin Cities who disguised my homesickness in the veil of cultural arrogance. And so, it was easy for me to dismiss the appeal of a place like Comstock. I suppose I just needed the right tour guide. 

One day in 1995, in the hallway outside my office, Bonnie appeared — a six-foot tower of cheerfulness and good humor. She struck a deep contrast to the rest of our graduate student flock, panicking over workshops and papers and commiserating about difficult students.  Bonnie had just abandoned her sensible plan to complete a Ph.D. in mathematics and — with the encouragement of her mathematics professor — decided to pursue her life-long passion to write.  She had already shed her doubt and misery, crying over mathematical proofs. Now here she was, confidently landing back on the familiar soil of southwest Michigan. Bonnie would spend the next three years in Western’s MFA program, transforming family stories, town legends, and her razor-sharp observations on Comstock into her first major publication: Women and Other Animals (1999), a collection praised by Publishers Weekly, for its portrayal of “misfits in middle America’s economic and social fringe with subtle irony, rich imagery and loving familiarity, describing domestic worlds where Martha Stewart would fear to tread.”

Getting a glimpse into Comstock — its modest, sometimes dilapidated homes, occasional dirt roads, ponds, woodlands, and railroad tracks — and meeting the formidable Susanna, any observer could see that the spark and material for Bonnie’s writing lay right in front of her, ready for her to harness.  A passage from her 2011 novel Once Upon a River demonstrates how carefully she depicts the impact of local industry upon the rural beauty of southwest Michigan: “They all fished the snags at the edge of the river for bluegills, sunfish and rock bass, though they avoided the area just downstream of the Murray Metal Fabricating plant, where a drainpipe released a mixture of wastewater, machine oil, and solvents into the river — some of the fish there had strange tumors, bubbled flesh around their lips, a fraying at their gills. On certain windy days, the clay-colored smoke from the shop wafted along the river, reached them on their screen porches, and even when they closed their windows, the smoke entered their houses through the floorboards and the gaps around their doors.”

Decades since her first publication, Bonnie has remained steadfast in her devotion to write accurately and lovingly about places like Comstock and the people who occupy these rural spaces. Her novels and short story collections, including the National Book Award finalist American Salvage (2009), are inspired by Comstock’s landscape and industry. And nearly every character she has crafted, including those from her forthcoming novel The Waters (W.W.Norton, October 2023), emerges from a rural Michigan terrain.

On a recent trip to Comstock, I would have astonished my 22-year-old self: nostalgia washed over me. I arrived in late spring, into the lush green Michigan landscape, lodging at the Campbell homestead, guarded by donkeys Jack and Don Quixote. The presence of Susanna Campbell, who died of cancer in September 2020, still presides. H House, as Bonnie now calls it, has undergone some major cleaning and restoration. She hopes to transform the house, and its eight-acre lot, into a retreat for writers, musicians, and artists. A few yards from the house, just under a patch of pawpaw trees, Bonnie has set two memorial stones, one for Susanna and one for Susanna’s sister Joanna, who died in 2019. “She loved & was loved & she read a lot of books” is inscribed on Susanna’s stone — so fitting for a mother who inspired a writer who sings the songs of Comstock and its people.

Lisa DuRose is the co-editor of Michigan Salvage: The Fiction of Bonnie Jo Campbell (MSU Press, 2023) and a faculty member at Inver Hills Community College where she teaches in the English department. Despite earnest efforts to become a New Yorker in her twenties, she resides in Saint Paul, just two miles from where she was born. She now visits Comstock annually and is writing a biography of Campbell.

Photo by Christopher Magson, a Boston native who moved to Michigan for the parking and wildlife and stayed for his wife, Bonnie.

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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 before the race, Thompson was over 1300 miles from Churchill Downs in Aspen, Colorado, busy having, as he later recalled, “one of those long European dinners with lots of wine” with novelist Jim Salter. During the meal Salter prompted Thompson, asking the Kentucky native if he planned on attending the upcoming derby. Intrigued, Thompson immediately phoned his editor Warren Hinckle in San Francisco at 3:30 in the morning, shouting “I have a great idea, we must do the derby. It’s the greatest spectacle the country can produce.”

Straightaway, Hinckle endorsed the pitch and within an hour booked Thompson a ticket, wired expense money and began the hunt for an artist to illustrate the event; Hunter loathed working with photographers, so Hinckle arranged for British illustrator Ralph Steadman, already scheduled to fly to the states, to meet Thompson in Louisville.

What ensued was a frenzied 7200-word, now infamous, first-person account entitled “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved.” It was the genesis of gonzo journalism — a unique cocktail of “close to the bone” reporting with subjective, participatory and satirical narration. 

The essay, alongside Steadman’s apocalyptic sketches, mostly snubs the horse race, instead fixating on the local inhabitants and cultural milieu surrounding the derby’s pageantry and debauchery:

We hadn’t seen that special kind of face that I felt we would need for a lead drawing. It was a face I’d seen a thousand times at every Derby I’d ever been to. I saw it, in my head, as the mask of the whiskey gentry — a pretentious mix of booze, failed dreams and a terminal identity crisis; the inevitable result of too much inbreeding in a closed and ignorant culture . . . So the face I was trying to find in Churchill Downs that weekend was a symbol, in my own mind, of the whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is.

Thompson’s narrative is also set against a volatile national backdrop. He makes numerous references to Nixon’s America. The falling stock market. Bombings in Cambodia. Interminable war in Vietnam. Antiwar protests that led to four students being killed by National Guard troops on the campus of Kent State, which occurred the Monday after the derby. And a racially fraught atmosphere in Louisville and across the country. There are multiple allusions to the Black Panthers, “white crazies,” race riots and a racial caste system.

I first read the piece in the summer of 2015, the same summer I first read Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man. Both struck like lightning. At the time, I was living in the Bronx, blocks above the Harlem River and the northern tip of Manhattan; I was a non-traditional undergraduate student at Columbia University, studying African American studies and political science, hungry to write about America’s racially divided working class.

I’d never read anything quite like Thompson’s story. In many ways it had everything I’d been hunting for in a writer and mentor, especially for a white man born below the Mason-Dixon Line in the Jim Crow era.

Beyond the lean electric prose, comic hyperbole and current of impending doom, Thompson’s narrative provides an unvarnished insider’s view of the social dynamics in Louisville and Churchill Downs.

As both a globetrotting journalist and a native son who’d attended numerous derbies in the past, Thompson proves to be an expert tour guide. He not only captures the nuances of the town and track, he combats any romantic inclination to side with the local tribe and instead actively critiques the customs, class structure and racial strata associated with his hometown’s bankrupt bacchanal — from the Kentucky Colonels “in white linen suits vomiting in the urinals,” to the governor, “a swinish neo-Nazi hack named Louis Nunn,” seated in the “inner sanctum” alongside Barry Goldwater.

Better yet, he ultimately eschews self-righteousness for self-deprecation, turning the finger-pointing on himself in a moment of catharsis the morning after the derby as he discovers the hideous image in the mirror.

There he was, by God — a puffy, drink ravaged, disease-ridden caricature . . . like an awful cartoon version of an old snapshot in some once-proud mother’s family photo album. It was the face we’d been looking for — and it was of course, my own. Horrible. Horrible.

Thompson’s take-down and insider-outsider perspective resonated with me on multiple levels. Though I was raised in Richmond, Virginia, once the capital of the Confederacy, I was born in Kentucky like Thompson. I grew up with a remote connection to the derby, an intimate disdain for American aristocracy and a contradictory subconscious need to fit in, which often manifested itself in grotesque bouts of drunken mayhem with my bourgeois peers.  

The piece struck me so much, that fall I sought assistance to produce something similar for my senior thesis. I emailed a former literature professor, Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, the director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies, a long letter outlining my circuitous path into her formative seminar “The Novels of Toni Morrison,” to solicit her to be my thesis advisor. 

She wrote back, “Yes, I will advise your thesis . . . You are a writer. Therefore, you MUST write.” As a neophyte-wannabe, her words felt like gasoline poured over a dying flame, validating a fragile dream I’d stoked to a point of exhaustion, a dream I feared bordered on delusion. Unfortunately, I never quite captured what I wanted to say for my thesis, and in many ways, I’m still working on that essay today. Nevertheless, after graduating, I would by happenstance move from NYC to Louisville and attend my first derby in 2018 with my dear friend and flat mate Lisa Turner.

Like Thompson’s, our plans were made in haste. It was a rainy, lazy Saturday. But with less than five hours to post in an impromptu fit of spontaneity, we decided to foist ourselves up off the couch in Lisa’s Old Louisville condo less than two miles from the track and attend the 144th Run for the Roses — the wettest derby on record, won by eventual Triple Crown winner Justify.

In three hours’ time, we managed to purchase general admission tickets, hustle downtown to GQ Unlimited to procure proper attire, drive through Ali Baba Liquor Store and Smoke Shop for cigarettes and Old Forester (one bottle would be duct-taped to my calf, the other slugged beforehand), rendezvous with my amphetamine dealer (a mercurial young socialite-hipster I’d met on Tinder who’d first shown me around Louisville), get gussied up, drive to the fairgrounds, shuttle over to the track, enter Churchill’s gates and commandeer two mint juleps to sip and stare at the sea of wildlife getting soaked in the rain with an hour to spare before the paddock judge commanded “riders up.”

The key feat though was improving our station. We had nowhere to go but the infield, “that boiling sea of people across the track from the clubhouse,” as Thompson put it. But Lisa was determined to upgrade. While I was on watch for the slightest sneer by fascist scum directed at her dark skin that stood out like a pink flamingo, she was unfazed and preoccupied, busy eyeing one of the gatekeepers lackadaisically checking tickets to the lower-level bleachers along the homestretch.

The gatekeeper looked checked out like he’d been there all week, as a slew of soused, ivory-faced beasts in ponchos were stampeding in and out of his narrow gate, shouting and slipping over each other on the soaked floors to get to the clogged bathrooms or parimutuel counters to put down bets.

We stood back to study the diabolical flow, while the attendant, anesthetized by the chaos, intermittently checked his phone. I was nervous about our prospects of getting through without being stopped. My veins pulsed with adrenaline and speed. Certain we were doomed, I studied Lisa’s face. Moxie oozed from her eyes. Reassured, I followed her lead as she walked up to the man and glided past him with an arctic poise. We crab-walked down the aisle to open seats, just four rows back from the sloppy track, grinning like hyenas as the rain poured.

Minutes later the crowd, over 150,000 strong, undeterred by the elements, were welcomed to stand and sing “My Old Kentucky Home,” our Commonwealth’s curious state song — a tragic minstrel tune turned derby tradition, bloated with misplaced nostalgia and sentimentality, a song I’d heard sung thoughtlessly since I was a child and grown to despise like the monuments that lined my hometown . . .

Written by Stephen Foster in 1853, eight years before the Civil War, it was inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and often performed in the play based on her novel. Written from the perspective of a slave, the lyrics lament being sold down river away from a bucolic Kentucky plantation to a hostile land “where the sugar canes grow.”

Kentucky banned Uncle Tom’s Cabin from being performed in 1906. In 1928, however, the legislature enshrined “My Old Kentucky Home” as the state anthem. In a period rife with Lost Cause fervor and “Old South” reminiscences, the anti-slavery sentiment of Foster’s tune was effaced, and it became instead a paean to the Antebellum South. Over time, it has been further sanitized; in 1986, the Kentucky General Assembly removed a racial slur from the lyrics, providing a path for the syrupy sweet chorus to be reinterpreted once again.

Standing in the rain next to my friend, dressed in a bow tie and suspenders with a bellyful of bourbon, aping the mask of the whiskey gentry, I could not help but sense in my bowels the decadence and depravity of the moment.

Half enthralled by the pomp and circumstance too, I also could not help but feel a hint of shame as a willing participant in this “atavistic” ritual, as the bridled thoroughbreds made their way from the paddock to the starting gate, the crowd wistfully crooning a slave song.

Charlie Cy is a freelance writer and day trader based in Louisville, Kentucky. Over a decade ago, he took a life changing three-month road trip from his home in San Francisco through the Deep South. This polarizing experience would uproot his budding career as a sommelier and lead him to stow his effects in storage, move into his Mini Cooper and live out on the streets of Los Angeles to contemplate next steps. After months of military showering in a McDonald’s bathroom, reading in the North Hollywood Library and sleeping awkwardly underneath the perfumed purple blossoms of jacaranda trees lining the streets at the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, he began to forge a new path — and becoming a writer, a dream he’d long deferred, became central to it.  

Photograph by Eric Kalet, a professional sports photographer who has shot the major horse races in the United States, including the Kentucky Derby and Breeders’ Cup. His photos have been featured at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame in Saratoga, New York. When Eric is not at the racetrack, he works at Jefferson University Health, a chief health, hospital, and university system in Greater Philadelphia, as a Human Resources Business Partner. Eric has received several special recognitions for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts during his human resources career.

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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 mistaking the aspens, which spread along the southern edge of the property where Lisel and Paul Mueller had lived nearly 20 years, their visitors romanticize the couple “as characters / in a Russian novel, Kitty and Levin / living contentedly in the country.” My parents surely matched Tolstoy’s Kitty and Levin in the strength and longevity of their marriage.

But not all happy families feel happy. Nor, by the end of the 70s, did we live in “country” anymore, even though the guests still think so, gazing out with pleasure on the scene.

Our friends from the city watch the birds

and rabbits feeding together

on top of the deep, white snow.

(We have Russian winters in Illinois,

but no sleigh bells, possums instead of wolves . . .

The city friends came from Chicago and its neighbor-city, Evanston. My parents had moved from Evanston in the late 1950s, buying one acre in Lake County, to Chicago’s north. There they built one of the first houses in “Forest Haven,” a tiny subdivision near the interstate. The house stood at the dead end of one of the subdivision’s five streets, in a northwest corner lot separated by barbed wire from a farm that bordered all of Forest Haven’s north end, as well as our portion of its west. In my childhood, in the 1960s, I gazed west through the wire at the edge of the backyard, looking past the small cattle herd that grazed in the sunset, toward the dark line of woods where the pasture ended and my sight ran out. Past that lay the railroad, another small new subdivision, and the Des Plaines River. Contrails burned their courses over me, arrowing back and forth from O’Hare — newly opened to passenger traffic, half an hour down the interstate.

In those early days, it was almost country around the house where Lisel Mueller’s poems were born. She came to this writing late in life — already 41 when her first book was published in 1965. By 1997, when her selected poems won the Pulitzer, she had nearly stopped writing. Glaucoma diminished her ability to read, and she could no longer drive. One day she found my father at the kitchen table, trying and failing to write his own name. He was losing his language to Lewy-Body Disease. She sold the house and moved them to a complex in Chicago, five minutes’ walk from both groceries and my father’s nursing unit. She never wrote another book of poetry.

In “Another Version,” we seem to be at the comfortable end of the 70s American lyric, with its quiet voice, personal sorrows, nature ready-to-hand for muted unities. While the city-slickers admire the peaceable kingdom outside a contented country home, an old man is dying inside. “He is my father,” Mueller writes,

he lets go of life in such slow motion,

year after year, that the grief

is stuck inside me, a poisoned apple

that won’t go up or down.

But “like the three sisters” in Chekhov’s play, “we rarely speak / of what keeps us awake at night.”

like them, we complain about things

that don’t really matter and talk

of our pleasures and of the future:

we tell each other the willows

are early this year, hazy with green.

“Another Version” begins with the visitors’ error and ends with their hosts’ secrecy. The misunderstandings pile up like northern Illinois snow. Russian allusions mask a German story. The old man was Fritz Neumann, who first arrived in Illinois as a political refugee. As a child in Nazi Germany, Lisel was forced to keep quiet about her father, whose known leftism had marked him as an enemy, someone against whom her schoolmates and neighbors should inform. Neumann, too, kept quiet when at home, but often he was far away. For much of the 1930s he took ill-paying temporary teaching work in France and Italy, while his wife raised two daughters alone in Hamburg. In 1937, luck landed him a scholarship to study at a teacher’s college near Evanston. His wife and children joined him in the US in 1939, ending the years in which Lisel clamped her lips tight to suppress her fears — the child’s terror that her parents might disappear, made very real by her father’s two arrests. Now Lisel became a Midwesterner. She lived all her adult life in Indiana and Illinois. She wrote often of her own luck. But she never lost her night fears, and when an interviewer asked if she considered the Midwest home, she dodged the question, answering, “Let me say what countless other displaced persons must have said: I am more at home here than anywhere.”

Her father remained on the move: from teaching job to teaching job in America, then returning to his native Hamburg after the death of his wife in the 1950s. Remarried unhappily, he kept traveling, steamshipping across the Atlantic for long US visits. One night in the 1970s, he touched down at O’Hare and never left. A stroke had stricken him with aphasia. He retained, however, a teacher’s memory for history: treaties, battles, empires, republics.

But how many people understood that there were non-Jewish German political refugees? In my experience, the old man who came to die with us represented little-known history that always puzzles Americans, even now. My mother sometimes invoked a more famous poet, Brecht, as a short-hand. In poems about her parents, she borrowed Brecht’s description of European exiles “changing countries more often than shoes,” and she quoted Brecht’s sorrow at talk of small pleasures in terrible times, his despair that a casual “talk about trees is almost a crime / since it means being silent about so much evil.”

Undoubtedly, Lisel Mueller talked about trees: aspens and willows, the great maple that still stands at an edge of the front yard — if I can trust the internet. But I can’t, of course, since the house is currently listed on Zillow as “uninhabitable.” On my laptop, I can see that the windows are boarded in the upstairs room that became my mother’s study, from which we saw the long views north and west. In that study, she wrote the books for which she won awards, poems that were popularized on the radio by the era’s voice of the Midwest, Garrison Keillor. The Poetry Foundation praises her work “for its attentiveness to quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.” Happy families in suburban nature, quietly sad, the great luck of a long, loving marriage. But she also wrote, almost always, of displaced persons, and in a journal she commented, “My preoccupation with history marks me as outside the mainstream of American poetry. No matter how long I’ve lived and written here, that has not changed and will not change.”

In “Another Version,” when the daughter can’t speak of her father, whose life was determined by history, she talks about trees instead. Her poem makes the pain of such evasion its point.

Suburbia is full of oscillations, migrations. My father, who worked in the city, drove back and forth for years on ever more crowded roads. As the subdivisions multiplied along them, our yard filled up with deer, displaced from the cleared woods. My mother likened them to “refugees,” “risking death on the road / to reach us, their dispossessors.” My sister and I moved to Chicago — which made us the city visitors gazing out on the aspens, itching to return to urban streets. There, we were sure, our authentic lives waited.

But some things never change. In 2020, reviewing an anthology of poems responding to the pandemic, the New York Times took furious aim against its “tepid” contents’ resort to natural imagery. There were too many poems “about flowers. Or birds. Or trees.” The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, had been “wise to rage against tree poems,” the critic complained. And perhaps the book really was tepid. But what an astonishing charge! As if we could still see no urgency in trees. As if we still believed that trees crowded out our witness of history, not the other way around. As if we hadn’t all learned to pronounce a new urbane word, Anthropocene, to slip inside our poems. As if grief, the poisoned apple in my throat, were only for childhood and not for aspens, “country,” snow.

Jenny Mueller lives in St. Louis. She is the author of two books of poetry, State Park and Bonneville, both published by Denver’s Elixir Press. She is also the editor of Moonie, a posthumous e-book of poetry by Brian Young, published by Fence Digital. She is the younger daughter and literary executor of Lisel Mueller. Unlike her mother, Jenny has been able to do years of coursework in creative writing, a privilege she tries to pass on to her students at McKendree University in Lebanon, Illinois.

Photo by Marianne Connell.

To read “Another Version” in its entirety, please visit the website of the Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, where Lisel Mueller is a featured poet.

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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 childhood home as he was on his way to becoming one of the most influential and celebrated American playwrights of the twentieth century.

Williams’ relationship to the Midwest is the antithesis of The New Territory’s ethos, “Here is Good.” For Tom, as he was known as a young man, here was very bad. But the repression St. Louis represented was a creative pressure cooker, according to Henry Schvey in Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams. Wild birds would become a ubiquitous symbol throughout Williams’ work: “I feel uncomfortable in the house with Dad when I know he thinks I’m a hopeless loafer,” Tom journaled. “Soon as I gather my forces (and I shall!) I must make a definite break… I have pinned pictures of wild birds on my lavatory screen — significant — I’m anxious to escape — But where & how? — . . . What a terrible trap to be caught in!”

Williams nicknamed his river city home “Saint Pollution” and indeed, the city had a few characteristics of a sulfuric runoff swamp. In the 1920s, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America, following New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and it was one of the most polluted urban spaces on the planet, culminating in “the day the sun didn’t shine,” in November 1939.

On “Black Tuesday,” as it came to be known, a weather pattern trapped coal emissions close to the ground, blanketing the entire city in a thick smog that smelled of ash. The streetlamps were lit all day, and in his poem “Demon Smoke,” written in 1925, Williams captured the noisy, smelly, industrialized hellscape:

crash and clap of Olive Street

Where nature and man’s work compete

For mastery in the dingy sky;

Where clouds of smoke

And jets of steam

Defy pure air and sunlight’s gleam.

Saint Pollution was no place for wild birds, though as Schvey points out, Tom’s true antagonist lay “not in the physical city, but within his own family.” His father, Cornelius C. Williams, was either absent, drunk, abusive or some combination of all three. Tom’s mother, Edwina Williams, was a repressed socialite never contented with her station in St. Louis society. Tom’s older sister, Rose, was schizophrenic — diagnosed with “dementia praecox” and confined to a mental institution in Farmington Missouri. “She is like a person half-asleep now,” Tom wrote of his sister. “Quiet, gentle and thank God — not in any way revolting like so many of the others.”

All three members of the Williams family were inspiration for various characters throughout Williams’ writing career. “So much of this writer’s work was forged in a crucible of anger and self-conscious rebellion against both family and home,” Schvey writes.

The smokestacks poisoning downtown with demonic coal ash caused all kinds of people to flee west, touching off St. Louis’ westward suburbia as early as the 1880s. The rich built mansion neighborhoods in the clean air, at the periphery of the city, like the Central West End where the Williams family lived for a time, which is now the site of the Tennessee Williams Festival.

In 2021, confronted with COVID-19 restrictions, the festival staged a production of The Glass Menagerie outside of Williams’ childhood home on Westminster Avenue. The production made use of the fire escapes that Williams once walked on, which inspired scenes in the play, as part of the outdoor theater set.

When the Williams family moved out of Westminster Place to their residence on South Taylor, Tom noted the “radical step down in the social scale, a thing we’d never had to consider in Mississippi; and all our former friends dropped us completely — St. Louis being a place where location of residence was of prime importance.” A sensitive, shy Tom Williams seemed to adopt many of his mother’s opinions of the city. “Social status in St. Louis depended on how much money you possessed,” Edwina Williams complained in her memoir Remember Me to Tom. His mother’s inveterate disdain for the city was based largely on her failure to find a social position equivalent to what she possessed as the rector’s beautiful daughter in her previous homes, Columbus and Clarksdale.

Meanwhile, Tom’s father Cornelius was often drunk and fighting with Edwina — complaining loudly about his wife’s disdain for sexual intercourse, warring over the bottle hidden behind the bathtub. Williams describes a Cornelius-like figure in his short story, “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning,” noting that his father often entered the house with “the intention of tearing it down from the inside.”

With this kind of family life, surely a bookish young man could find sanctuary in school, right? As the historian David Loth points out, St. Louis was a booming metropolis known for the “best city school system in the Midwest, and by several years of national ratings, it was considered one of the best school systems in America.” In University City High, Tom learned Latin and received a classical education in art, reading, and writing, but he was teased for his southern accent and “effeminate” manner.

College was not much better. Williams was so ashamed of failing to graduate from Washington University that he omitted mention of his enrollment from his memoir. “I was a very slight youth,” Williams describes himself. A young man beginning to come into his queer sexuality, he writes, “somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden.”

“Williams was addicted to escaping St. Louis from first to last,” Schvey writes in Blue Song. “It was the great triumph of his life that, unlike his sister, he did manage to literally leave it behind.” After a lifetime of flight, it seems ironic that Williams would be returned to Missouri and buried in Calvary Cemetery alongside his family, but as Schvey notes, “Williams remained tethered to the city for the rest of his life… It was his tragedy that for all his desperate attempts, Tom Williams never really left home. The imagination and willpower that allowed him to devote his life to writing also kept forcing him to return home again in his imagination.”

The restrictive turmoil of the city is a symbolic throughline in William’s work — a wound he returned to over and over.

The Tennessee Williams Festival now carries on his legacy in the Central West End, projecting the author’s words from the cast iron balconies of his former home. A sculpture of the writer decorates the corner of McPherson and Euclid Avenue, across the street from the historic Left Bank Books, capturing a moment in bronze of Williams emphasizing something profound with a cigarette. But St. Louis still owes a debt to Tom Williams — an obligation to prevent yesterday’s traumas and protect the city’s LGBTQ+ community, its wild birds, and its artists.

Devin’s writing is published in Slate, The Nation, The Emerson Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. @devintoshea on twitter, @devintoshea on instagram.

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