My stepfather, Amos, pulled out a stool, and I followed him to the porch with a doormat. There we sat and waited for a long wind funnel to take us to one kind of Oz, where a version of Ma was sitting on a golden stool, a brass crown on her small head and loyal subjects at her feet. After all, if Amos the physicist thought Kepler-186f could be heaven, out of reach in our current form but possible in another, then I could escape to an Oz of my imagination, maybe call it something else, something new and mine. Mine alone. We waited and waited, and when the storm didn’t come, when it scattered into air on the houseless plains, we decided to leave the porch and find ourselves a goat.

If anyone asked, we were surviving on long walks, goat meat, and canned tomatoes. The walks kept our blood flowing out of the other’s radius for as long as possible. I kept long nights roaming the woods, Amos kept long nights on the road, and we didn’t ask each other questions. We only spoke to discuss necessities: What are you making for dinner? Where did you put my favorite socks? Why didn’t you go to school today? The goat reminded Amos of home, his mother’s pepper soup. While he scalded his dying taste buds with habanero-spiced meat, I blended Ma’s tomatoes and stewed them with shrimp for my mild tongue. We were surviving on memory, the good kind, and all our good memory was tied to food. Food that was not easy to get in the middle of Kansas.

After the storm died on the fields, I worried we would not find a goat. It was darkening, for one, the sky a map of bruises.

The Miller farm was our first stop, just off a gravel road across from Dairyland. They had a llama and an alpaca, three hens, a rooster, five guinea fowl and five goats.

“They’re not for sale,” said Mr. Miller the first time we asked, months ago. “I’m sorry for your loss. But they’re family.”

When she was home, Mrs. Miller offered everything for sale, anything we wanted: chicken, guinea fowl, goat. They were not her family, she said. She needed the cash, she said. For her real family. (Not that we asked.) She would deal with her husband later. As far as I knew, Amos and I were the only customers for goat meat. Others might want pets, but I had yet to see anyone walking their goat on a leash.

But today was a lucky day for the Miller goats. Mrs. Miller was not home. The housekeeper, a college student with purple hair, met us at the door. She had firm instructions from Mr. Miller: no sales, no visitors. I heard voices behind her, a flashing television and laughter over two familiar TV voices. I almost asked if I could join them.

Amos stood frozen at the gate. I peeled myself away from the door. When I reached him, I pulled him by the elbow to the aging Camry.

“They’re going out of business,” I said. He grunted at my attempt at an excuse, gripped the leather of the steering wheel and dug his nails in. I winced. For a moment, I felt a pinch at the back of my head. The one I felt when Sam Chester scorched his thumb on the Bunsen burner during chemistry, the one I felt just before the basketball slammed my distracted face during practice. The one I didn’t acknowledge the morning my mother was gasping in the next room.

I took a breath, ushered my thoughts away from Ma and remembered Sam’s family had a farm, too, very close by.

“Keep right,” I told Amos, when he started to turn us back to the highway, to the Dillon’s
Market for tilapia fillets. “One more try.”

I didn’t want to go to the Chester farm. Not since Ma’s funeral. Sam Chester spent half his days there. Sam Chester was vulnerable there. Open, as close to happy as a halved spirit could get. I had been open once, too, at the farm. Now I couldn’t remember how. Sam was becoming a memory, too, and I wanted him to stay that way. An old escape, a kiss in the fields while my mother died in the cold house. But living memories were harder to shake.

At school, I kept my eyes down, away from his inquiring gaze. He tried to share lab stations and benches between games, all the while mimicking my silence. I requested a new lab partner, quit basketball and then debate when he joined. I didn’t speak, not even when his dimples grew shallow, not when they vanished into hard cheeks. His eyes paled, but eventually he took the hint. I was alone with myself, what I wanted, what I deserved.

Then the teachers started sneaking cards and notes into my locker, invitations to games and tournaments. It’s been a year, I heard them say in the space between one letter and the next. About time you returned to life. But I would not return. School had become a market of faces stuck between the desire to help and the desire to leave me to my grey clouds lest they migrated over. I was surviving. I didn’t have energy to figure out who was real and who was pretend.

Amos parked between Tracy Chester’s muscled truck and Sam’s green Audi. He eyed the luxury car, asked me if I knew the owner. I didn’t answer. Tracy Chester opened her door, wearing pink flip flops, jean shorts and a sleek shawl, her skin blotching at the cold. She wasn’t Mrs. Chester anymore, but everyone still called her that, so I did, too, in my head. She greeted us on the porch, door held open, Sam behind her. Her face bloomed, an invitation from a kind neighbor. Sam’s darkened: What are you doing back here?

“I’m Tracy,” she said, ignoring her son’s shadow. “It’s cold out. You all should come inside. I’ll make tea.”

“No need,” said Amos. “We’re here for a goat.”

“Fine,” she said. “Give me a smile, and I’ll sell you a goat. I can’t have you walking on my property all grumpy.”

“Ma,” Sam groaned.

Amos turned to leave.

“Wait!” said Tracy. “Gee, I was only pulling your leg.”

She stepped down from the porch and started a brisk pace to the barn, gesturing for us to follow. I knew this path well. The goats were fenced beside the barn. They were napping and defecating and munching on hay.

“Which one would you like?” Tracy asked, one hand on her waist, the other on the fence. The farm dog circled us, sniffing for bones.

“The friendly looking one,” said Amos, pointing. “With the two white feet.”

It was my turn to freeze.

“No,” I said.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” His voice was a blade kissing stone. Amos and I weren’t blood, but we had at least one thing in common. No one got in the way of our meal, just as no one got in the way of our grief.

“A goat is a goat,” I said. “You don’t have to be picky.” A goat was not just a goat. Not if you and your mother named him Wilson, fed him apples and promised to one day adopt him. But two truths could clash at a crossroad and remain true. A goat was still more than a goat if you hadn’t eaten all day, if you craved the meal your mother fed you when you returned home after lonely days abroad, the meal you tried to emulate to remember her. I knew this. I also knew hunger eroded his patience, so I stood firm. My hands clenched in my pockets. I stared at the poppies in Mrs. Tracy’s shirt. I tried not to look at Sam standing behind us, his face a canvas of confusion. I tried not to look at Amos, his face a growing storm.

“You can give orders when you’re paying,” he said.

I could pay for it, but if Amos knew I had money, he would ask where I got it, and it would be gone before a year passed, spent on expensive liquor, maybe even a down payment on a new car. My punishment for keeping Ma’s secrets. I looked at Tracy. Her face, glossy only a moment before, was blooming red, green eyes flitting from Amos to me. I tried not to panic.

“Tell you what,” she said. “Let the girl work here once a month, and I’ll give you a goat a year. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds good,” I said. I kept my voice flat. I couldn’t sound too eager.

Sam, finally catching our ruse, shook his head and went back inside. If Amos wasn’t on the road as often as he was, he would know what Sam and his mother knew. That Ma and I worked on Tracy’s farm when he was gone, that we spent summers here, while Amos crossed other states in the name of research, searching for new homes away from this one. Because ours was not a home anymore. We didn’t ask questions. We let him have his dreams, we let him have his time with his proxy wives and proxy children, painting pictures of perfection, at least until the day the picture slipped, and he saw a flash of fear in their eyes. Then he would return his gloom to us. Meanwhile, Ma and I found new dreams. Without Amos’ cloud above her, Ma borrowed Tracy’s seeds and built a garden of her own.

The garden made a beautiful picture. One he couldn’t know. Because we saved, to run, to build a new home. Ma hadn’t asked to come to the U.S. Amos had painted a picture of family, an irresistible portrait for the hungry, and so she had arrived with me in tow, not knowing how things worked. School allowed me an escape. All she had was an old house that yawned cold and empty save for spiders and long shadows. She went on walks to get away, but walking wasn’t enough, was it?

Amos frowned at Tracy’s offer. He sniffed, nose pinched, smelling suspicion. I waited for his tension to evaporate, breathed when his shoulders fell. Good thing he no longer asked about my life. Good thing his grief kept his eyes inward, clouded. Safe to assume Tracy was offering her condolences and only that.

“Two goats,” he said.

“What?” Tracy wasn’t used to bargaining. I hoped she would catch on quickly.

“Two goats a year.”

“Deal,” she said.

Still frowning, Amos nodded. “Give me another billy then. So long as he’s not too young or too old. I don’t have time to cook an old goat.”

The billy Tracy offered was old. But one problem at a time.

“Sam!” Tracy called. “Come here and help.”

Amos grunted. “We’re good.”

The last time one of the Millers had helped, killing the animal before we could argue, the goat died slow, too slow, so slow I recalled every breath and locked myself in the closet whenever Amos packed to kill another.

Since then, Amos didn’t like anyone peering over his shoulder. His kills were clean, he didn’t like to be questioned. I was only here because extra hands meant less time in the cold, because I lived with him and saw everything, almost everything. I still didn’t know how exactly my mother had died.

A spider, Amos had said. A spider on her pillow.

A brown recluse, said the doctor, too late.

I didn’t understand how the woman could survive a famine and a drowning, cobras and pythons and who knows what else only to die from a spider bite. I didn’t want to believe it. I disappeared into myself when I recalled my unbelief.

“Careful with that knife,” Amos growled. “Don’t want your blood in my meat.”

I handed him the knife. I bent down to hold the shuddering animal, locking one hoof over another, pressing down. Amos whispered a prayer, gauged the heart.

“Get the flamethrower,” he said when he was done.

He singed the hair off. I warmed my hands at the flames. I felt Sam’s knife-gaze at the back of my head. I didn’t turn around.

Amos scraped the goat and chopped off the limbs. He did almost everything himself, wrapped the head separately, re-sharpened the knife. I let him. I knew better than to put myself in the path of his rage. I cleaned out barrels and prepared the cooler, quiet, efficient. Until he dug a hole to throw away the entrails.

Ma would have cleaned it.

“What?” He stilled.

I hadn’t intended to speak. Unless I did. I had been misplacing my intentions of late.

“She didn’t like to be wasteful,” I said, barely a whisper. But he heard.

With those words, I saved the stomach and the liver. I couldn’t save any intestines—they were already in the ground, the chickens pecking around the farm dog, the dog licking at the blood. I wrapped what I could save in three bags, stuck them in the cooler above Amos’ meat. We packed. We washed our hands and feet at the outdoor tap. Tracy waved us out of the driveway; I waved back. Sam did not come to say goodbye.

Back in the cold house, Amos left me in the kitchen. My punishment.

I took my time. His punishment.

I cleaned both meat and entrails with lime, changed the water three times. I put them on the stove, lidded the pan, leaving room for steam. Then I left it all to boil. I walked out the back door and sat on a stump, overlooking Ma’s garden, what was left of it. If I closed my eyes and focused hard enough, I could see her on her stool, hunched over a potato mound, hacking at a difficult root with her hoe. I could see a younger version of myself pestering her about dinner. I could smile now, recalling that stubborn girl standing behind her mother with hands akimbo, bracing for the irritated, “You know very well how to make your dinner.”

I could stay here in this moment at least until Amos yelled at me to return to the kitchen. But if he forgot, if he, too, was trapped in a cocoon of tears, I would stay until my toes threatened to freeze, a reminder that most of my warmth had been lost to a summer long gone, a summer never returning. Even if the sky and the storms remained in denial, the earth stayed honest. The hibiscus petals had shrunk. Twigs that sagged like scarecrows were all that remained of Ma’s garden. Only the spiders persisted. An exterminator came every other month now to spray Raid in every corner of the house. He highly recommended renovating the basement. The landlord sent emails periodically, checking in, offering to move us to a new house, no need to worry about the rent, you’ve got so much on your plate, I’m so sorry for your loss.

We said no. We kept saying no. We couldn’t move. There was no memory in a new house.
This was home now, our punishment.

The post Sorry For Your Loss appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

1.

count; computation; calculation

I used the word reckoning on the phone with Marlene in Brooklyn before I heard it bandied about on the news. She and I have been counting and recounting racial incidents since 1990 when she invited me to be godmother to her son Travis. We’ve talked about what Travis goes through as a young Black man in American: being racially profiled when he drives, harassment on the street and at school. We talk about the microaggressions Marlene experiences at work, her daughters’ distresses, the terrifying night her husband was beaten bloody by white Brooklyn policemen: her husband handcuffed on the ground in a dark parking lot in Flatbush, the thumps and thuds and grunts as the cops beat him with batons and flashlights, and Marlene, restrained by a female officer on the far side of their car, helplessly screaming, Don’t kill him! What are you doing? Are you just going to kill him for no reason?

Every assault, emotional and physical, metaphorical and literal, public and personal, recounted one by one by one over thirty years.

In the beginning, when Marlene first invited me into her family, I believed America was past this sort of racialized violence. My white ignorance allowed me to think that. Three decades later, I recognize the lie at the heart of that ignorance.

I live in Oklahoma now, so we have to reach across miles to do it, but our count continues, seemingly endless, like counting stars. But I’d never heard the kind of despair I heard in her voice that day. It was the morning after the killing of George Floyd and the viral video of the white woman in Central Park calling the cops on the Black man who’d asked her to leash her dog.

“It’s getting worse,” Marlene said. “You can’t know what it’s like, Rilla. What we go through every day.”

“I know,” I said. “I mean, I know I don’t know.” And I don’t, not in the same soul-killing way. I’ve stood witness to the assaults Marlene and her family go through, never suffering the same kinds of assaults myself, because my skin color is not a marker for suspicion and violence and death.

“I cry every time I watch it,” she said. “I know there will be more deaths like this. It’s getting worse! I don’t know what to do!” Watching the slow, torturous murder of George Floyd caused her to relive watching white cops beat her handcuffed husband; her grief and anguish were beyond bearing, choked and plaintive and sorrowful, to the very heights and depths of the world. And yet she couldn’t not watch.

I knew the details of the video, had seen the still photographs, the white cop’s nonchalant gaze as he crushed the life from the Black man on the ground, but I could not bring myself to watch. Nine minutes and 29 seconds eking out in real time the nightmare of our nation’s history. I think about that now. I couldn’t watch, and Marlene couldn’t not watch, and this delineates as clearly as anything just how our lives are corralled on either side of the racial divide.

This, then, is part of my computation, one small item of my privilege: I can choose to avert my eyes if I want. I can tell myself it would be voyeuristic to watch that slow, tortured death, I’d be like those white faces turning toward the camera in old postcards of lynchings. I tell myself it’s more respectful not to watch. But Marlene has lived this same white-on-Black violence, she has cried out to white cops to stop murdering her husband, she’s watched her son arraigned in criminal court for the crime of being a young Black man who looks, to white eyes, like any other young Black man. In uncountable ways, overt and covert, Marlene and her family live it every day. They don’t have the choice to turn away.

What I did not turn away from that day was the video of the white woman in Central Park calling 911. I watched it over and over. “There’s an African American man threatening me!” The woman’s fake strident fear, her rising hysteria, the very use of the term African American — such a privileged, middleclass Caucasian thing to do. She knew precisely what she was doing, and yet she would have said then, and indeed did say afterwards, I am not a racist.

That white woman is the one I write about in fiction and nonfiction; she’s the one I know from the inside. I hear her voice at book clubs and church socials, in line at the grocery store. I don’t see color. I don’t have a racist bone in my body. She’s embedded in white America, whether we want to claim her or not. She’s embedded in me.

She’s the one I need to recognize, and own, and cut away. It seems to be taking a lifetime.

This, too, is part of the count.

A few days later, as Black Lives Matter demonstrations roiled across the country, Marlene and I spoke again. This is when I first used the word. “Maybe we’ve reached a tipping point,” I said hopefully. “All these white people marching in the demonstrations. Maybe we’re finally really reckoning with this stuff.”

I wanted the marches to be authentic, not performative, not a passing got-woke fad but evidence of the deep, true racial reckoning the country has needed. I’m not sure I believed it, even then, but I hoped it could be true. To my small white hope that day, Marlene answered nothing. Whatever I wanted those marches to be, I believe she knew better.

2.

an accounting, as for things received or done

“So let me ask you this,” my friend Catherine said one roiling day in midsummer — yes, that same summer: the summer of the pandemic and the ascendance of Black Lives Matter and the wrenching open of our superficially scabbed wounds. “What do you think will actually shift white consciousness?”

That white consciousness needs to be shifted is a given in our conversations. That it equates with white supremacy, fear, implicit bias: all givens too. Catherine writes about the African diaspora and Black culture and consciousness, and I write about white consciousness and bias, not in theory but in memoir and fiction, and we were colleagues at Oklahoma’s flagship university, where racial scars run deep as the bloodred soil in this part of the state. I fumbled around on the phone, offered something about love being the only force I know of that can really change people — but love alone sounds so sentimental and inept. So I told a story. And Catherine told one. In my story, white consciousness is changed. In hers, not so much.

“What’s the difference?” Catherine said.

In my story a white woman goes into Black spaces. She loves a Black child and becomes a part of that child’s family. In Catherine’s story, a white woman loves a Black child but raises the child inside her white world. We talked about this paradox: that white bias isn’t simply about skin color, though in white folks’ shamed hearts we believe that it is. But we are perfectly capable of loving or liking or admiring an individual Black person — a grandchild, athlete, music star, coworker, friend at church — and still loathe and fear, often unconsciously, Black America itself.

I know I was conditioned as a child to react to skin color, to see Black people as different, alien, an unknowable “they.” I’ve tried to describe this to Catherine, but I can’t pinpoint specific moments. Who taught me? When? How? I want to trace back the words, recreate them so I can own them, repudiate them, but it’s like trying to grasp air. If I cannot remember the precise ways white supremacy was instilled in me, how can I make an account of things received or done?

The time and place where I grew up, Oklahoma in the 1960s, was little different from the old Jim Crow South: we were radically separated. White people did not live in the same neighborhoods as Black people; we did not shop in the same stores, play in the same parks, swim in the same pools, attend the same churches, eat in the same restaurants, drive the same streets. Our lives intersected at no juncture that I can recall, except the hallways at our high school.

And yet most white folks I know from those days would swear ours was not a racist town, we loved our Black athletes, we never had any racial trouble: we were not like the Deep South. They would truly believe this, despite reality. One of the deadliest white assaults on a Black community in the nation’s history, the Tulsa Race Massacre, took place only fifty miles and fifty years away, and we knew nothing about it — and this is only the tiniest part of what we didn’t know. And still don’t.

Once, when Catherine and I were talking about how the reckoning has got to be white folks’ work, white folks’ journey, I said, “Yes, and reparations are important, I absolutely believe in them, I know nothing will change until we make restitution. But reparations aren’t going to change things if we don’t do the internal reckoning. White folks have got to own the whole truth, we’ve got to understand in our hearts what’s been done here, and our part in it.”

Catherine laughed. “Believe me,” she said, “there won’t be any reparations unless that happens first.”

Then we both started laughing, because we both know white folks won’t be turning loose of any money unless there’s a deep soul turning first.

I mean, it’s true, isn’t it? It’s true.

3.

a settlement of accounts: a day of reckoning

I tell my white friends I’ve been grappling in new and deeper ways with slavery as America’s origin story. Yes, we know slavery and the genocide of Indigenous peoples are the nation’s original sins, and I’ve long thought of it that way, but this wrestling now feels different, more acute and wretched, though it’s hard to describe what I mean, because there’s no story here—no characters, actions, setting, plot. No event. It’s just me reading, talking with white friends and Black friends, feeling things, watching the news.

I think, how do we settle our accounts? What constitutes our day of reckoning?

In the Baptist churches of my childhood, the preachers talked about “coming under conviction” as the first step on the road to Salvation. You can find similar principles in Twelve Step programs, self-help books, and reconciliation panels, because the process of spiritual regeneration seems to follow a certain path.

First comes the awakening, the acknowledgment, the “coming under conviction” about one’s own responsibilities, or defects of character, or, if you will, sin.

Next comes repentance, the turning away from that defect with knowledge. We have to know precisely, in acute detail, in all honesty, in full ownership, the harm/sin/wrong we’ve committed, and then choose, willingly, to turn away from it.

After repentance comes atonement, amends, actions we take to try to set things right. This includes going to the ones we have harmed and making amends. This includes restitution. This includes reparations. This includes sacrifice. In Old Testament days, it was blood sacrifice. Now the sacrifice is time and money, privilege and treasure. The harmed ones are telling us how to do this — if we’ll listen.

In this path to regeneration, it is only after atonement (read: restitution; read: reparations) that redemption begins. Lots of white folks I know want to skip right to redemption; we’re anxious to put that old stuff behind us, get to reconciliation, forgiveness, peace. We want to reach kumbaya, right here, right now, when we haven’t even fully reckoned the cost. When we’re only just now, just barely, just beginning to take account.

Or are we even doing that? All this time later, and I’m thinking: what have we really accomplished? Who’s talking about racial reckoning now? Besides those who still suffer this country’s racism and racialized violence, that is. Where are the hashtags, the Black Lives Matter profile-picture frames?

4.

an itemized bill or a statement of an amount due

Sometimes I feel as if I carry the whole country inside me: America’s hard history, our promise and guilt. My novels are about this hard history, but not that alone. Maybe being steeped in the King James Bible all my young life gave me a belief in the sins of nations, this notion of collective guilt. Growing up in Oklahoma, where the threads of America’s white supremacist narrative came together in such dramatic and violent ways, gave me awareness of my people’s place in the nation’s collective sins. And by my people I mean myself, my own family, and I mean Oklahomans. I also mean, in general, white folks.

I listen to what white people say: my friends, kin, and others. From even the most progressive I hear words that glide right past reckoning. What we want now is inclusion, equity, a peaceable kingdom, a nonracist culture. We say to the disenfranchised, “Come on in,” but we don’t say, “I’ll move over.” We think there’s room for all of us. We don’t want to give up anything — none of our privileges, perks, hegemony. But I don’t think it works that way. I don’t think we can redeem five hundred years of devastation without personal and collective pain, without sacrifice. I’m overwhelmed sometimes when I think of what it’s going to take to turn this country. But when I think as an individual, I know there’s work to do on my own.

I consider decades of mindlessness on my part, a lifetime of presumptions and assumptions that are my birthright as a white American. I think of jokes I’ve made, people I didn’t see, others I saw only through the prism of my whiteness. I think of the devastations in Tulsa in 1921, the thefts of land and oil from Natives and freedmen in my home state, how my father worked for Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville and raised us on a paycheck from an oil company born of coercion and theft. I think how my family could not have transitioned from hardscrabble lives as sharecroppers and coal miners to middle class educators and landowners without the privileges of whiteness, the inequities baked into the system. This is only a partial list, only the beginnings of the computation.

The work of racial reckoning belongs to those of us who’ve benefited all these centuries, and this work has to be done before we can begin to get to reconciliation. How do I, personally, reckon, repent, repair? I’m willing for the sacrifice, I tell myself, willing to make restitution through donations and taxes, beginning, most personally and close to home, with reparations for the victims and descendants of the Tulsa Race Massacre.

I keep returning to the conversation with my friend Catherine that summer of reckoning. I believe in reparations, I told her, but white folks have got to understand what’s been done here, and our part in it.

Believe me, she said, there won’t be any reparations unless that happens first.

The post Rĕk’e-nĭng appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

We seek brief essays (~600 words), accompanied by a photo of the site, to publish on The New Territory website for Literary Landscapes. This is an ongoing series on the website, with highlights published in the print magazine. All contributors will receive a one-year New Territory subscription as a thank-you.

It’s essential that this series represent the diversity of the Midwest, including the authors, contributors, and the types of landscapes and visuals that we publish. With that in mind, we especially seek pitches from Indigenous, people of color, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ contributors.

Here are a few possibilities from The New Territory team. Select one of these or pitch your own! Send inquiries and pitches to Departments Editor Andy Oler at andy@newterritorymag.com.

A (limited) list of potential sites:
*We will regularly add to this list and remove names/sites that have been “claimed” by a contributor. Last updated 6/20/2025.

• Hanif Abdurraqib (Columbus, OH)
• Kaveh Akbar (Warsaw, Indianapolis, or Lafayette, IN; Iowa City, IA)
• Lynda Barry (Richland Center or Footville, WI, or Chicago, IL)
• b: william bearheart (Turtle Lake, WI)
• Ana Castillo (Chicago, IL)
• Charles W. Chesnutt (Cleveland, OH)
• Maxine Clair (Kansas City, KS)
• Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Reservation, SD)
• Violet Kazue de Cristoforo (Jerome War Relocation Center, AR)
• William Cunningham (sites from the Green Corn Rebellion in eastern Oklahoma)
• Ella Cara Deloria (Yankton or Standing Rock Reservations, or sites in Vermillion or Rapid City, SD)
• Rita Dove (Akron, OH)
• Louise Erdrich (all over! we are considering an Erdrich-focused volume)
• Paul Laurence Dunbar (Dayton, OH)
• Ralph Ellison (Oklahoma City, OK; Gary, IN; Chicago, IL)
• Eve L. Ewing (Chicago, IL)
• B. H. Fairchild (Tulsa, OK, or small towns and oil fields in Oklahoma or Kansas)
• Ross Gay (Bloomington, IN)
• Susan Glaspell (Davenport or Des Moines, IA)
• Paul Goble (Rapid City, SD)
• Zane Grey (Zanesville, OH, or sites from his westerns)
• Woody Guthrie (Okemah, OK, or sites from Bound for Glory)
• Joy Harjo (Tulsa, OK)
• E. Lynn Harris (Little Rock, AR)
• Velina Hasu Houston (Junction City, KS)
• Scott Heim (Hutchinson, KS)
• LeAnne Howe (Edmond or Stillwater, OK)
• Lawson Fusao Inada (Jerome War Relocation Center, AR)
• Cynthia Kadohata (Chicago, IL, or Springdale, AR)
• Elmore Leonard (Detroit, MI, or characters from Detroit, MI, Norman, OK, etc.)
• Oscar Micheaux (Gregory County, SD, or Great Bend, KS)
• Janice Mirikitani (Rohwer War Relocation Center, AR)
• N. Scott Momaday (Lawton, OK)
• Bich Minh Nguyen (Fort Chaffee, AR; Grand Rapids, MI; Ann Arbor, MI; West Lafayette, IN; Madison, WI)
• Ohiyesa/Charles Eastman (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois)
• Tillie Olsen (Wahoo or Omaha, NE)
• Otokichi Ozaki (Jerome War Relocation Center, AR)
• Harvey Pekar (Cleveland, OH)
• Celia C. Pérez (Chicago, IL)
• Nate Powell (Bloomington, IN; Little Rock, AR)
• Susan Power (Chicago, IL)
• James Whitcomb Riley (Greenfield, IN)
• Tomás Rivera (Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, or Wisconsin)
• Damon Runyon (Manhattan, KS)
• Matȟó Nážiŋ/Luther Standing Bear (Rosebud or Pine Ridge, SD)
• Ruth Suckow (Hawarden, IA, or many other towns/farms/landscapes in Iowa)
• Joyce Carol Thomas (Ponca City, OK)
• Taitetsu Unno (Rohwer War Relocation Center, AR)
• V. “Valhalla” Vale (Jerome War Relocation Center, AR)
• Gerald Vizenor (Minneapolis or White Earth Reservation, MN)
• John Albert Williams (Omaha, NE)
• Xéhachiwinga/Mountain Wolf Woman (Black River Falls, WI)
• Ray Young Bear (Meskwaki Settlement, IA)

The post Literary Landscapes appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.