From Kansas City, Highway 49 offers a smooth road and not much else. As our car drew south, the landscape changed from barren fields scattered with oil donkeys into rolling hills. Suddenly, I understood how Bigfoot could live here: the pine trees, the rocky terrain, the horizon free of gas stations and subdevelopments. We were in an area so remote neither Verizon nor T-Mobile could keep us connected. We swiftly became adventurers of another era, using an atlas instead of Google Maps, suspending data plans and disbelief. Honobia, Oklahoma, pronounced Ha-No-Bee if you’re a tourist or Hoe-nubby if you’re local, isn’t known for much. You could pass the unincorporated community without even knowing (as we did). There is but one hotel in the area (sold out for the weekend months ago — a testament to the popularity of the festival), but Airbnb offered an extensive selection of cabins billed as retreats for lovers or hunters or both. We easily found comfortable accommodations.

The conference deserves a report from a better sociologist than me. It offered a dizzying array of acronyms and associations — SBA (Southern Bigfoot Alliance), BFRO (Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization), and so many more. Friday evening, the Native Oklahoma Bigfoot Research Organization (or NOBRO, as they refer to themselves) hosted a bonfire storytelling session. We spread out our picnic blanket and slurped surreptitious wine from our water bottle, listening to rambling stories that were mainly inside jokes about mistaking turkey buzzards for cryptids.

As the world darkened and a chill set in, instinctively, we all nestled a little closer to the bonfire, curling the edges of the picnic blanket around our exposed arms. The fireside became a platform where anyone could share their story. A recently retired pediatrician emerged from the crowd to share her encounter. The anonymous speaker was a self-professed woman of science — she was one of the area’s few doctors after all — and yet she waited until after her retirement to reveal her personal bigfoot encounter because of her position in the community, and fear of what being a believer might mean for her credibility in her career. The sincerity and solemn tone of her story tilted my personal belief needle from full-on-skeptic to Bigfoot-curious.

Starting Saturday morning, the two-day conference hosted a repeat lineup of Bigfoot experts (all white men), and a diverse audience of Bigfoot skeptics, believers and Knowers (all Indigenous Americans). Although the presenters were billed as experts, none of the evidence shared at the conference convinced me as much as whispered conversations between attendees, finally free to share their own stories between sessions. The first speaker had been looking for Bigfoot for over 40 years and had no evidence, no sightings, but spoke with deep reverence for his time in the woods and for his friends who Know. The next speakers were a pair of men who had soooooo many Bigfoot encounters as to merit their own podcast. The last speaker showed photo after photo of realistic Bigfoot evidence, then broke the news that the images were all fake. My favorite photo (real or generated) was of a smeared handprint on a grease-filled dumpster behind a casino. Raccoon or Bigfoot, something was hungry.

The conference was surrounded by a free-ad-mission festival, offering countless craft booths, food trucks, a bounce house, and helicopter rides. I ate fry bread until my seams were bursting. The true treasure of the festival offerings was the abundant collection of self-published Bigfoot novels. I greedily purchased an armful of stories, including a signed copy of Bigfoot Watching Woman Watching Bigfoot by M. Sparks Clark. I ended up buying the rest of her trilogy after the festival, both because I enjoyed the stories and because it helped me gain a deeper sense of appreciation for Southeast Oklahoma. Plus, everyone knows fiction can get you closer to the truth.

Despite the wonderful weekend and the unexpected beauty of the area, I can’t recommend you attend the Hanobia Bigfoot Conference. After 17 solid years, the festival is henceforth cancelled due to a disagreement with the venue and what appears to be a personal feud over who owns the rights to the event, according to posts, comments and passive-aggressive Keanu Reeves memes on the festival’s Facebook page.

While the festival is off my vacation list, Southeast Oklahoma certainly isn’t. Who knows, I might even attend another regional Bigfoot conference … for the gag, of course.

The post Suspending All Data Plans and Disbelief appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Matt’s routine is upended when his mom moves his aunt into his bedroom (because yes, Matt still lives with his parents). The black sheep of the family, Matt’s aunt has been in and out of jail and now has terminal cancer. Heightening the disruption is the tension between Matt’s father and aunt, which underpins a sense of family history that hasn’t been forgiven. Matt’s girlfriend Jane, a teacher, is in the middle of the local teachers’ union strike. Her passion and outward perspective overshadow Matt’s own narrow and, at times, selfish outlook. Her frustration is only mirrored in her interactions with him, who represents the apathy of their city at large. In reference to the strike Matt states, “They won’t succeed. It’s Oklahoma. It’s America.” His sister Sylvie’s environmental and punk sympathies also highlight Matt’s apathy. During a conversation about California’s wildfires, Matt says, “It’s not like we can do anything about it.” To which her response is, “Cool … Good attitude.” More than merely a friendly ribbing between siblings, Sylvie’s impatience with Matt’s deference is a catalyzing agent to her own activism.

Not a flattering picture of Matt, but his best friend, Connor, an ultra-successful, autistic-coded savant, works as a wonderful foil for him to be measured against. Connor often has to be grounded and kept within “normal” patterns of behavior, with Matt gently shepherding him as much as he can. Connor’s often esoteric and increasingly abstract rants give a peek into why he might be so successful, pushing stocks around and coming into a small fortune. The choices Matt makes later are ultimately informed by his interactions with Connor, who seems to have everything.

When Matt is given an out from his current circumstances, Roensch subverts the expected coming-of-age narrative and keeps the story rooted in place. “Driving in Oklahoma City is often disorienting … You always know where you are, but you could be anywhere,” is another comment from Matt trying to grasp at the displacement that feels very topical to the story. The story takes place in 2018 and is grounded in the zeitgeist of that time, this sense of wandering and burnt-out purpose. In hindsight, Roensch calls to mind the deep breath before the pandemic that will dramatically alter the cultural and social landscape.

The most encompassing image of the book is the sky. Flat places often don’t have much to look at, aside from the swallowing blue overhead. “The unpredictable, enormous sky and the gently troubled flatness of the land are the only true permanents,” is a deft summary of the landscape here. Looking up at the sky with fear, instead of imagining possibility or hope, becomes a motif in the novel. Matt considers a church as he drives by: “I wonder again why all our churches are so much wider and flatter than churches in photographs and in the movies. It’s like we are all afraid of the sky.” It is the prevailing realism of the story that causes the work to shine. From the stark grid of the city’s streets to the ever-precarious state of a middle-class family’s finances, Roensch does not romanticize his characters’ situations. By the end, the reader is left with the belief that there will be no miracle for Matt’s aunt, there is no perfect happy ending, and life continues at an unremarkable but swift clip. Stylistically minimal, but not without deep moments of intimacy and reflection on the issues at hand, Roensch captures what “small-town-but-big-city” stories can be like. It is a true achievement that such a work can capture one cob of the Midwestern experience.

The post Small Town, Big City appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

This is to say that Whiteheart, Bonnie Jo Campbell’s setting for her novel, is familiar to me. I recognize this place, and the silence between its men and women, the way you know your hometown in a dream, even though the details have been amplified, the logic twisted in ways that make perfect sense as long as you sleep.

As the book opens, the matriarch of the Book clan, Hermine “Herself” Zook, lives on a tiny island in the middle of The Waters, raising her granddaughter Dorothy “Donkey” Zook alone. Her three daughters have scattered, seeking their various fates in the wider, and seemingly less enchanted, world. Hermine banished her husband, Wild Bill, decades ago for an undisclosed sin, forbidding him or any other man from setting foot on the island. The intent is to protect the Zook women from the careless cruelty that the men in the story seem doomed to repeat. But, as Campbell writes at one point, “the absent father was the father, after all.” The story, as well as the town, remains haunted by Bill’s absence.

When Rose Thorn Zook comes home to the island to attempt once more to mother the daughter she surrendered to Herself, she sets in motion a chain of events that will lead to a crisis for the entire community. The whole town will be forced to reckon with the disconnection and lack of balance between the men and women of Whiteheart.

The language Bonnie Jo Campbell uses is as fecund and lush as the setting for the story. The lines that title each chapter take on their own form, a poem of sorts. They feel like scripture for a pagan form of worship venerating women’s knowing. Like any good spell, the incantation itself sounds like music, making it a sensuous joy to surrender to the magic.

Key to our understanding of this tale is the curse with which Herself sent Wild Bill away. He should “live as a woman.” Late in the novel, he muses on the page, “What does that mean?” To live as a woman, in the world represented here, means to care, to nurture, to heal, but also to accept that humans are part of the natural world. Death is as much a part of nature as life is. Poison can be part of a cure. Again and again, we see the animals, plants, the land itself, respond to the women of the Zook family — they are not separated from the fauna and flora that surround them.

The sense of visceral menace flows through the narrative, humming at a higher frequency when the men appear. It is an expectation for me that any story that contains witches, snakes, and an old woman who holds women’s secrets will also contain men whose wrath may destroy it all. These men are clumsy, disconnected from their own nature and Nature in a larger sense. These men live in restless exile from their own highest selves, and they know it. They have forgotten how to be soft; their own tenderness shames them and that shame curdles into rage. Their carelessness and blindness to others repeatedly cause harm. It is no accident that they are fixated on guns and religious righteousness — this place that Campbell writes of is not exactly our own, but it operates on many of the same principles.

The central question of the novel is this: Can the men of Whiteheart do as Herself demanded and learn to “live as a woman”? In other words, can they learn to listen to the world? Can they stop crushing mushrooms, wildflowers and young women underfoot in their blindness and arrogance? Can they stop insisting on control, self-righteously certain that they know the mind of God? Can they lay down the goddamn guns and allow themselves to nurture instead?

More urgently, can we?

The post “Live As A Woman” 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 10/26/2024.

• 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)
• Susan Power (Chicago, IL)
• James Whitcomb Riley (Greenfield, IN)
• Tomás Rivera (Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, or Wisconsin)
• Damon Runyon (Manhattan, KS)
• Danez Smith (St. Paul, MN)
• 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.