Koi Garden Plaza
Branson, Missouri

By Matt Miller

Aside from his work as the editor of Black Elk Speaks, the poet John G. Neihardt is best known as the perpetual poet laureate of Nebraska — the legislature conferred that title upon him in 1921 and never retracted it, requiring later appointees to accept the lesser title of “state poet.” At the time of that commission, however, and for much of his life afterward, Neihardt in fact lived in Branson, Missouri, near the edge of the White River.

Neihardt remains quite a presence in Nebraska despite his departure from the state. A well-developed state historic site on the site of his former home in Bancroft offers education on Neihardt and Native American culture, and various structures (a park, an elementary school, a residence hall) bear his name.

The traces of his life in Branson are more muted. There’s a development in suburban North Branson called Neihardt Heights, which bears as much relationship to the man himself as any suburban development does to its eponymous weeping willows or hidden springs. However, with the help of my colleague, College of the Ozarks librarian Gwen Simmons, I was able to locate the site of the former Neihardt home, which was demolished in the 1980s, a Chinese restaurant put in its place. In 1989, the Branson Arts Council installed a monument: a modest boulder adorned with a bronze plaque. Today that monument sits, overtaken by Virginia creeper, just blocks from the excesses of the Strip on the corner between the Koi Garden Plaza strip mall and the Branson Visitors Center.

Branson isn’t much of a town for poets, of course, and even if it were, contemporary neglect of Neihardt’s poetry is probably justified. He wrote Orientalist lyric poetry based on Hindu mysticism and self-conscious imitations of European epic poems, complete with epic similes, but about the American West. Much of his work is in rhyming couplets in an excessively regular iambic pentameter — hallmarks of a poet lacking technical sophistication. And unlike even other quasi-European poets like Longfellow, Neihardt shows little ability for a memorable image or turn of phrase. Unlike his fellow Nebraska writer, the better-known Willa Cather, Neihardt’s poetry looks primarily to European creative models. Cather’s greater artistic accomplishment is that she created a distinctively American literary form, rather than imposing European models on a place that has its own life and culture.

Neihardt is justly remembered, then, less for his poetry than as the transmitter of Black Elk’s ideals: a vision of “the sacred hoop” uniting all creation in a holy order. And here Neihardt comes into his own. Even as he drew primarily upon the classical epic for his poetic form, he evinced an interest in an indigenous American social vision that Cather couldn’t match, one in which the first peoples of this land have an equal voice with those of us descended from settlers. For all the justifiable controversy around the authenticity of Black Elk Speaks, it’s undeniable that Neihardt sought a vision for the Midwest that had more to do with cross-cultural peace than settler violence.

I suppose one could see the conjunction of the Koi Garden Plaza and the Branson Visitors Center as a kind of crass instance of that cross-cultural wholeness. But I’m more inclined to contrast Black Elk’s vision with the ideals represented by the Branson Strip. However multicultural the Strip might come to be, consumer capitalism has little to do with the Sacred Hoop.

Like Neihardt, I’m a Nebraskan expat living in Branson. When I can’t avoid the Strip, I confess that I’m prone to contempt, to contrasting it with the vision of wholeness I sought in books like Black Elk Speaks. But I recall, too, that part of Neihardt’s interest in Black Elk arose from his Orientalism, and so I’m forced to acknowledge that Branson’s exploitative tendencies also reflect a side of Neihardt.

Neihardt has always represented a vision of what we could be, for good and ill; if that vision diverges from what we in fact are, it does not do so completely. Nor ought we to scorn such visions when they fail, as they must, to live up to what is best in us. Yes, settler visions of what could be gave us the Branson strip and Manifest Destiny. But it will only be through visions like Black Elk’s sacred hoop that we might found a Midwest that corresponds with the best in Black Elk’s, and in Neihardt’s, hopes.

Matt Miller, a native Nebraskan, now lives in Branson, where he serves as Associate Professor of English at College of the Ozarks. His first book, a collection of essays titled Leaves of Healing, was published by Belle Point Press in late 2024. Find him online at matt-miller.org.

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It is late July 2021. I have driven my daughter an hour northwest to reach swathes of Minnesota sunflowers, the novelty of crowds of head-high plants taking our minds off the crowds of people we are still avoiding. We turn off the main road onto a rutted, grassy drive, where we pause more than once to watch small creamy butterflies dancing double helixes around each other. Once on foot, we can hear the fields before we can see the flowers. So many bees are feasting from the blooming yellow heads that the world has become a living hum. We make a contest of looking for the sunflower with the most bees on it at once (five). We marvel that there are not just bumblebees and honeybees, both of which we can identify, but also several otherbees, which we cannot. All going about their bee business, and each contributing one fizzing note to the chorus that vibrates on the wind.

Sunflowers reliably face east. As young plants, they shift their gaze over the course of a day to continue bathing their cheeks in direct light. But when they mature into impressive giants, their heads become too heavy to move. It feels vaguely sentient, their resolute turn to the rising sun. In an open prairie, all the other flowers appear lackadaisical by comparison.

When arrayed in farmed rows that spread over acres, every flower stands at attention, saluting the sun. Soldier-like symmetry in plants is a little disquieting, especially from the back where the flowers’ heads wear huge, spikey green cups that look oddly like helmets. But viewed from the front, the illusion of a battalion disappears. Broad leaves dissolve rigid spacing. The flowers’ pebbled centers — in fact hundreds of tiny blossoms — are ringed by densely overlapping petals that splay outward until each edge is differentiated by the sun. Ray florets, they are called. Because what else would you name such golden magnificence? As the light filters through, every flower gets its own halo.

We have had so little rain this summer that at least one of these farm fields has been allowed to die back, presumably to preserve water for the others. Stunted stalks tilt in the dusty soil, sharp contrast to the adjacent field that thrums with insects. I find myself wondering what the untouched prairie looks like right now. Are its sunflowers wilting before they can bloom? Or do ones that seed themselves naturally have roots impervious to short-term drought, roots that press deeper to locate small bits of sustaining moisture? I assume uncultivated plants are more resourceful because they have not been coddled — although perhaps that is anthropomorphizing and wrong. Possibly their seeds simply remain dormant, nestled into today’s too-dry earth, quietly waiting for a rainier summer. That, too, is a kind of resourcefulness.

~ 🌻 ~

It always seems to be winter when I pick up Willa Cather’s My Antonia. Even so, the scene I cling to is not the one where the family digs tunnels through snowdrifts to get to the barn for chores. Instead, I find myself beguiled by the moment her protagonist reminisces over his first immersion into sunflowers. Newly-orphaned at the age of ten, Jim Burden is sent from Virginia to his grandparents’ farm in Nebraska in the 1890s, which, as an adult narrator, he recalls exploring:

Sometimes I followed the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the persecution when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah, scattered sunflower seeds as they went. The next summer, when the long trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had a sunflower trail to follow.

Cather’s novel is redolent with the wonder of this young boy, fresh from the Virginia woodlands, learning to understand the prairie’s splendid, wide-open skies and appreciate its promised freedom of movement. I love how his fascination with sunflowers as route markers casts them in the familiar mold of fairy tale: they function like a magical trail of breadcrumbs, perpetually renewing themselves to guide successive seasons of settlers safely west. Fuchs’s cherished story has an added ring of truth, tapping as it does into sunflowers’ power as a directional sign. It must have reassured countless drivers of horses and wagons across the plains that as long as they headed towards those sunny faces, they were moving in the right direction. Jim’s rhapsody takes a turn, though, to end here:

I believe that botanists do not confirm Jake’s story but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains. Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

Despite the corrective that this is merely a legend, I find this last clause breath-taking. What a heady image — roads marked by towering flowers that proffer benediction over the movement of persecuted souls into a space where they could find religious freedom.

This passage mentions nothing of the people who were native to those plains. Of their relentless persecution. Of the incalculable damage those white settlers did in claiming land and displacing people and disrupting ecosystems and destroying long-established harmonies between humans and the earth. And yet, if read carefully, it admits to us that the flowers’ sanction of westward expansion is merely the stuff of legend, invented no doubt by white settlers. If read carefully, it might remind us that those roads were “bordered” by sunflowers because sunflowers were everywhere on those plains except where the roads, gashed through by wagons that scarred the land, prohibited the flowers’ growth.

How can we admire these breath-taking lines while doing justice to the truth that some people gained freedom by denying it to others? Where, in this complexity, does that leave the flowers? What is our relationship to the adulation and the promise, to the sheer joy of the beaming sunflower in its own right? Can we disentangle that from human history? Should we try?

~ 🌻 ~

May and June are normally rainy, plant-greening months in Minnesota. Grasses wake up. The monochrome of winter becomes variegated, lush. The state’s abundant water — 10,000 lakes! — is the stuff of legend, but it is also the winter snowpack, high water table, and abundant spring rains that makes Minnesota a promising location for the inevitable flood of climate refugees we know time will produce. Those living through years of devastating droughts to our west have periodically argued for the right to siphon off some Great Lakes’ water to slake their regions’ thirst. There are profound ironies in proposals to send natural resources west, as people contemplate fleeing east across North America seeking a more hospitable bit of earth.

But for the second summer in a row, Minnesota’s lot seems cast with the burning western half of the United States. In early July, grassy boulevards were simply tufts of brown. As I sit writing in August 2022, St. Paul, MN, is almost 7” below its normal year-to-date precipitation accumulation. Last year at this time it was even worse: some 80% of the state was marked Severe, Extreme, or Exceptional Drought.

My lilac hedge, some fifteen feet high and fifty feet long, droops. The soil is so dry, so deep, that any water you offer to flower gardens seeps far away from the roots before plants can slurp up enough to sustain themselves. Things I have never had to water — the rose that’s taller than my garage, for instance — are suffering. Small trees look pinched. Today I drove by several adolescent maples, not mere saplings, whose leaves were browning around the edges. Next year, they may be skeletons. If this landscape were a Dickens character, it would be described with a narrow face and pursed lips and a perpetually pained expression.

The perilousness of our situation feels ominous. A gossamer thread binds us together over our shared craving for water sources whose perpetuation we cannot command. I sense myself wilting too, these hot summer afternoons, under the weight of that concern.

~ 🌻 ~

By mid-August, none of us can recall accurately the last time it rained. One night, I dream that someone is outside throwing dried beans onto my roof. I awake in the dark, confused. Bags and bags and bags of beans clatter down, and I cannot figure out where they are coming from. Drowsily, I realize I am hearing the rattle of raindrops. I am nonetheless still baffled by the sound. When I wake up more fully, I register a deep sadness: it has taken just a few months to turn the sound of rain into a stranger.

Later that morning, I find myself holding my breath, afraid somehow to jinx the rain and make it stop if I celebrate too much. And yet I am ecstatic. I want to dance. It is raining. Not just a few half-hearted drops. But a persistent soaking that produces a smell lightly metallic and earthy — petrichor, it is beautifully named — a breeze wet with a wetness you can taste through an open window. It rains for hours before it clears. Miniature pools glisten on broad leaves in my garden, and I can breathe deeply once more.

The next night, it rains again, and I wake to a morning gloom that feels like celebration, a dawn overcast and damp. The heat has finally broken.

Out of town, driving through a downpour the following day, I get the giddy news from a friend: there has been a third night of rain! “Everything is saturated,” she writes. I do a little jig in my seat as I think of my trees, my roses, my enormous hedge, finally having their thirst quenched. I imagine them restored to a green as triumphant as the hills I am driving through: Wisconsin, the national map tells me, has experienced only Moderate Drought in one very tiny corner this year. I do not know how the drought knows where the state lines are.

~ 🌻 ~

I have quipped more than once, since moving to Minnesota, that I am grateful not to live in a sod house on the prairie when the winter winds come shrilling around the eaves and the snow mounts. But as I think about sunflowers and drought in this third summer of curtailed human connection, I find myself realizing how we are all tied to the land, even if we no longer live in shelters composed of it. We bear witness to the slow suffering of giant trees whose canopies become strangely translucent as leaves begin to shrivel. When rainless days extend to rainless weeks, we feel the tension in the air, the need palpable and parched, even if we do not consciously register it.

It only gives way when the rain comes, often in a powerful combination of disorientation and relief. I, too, was less wilted for a few days. The land was less gasping, the strain in people’s voices quieted itself a little.

And so, sunflowers. Reminders of our earthly obligation to coexist. They serve as map and guide, as exuberant marker and sober memento. We cannot command the rain, but we can be more conscious of that collective feeling of reprieve carried on the damp wind. We must take practical steps to combat drought in our children’s lifetimes. We also should lean more fully into the things that connect us despite a burning world. Morning sun on our faces, the relief of rain. The bees, the sunflowers, the wonder of seeing it all for the first time through our daughters’ eyes.

Read this in print by ordering The New Territory Issue 14 or get a PDF copy.

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Gravesite

Sheridan County, Nebraska

By C.J. Janovy

It’s not easy to get to the final resting place of Nebraska writer Mari Sandoz, whose books, I’ll go ahead and argue, evoke one region of America as powerfully as William Faulkner’s portray another.

Paying respects to Sandoz in the traditional way of visiting her gravesite requires a pilgrimage far from the interstate, through Sandhills counties so thinly populated one can drive 20 minutes (it feels longer) without seeing another moving vehicle, on a two-lane highway dipping and rising through a forbidding grass-covered Sahara. Finally, about 27 miles north of unincorporated Ellsworth, a historical marker affirms that this is Sandoz country. A faded sign across from the Deer Meadows hunting outfitters confirms she is buried three miles farther back in the hills.

Getting to this point requires first knowing who Mari Sandoz was. I never encountered her name on any syllabus despite graduating from the Lincoln Public Schools and earning two fancy English degrees (I hope syllabi have changed). I made this pilgrimage only after reconciling a childhood mystery.

When I was a kid, Mari Sandoz’s name stared back at me from the bookshelves above the fireplace at my grandparents’ house in Oklahoma City. The book’s yellow spine sang out like a meadowlark, while tall red letters spelled two simple words: Old Jules. Below that was the author’s name in simple yet elegant black. The dramatic block letters told me the subject of this book was important. But what kind of name was “Jules”? It must be a man (tall red letters were for men). He was “old,” like the grandfather I loved, whose fireplace was where Santa delivered gifts, but this book was on high shelves where only the adults could reach it. The writer had a strange name, too. Was “Mari” a boy or a girl? How was I supposed to pronounce it in my mind? Decades later, after my folks cleaned out my grandparents’ midcentury modern house, this book was the only thing I wanted. And I finally read it.

The Swiss immigrant Jules Sandoz was an awful human, literally filthy and abusive but also educated enough to deliver breech babies on the frontier in the 1880s. Once the United States government had murdered or moved the region’s Indians, Old Jules helped colonize his part of the country through cussedness, luck, marksmanship and the help of obedient women, one of whom wound up in the insane asylum. I don’t know how often Mari uses the word “pounded” in this portrait of her father, but it’s a lot.

Generations of readers have put up with this man for 424 pages of what is now considered Mari Sandoz’s masterpiece. In this way, Mari’s accomplishment is far greater than her father’s legacy of towns and services in western Nebraska. Given the difficulties of making a life in this harsh place and time, one might wonder: Why bother? I think it was so his daughter could write such a beautiful book. “In Jules,” she observed, “as in every man, there lurks something ready to destroy the finest in him as the frosts of the earth destroy her flowers.”

Mari Sandoz Memorial Drive is a sand road that winds past a clanking windmill and ends in a patch of grass on a hill. Farther up is a plot surrounded by barbed wire, with a white gate. The plum-colored headstone reads simply “Mari Sandoz 1896-1966.” A metal glider allows visitors to sit and contemplate the view.

Near the gate is a mailbox; inside is a spiral bound notebook whose messages reveal it hasn’t been long since someone else was here.

“She was an admirable person & wonderful writer!” wrote one visitor from Windsor, Colorado. “I heard her speak at Kearney State College in 1965, approx. 1 yr. before she died. I can still hear her exclaim, ‘read my books.’”

Dan Kusek, vice president of the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society, had started a fresh notebook six weeks before my most recent visit.

“When they were bringing Mari’s casket here for burial, the hearse could climb no further,” Kusek wrote at the top of the first page. “Mari’s wish was to be buried at the TOP of the hill but they could get no further. A hawk came over us here while we were cutting grass & weeds. I have no doubt it was Mari’s spirit!!”

The only spirit I felt was the unnamed woman in Old Jules who tried to walk home to her one-year-old baby in a blizzard. “When the sun shone warm again over the glistening, drifted plains,” Sandoz wrote, “she was found curled up in a blanket in the slat-bottomed cart, a mile from home, frozen.”

Sitting in the sun on the metal glider, pondering the hills where Mari and Jules last lived, it was tempting to imagine her voice in the wind-stirring grasses. But even with a breeze, the place was so profoundly silent that all of my own thoughts were too loud.

Journalist C.J. Janovy grew up in Nebraska and lived on both coasts before settling in Kansas City. Her book No Place Like Home: Lessons in Activism from LGBT Kansas won the 2019 Stubbendieck Great Plains Distinguished Book Prize. Follow her on Twitter @cjjanovy.

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JAMES EMANUEL

Alliance Public Library
Alliance, Nebraska

By Sean Stewart

Alliance, Nebraska, does not remember James Emanuel. There is no plaque, no statue. His poetry is not assigned to high school students. Despite the lofty architecture of the public library and museum, there is no display, no exhibit. Just two or three dusty books kept in the staff room of the library alongside genealogy tomes, protected behind glass cases. Protected from being discovered.

I grew up craving art in a town that didn’t have any. I read about other places—any other place I could—and the figures who put those places on the map. I decried the emptiness of the prairie I found myself in. I was scared the small world of my beginning had set the limits for all I could be.

Alliance had no bookstore, no venue for musical or theatrical performances to speak of, no university. In this town of 8,000, I gravitated to the place stories could be found. The public library was a lifeline. Everywhere else my world felt small, but when I stepped inside the library it became limitless. The old library building, built in 1912 with a Carnegie grant, boasts classical columns and resilient stone. The current library is equally grand: skylight windows fifty feet up seem to usher the world in. The place grabbed me. I got a job as a library page, and as I shelved books a new geography imprinted itself on my mind. Even if no section of the library was especially thorough, I could see the hints of everything not present. And I wanted to learn it all.

I’d been working there for years before I discovered James Emanuel. His faded books were kept with the archives in the staff room. When I was tasked with rearranging the archival shelves I was, as far as I could tell, the first to look at them in decades.

What I found left me breathless. James Emanuel was a poet pushing against the very bounds of what it’s possible for one life to contain.

He was born in Alliance in 1921 and grew up with the same quiet streets that I did, the same railroad engines droning in the distance, the same treeless sandhills stretching to every horizon. He read his first poem at Alliance Junior High. As a teenager, he worked on a cattle ranch before leaving the area and moving East.

Emanuel attended Howard, Northwestern, and Columbia universities. He was mentored by Langston Hughes, on whom Emanuel went on to write an influential book-length analysis. Emanuel then cemented his own scholarly reputation with Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, a groundbreaking anthology of African American literature.

From the relatively pastoral beginning of early poems, Emanuel’s later began to focalize in his writing around racial injustice. Their topical change is matched by their uptick in rhythm. Poems like “Panther Man,” his scorching condemnation of the murder of Fred Hampton, are marvels of energy and anger. Emanuel later disavowed America entirely. His son was brutalized by police and took his own life in the aftermath. James Emanuel renounced the United States and spent the rest of his life an expatriate in France, pioneering a new form he called the jazz haiku.

I have to think that Emanuel’s artistic and personal evolution in a direction his country was unwilling to follow is at least partly responsible for his anonymity in Alliance. When he died in 2013, the Alliance Times Herald ran one of his early poems called “Poet as Fisherman,” sidestepping his real legacy as a poet of startling rhythm, fierce critiques, and unfettered experimentation. I’m proud, now, to be from the home of the blistering jazz haiku king, James Emanuel—the town whose streets and surrounding oceans of dry tallgrass shaped his early world. When I began looking for traces of him in Alliance, I learned that Emanuel said of the public library—the 1912 iteration—“the Alliance town library was in biblical terms ‘my truth and my refuge.’” I wish I could tell him that it was for me, too. I wish I could tell him that his own books I discovered there are no small part of why.

Sean Theodore Stewart received his MFA from the University of Idaho, where he served as the fiction editor of Fugue. The Arkansas International selected one of his stories as a finalist for the 2019 Emerging Writer’s Prize and his work has appeared in Salt Hill, The New Territory, and Guesthouse. Originally from the Sandhills of Nebraska, he now lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Samantha, and their pups, Ramona and Molly.

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Glacier Creek Preserve
Omaha, Nebraska

By Conor Gearin

“The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.” One of Willa Cather’s most famous lines, from the 1918 novel My Ántonia, mainly refers to the color of little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), one of the key grasses of the mixed grass prairie where she grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The species has a bluish color in spring but matures to a copper-red in autumn that reflects the fire of a Great Plains sunset.

The first place I connected Cather’s words to little bluestem wasn’t in farm country but instead at Glacier Creek Preserve on the outskirts of Omaha. Years of restoration transformed terraced crop fields into a glimpse at the flora of mixed grass and tallgrass prairies accessible to city dwellers. In the Midwest, we’ve lost nearly all of our native grasslands to agriculture, meaning that if you grew up in a city like Omaha or St. Louis — my hometown — your first look at a grassland was probably a restored site down the road like Glacier Creek. This modest-sized preserve offers a glimpse of the most threatened type of ecosystem in the world.  As a biology teaching assistant, I would help lead university students at the preserve in collecting soil samples, estimating plant biomass, and identifying bird species.

When Cather was a student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in the 1890s, Omaha was a cultural destination, and she wrote incisive theater reviews to help establish herself as a writer. Her fiction reflects this early view of the big city. Especially in My Ántonia and O Pioneers!, Omaha looms as an urban hub, reachable by train for a cosmopolitan weekend outing, the place to go for fancy fabric and renowned actors. Cather’s careful depictions of small-town Nebraska take their meaning partly from the contrast she draws to these growing cities a few rail stops away.

Later in her career, Cather returned to Omaha on a brief Midwestern speaking tour. At a 1921 gathering of the Nebraska League of Women Voters in the tea room of the stately Brandeis department store in downtown Omaha, Cather advised the audience not to imitate other places. “It seems to me as I travel out through the great middle west, the people are trying to imitate New York,” she said, as quoted by the Omaha World-Herald. “Red Cloud and Hastings are trying to be like Omaha; Omaha and Chicago are trying to be like New York. One thing I like about New York is that there we wear the kinds of hats we like, we wear the kind of clothes that please us.”

The remark feels strikingly contemporary. Reading it, I think of how today’s Midwestern communities often converge on a suburban sameness: small towns grasping for big box stores, larger cities sprawling out subdivisions into farm country. The result is a landscape that’s hard to distinguish from hundreds of others, their quirks of ecology smoothed over and refashioned with evenly distributed brand names. But I think, too, of the distinguishing features that remain: the grasses and herbs of eastern Nebraska I saw in the field and through the microscope; the improbably steep slopes of the Loess Hills across the Missouri River; all the different kinds of live music wafting out of bars in Omaha’s Benson neighborhood on a First Friday. I think of Omaha’s cultural legacies — the Indigenous peoples of the Oceti Sakowin; Black families that arrived in the Great Migration; generations of immigrants from throughout Europe, Asia, Mexico, Central America, and more recently Sudan, Nigeria, and other African nations — and how those legacies often appeared in the students of my commuter campus. Foregrounding these, it’s harder to write off the city as interchangeable with any other in the Corn Belt.

Historically, Omaha has looked to Cather’s words for help in establishing a sense of place. When I lived there, my local library was the Willa Cather Branch. There’s a Willa Cather elementary school and a Willa Cather playground. Despite living 200 miles from Red Cloud, many people in Omaha (like their fellow Nebraskans) have felt better represented in her fiction than in contemporary works like The Great Gatsby — where the Great Plains are a grim wasteland, a place to escape.

But it would be a mistake to portray Cather as some kind of saint of Midwestern culture. Her legacy is more complex than that. She left Nebraska for New York to make her way in the literary world. She also largely erased Native Americans in her writing and essentially celebrated white settlement on Indigenous lands. Her view of Midwestern uniqueness was hitched to pioneer exploitation.

We’re not beholden to that limited view. Instead, I see Cather’s work as a starting point that many writers have riffed on throughout the past century. The thread of her legacy that stands out to me now is the awakening of a Midwestern ecological consciousness, distinguishing the particularity of one place from another. That awareness offers another way to envision the future of a place, one away from evenly-spread amenities and toward a unique trajectory linked to local ecology and culture — a celebration of difference.

If I imagine standing at Glacier Creek Preserve now, I can look southeast toward downtown Omaha, north and west toward farmland, and south toward recently built subdivisions. Despite suburban sprawl, I wouldn’t mistake the view for St. Louis or Chicago. The sources of Omaha’s uniqueness haven’t been completely smothered. But the threats to grassland habitats are as dire as ever. Looking around at the little bluestem, switchgrass, and side-oats grama, I think about Cather’s hunch that if we could articulate the special character, the this–ness of a landscape, that might tell us something about how best to relate to that place. If writers and naturalists — myself included — could help more people see grasslands as vital, with inhabitants that have names and life histories, I wonder what new shape our communities might take.

Conor Gearin is a writer from St. Louis living in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Atlantic, The Millions, New Scientist, and The New Territory, where he is a contributing editor. He writes a newsletter called Possum Notes.

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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Gravel Roads
Seward County, Nebraska

By Matt Miller

For all his stature as former U.S. Poet Laureate, Ted Kooser remains a poet of Nebraska, and so he is a poet of gravel roads. Consider “So This Is Nebraska,” his best-known poem about his home state:

The gravel road rides with a slow gallop
over the fields, the telephone lines
streaming behind, its billow of dust
full of the sparks of redwing blackbirds.
. . .

So this is Nebraska. A Sunday
afternoon; July. Driving along
with your hand out squeezing the air,
a meadowlark waiting on every post.

I grew up in Seward County, just outside of Milford, about 16 miles from Kooser’s home in the village of Garland. Our cars never lacked a thin coat of dust that I found embarrassing any time we went “to town” in Lincoln; the city seemed so clean, with all its white concrete. Still, the gravel roads were our life in Seward County. We met our neighbors there, stopping our cars right in the middle of the lane to chat through open windows. We explored nature and culture on the roads, tossing rocks in Coon Creek or gawking at somebody’s private landfill, posted NO DUPING (exact spelling). Sometimes the roads became our grocery store — we knew where elderberries or wild plums grew in the ditches. Once, we found a stand of edible crabapples and picked gallons of them. As we drove home, we trailed one out the back window of our Chevy Astro with a reel of dental floss, a spot of red leaping on the tan of the washboards. 

It is from time spent on those gravel roads that Nebraskans can tell you the shape of our country, that we know where to find the old German church or the local fishing hole. It is because of gravel roads that we know, as Kooser puts it in the voice of a radiator in a broken-down Chevy, “the names of all these / tattered moths and broken grasshoppers / the rest of you’ve forgotten.”

The gravel roads have their limitations as a public square, however. If somebody turns onto your lane, you had better stop gossiping with the neighbor and get out of the way. And Kooser, in his 2002 memoir Local Wonders, highlights another limitation in a rare moment of political commentary. At the start of the book’s consideration of summer in Seward County, Kooser observes “the Fourth of July parade float for this year’s Poison Queen” — two contractors spraying herbicide on the roadside. “While these two hapless men are killing the things they’re paid to be killing,” Kooser laments, “they’re spraying nearly everything else as well: the sunflowers, the pink wild roses, the wild grapevines, the chokecherries.” The public benefit of the gravel roads extends only so far as public willingness to preserve them.

Some of that willingness has grown since Kooser wrote Local Wonders. Now, when I go home, milkweed and yellow signs marking organic crops are commonplace in the ditches. The spraying regimen may have loosened a bit, to judge by the milkweed. And the new prevalence of organic growers testifies to some rising ecological concern, however market-driven. At least some of Kooser’s neighbors in Seward County have understood how these roads and the creatures about them still contour our lives as they do the landscape.

And those contours have lasting meaning. Near the end of Local Wonders, Kooser recounts how the roads helped him endure cancer: “Each day when I came home, I stopped at the head of our lane and picked up a pebble from the road. I lined these up along the kitchen windowsill to count off the treatments” (150).

Mercifully Kooser survived, and so we might imagine that line of pebbles continuing on, day by day, joining up into a road. Beside them on the sill, a wild rose.

Matt Miller now lives outside Reeds Spring, Missouri, where he works with his family to reforest their quasi-suburban lawn with fruit trees. He serves as Assistant Professor of English at College of the Ozarks and writes essays and reviews on ecology, spirituality, and the Midwest. Find him online at matt-miller.org.

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Boyhood Home
Central City, Nebraska

By Nathan Tye

For Wright Morris, home was both a physical place and emotional ache. Born in Central City, Nebraska, in 1910, Morris made his life elsewhere, but returned to the Platte Valley in his writing and photography. His childhood home remains, now a museum maintained by the Lone Tree Literary Society and in it I find a shared weight of homecoming. Like him, I was born in the Platte Valley, built a life elsewhere, and returned. Morris’ labor to excavate the home’s memories resonate as I uncover connections fallen into disrepair and begin to build a new life on the old.

Carefully restored, this single-story white frame house, built amidst the Panic of 1893 by a real estate agent, carries the faded wealth of a small-town businessman. Certainly, it must have felt like that when a widower, his son, and housekeeper moved in two decades later. Morris’ earliest memory of “lampglow and shadows on a low ceiling” is likely tied to this home. A window topped with a row of colored glass faces northeast. Bedbound with pneumonia, Morris traced the colored beams as they moved across his sheets in that room. In his first memoir, he admits that such memories left him with “the ache of a nameless longing,” which he threaded through his work until he died.

In The Home Place (1948), Clyde Muncy returns to Lone Tree, a stand-in for Central City. Nearly 30-years gone, Clyde has a new family, a new place, and memories ill-fit to Lone Tree’s present. Clyde’s futile attempt at placemaking is framed by images of debris and empty farmsteads, a subject Morris’ first explored in The Inhabitants (1946). In both books he captures a world worn over — abandoned homes, barren storefronts, football-worn carpets, frayed familial ties — and finds those spaces inhabited by absence. These homebound texts are all the sharper in our homebound epoch, for our own places are now populated with days upon days of unbroken living.

Morris relished patina, the worn, and the lived-in. For him, abandonment closes distances in time. Or, as the art critic and novelist John Berger found, “Home is the return to where distance did not yet count.” What though, does home mean, in Central City and the elsewheres we find ourselves ordered in? Where do our ties to the past take us when the future is so uncertain? Morris returned to escape, and by documenting these visits laid the foundation for the preservation of his home. The connection to the past, “was the important thing. It had to be established,” Wright wrote in The Home Place, “I had to be born again.” Morris’ texts and images commingled the present and past to forward a vision of living nostalgia.

The Lone Tree Literary Society has reversed the decay Morris documented and made his childhood home available to curious publics. And while what Morris called “the inhabitants” of these structures may now be obscured by respectful restorations, in Morris’ work, their absence persists. Later in his career, Morris commented that photographs came from “the most durable of ghosts, nostalgia.” In his early images of Central City, he reached back to the remnants he left in order to move forward. Nostalgia is a welcome escape given the uncertainty of our present, but as Morris’ struggle with his homebound ghosts underscores, our worn-over homes are points of departure, not occupation.

At home with ourselves, we’re learning to live with our inhabitants. Like Morris’ photographs, Covid-19 emptied the streets, turned homes into lived-in voids, and blurred delineations between past, present, and future. Yet, by documenting deterioration and distance, Wright pointed toward a restorative future. Now, in the stillness of an uncertain time, the inhabitants of Morris’ home and those of our own become clearer, and the possibilities they hold emerge.

Nathan Tye was born and raised in the Platte Valley. A historian by trade, Tye is assistant professor of Nebraska and American West history at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is currently working on his first book, a history of hobo workers in North America.

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