What the public might do with that information is the subject of Forget I Told You This. The novel tracks Amy Black, a calligrapher who longs for an artist’s residency at Q, a company that is named like X but is a clear stand-in for Meta. Amy has prosopagnosia, or face blindness, and is obsessed with physical media — as a human counter to facial scanning technology and walls of computer text, she’s a delicious foil for the world that Q seeks to build. She mostly wants the artist’s residency, she admits, as a resume builder. Her career as an artist was put on hold while she raised her son as a single mother and took care of her aging parents. With her now-grown son out of the house, she feels angst about what’s next: “My son had left. My lover was gone. I didn’t need anyone. I didn’t want to.”

Connie, Amy’s former partner, left her life years ago, though Zaid keeps the details vague — that’s just one of the mysteries the novel uses to generate momentum. Amy’s hustle is transcribing love letters for strangers in her antique handwriting. One night, a mysterious, pursued man asks for a letter with a message Amy begins to think may be for her: “I need you to make Tal forget me.” Uncovering Tal’s identity takes Amy into Q’s campus, which is “large and lovely and surrounded by walls past which you couldn’t see the homeless encampments at all.” It also brings her into underground dance parties in abandoned Oakland train stations and into contact with The Neighborhood, an organization that emphasizes personal connection and hopes it can use Amy to wipe out Q’s vast stores of data. “We’re not a terrorist group,” the organization’s leader assures Amy. “We’re a neighborhood.”

Complementing Amy’s ethical dilemma, whether to join Q or cripple it, is a romantic one. One option is Blue, a tattooed, smoky artist met through a lesbian hookup app called scizr, a name so perfect one finds it hard to believe the app doesn’t already exist. On the other is Sandy Jensen, a bubbly careerist who is employed as one of Q’s evangelists. It will not shock the reader when Amy’s two dilemmas converge as one.

But while her ambivalence is understandable, her naivety can be inexplicable, and strains the reader’s engagement. When she hears that Q’s founder, M. David Hacker (really) has been called before Congress, she feels a wash of relief: “It made me feel better … It was all being sorted out through the official channels. It would all be all right.” Really? Zaid is using Amy to walk through a brief history of tech disillusionment, but this moment feels too easy. It’s difficult to believe in a character who trusts in government regulation one week and seriously considers mass-scale cyber sabotage the next.

Forget I Told You This is set in the near-future, one in which California’s rolling blackouts last for weeks instead of hours and in which even that state has made abortion a crime. This pessimism is of a piece with other contemporary fiction, like Gina Chung’s recent novel Sea Change, which also uses speculative elements to imagine a world just slightly more ravaged by climate change, just a little less free. The future setting is all about how the reader and the writer interact with the present. Zaid’s implied question is: “Are we building the world we really want?”

The novel reaches its climax at Q’s All Hallows’ Ball with a series of revelations about Q, Blue, Sandy, Connie and Tal. Some of the twists are fun, some are anticlimactic, and some just seem confusing. Amy makes the choices readers will expect of her as her education in the tech world comes to its end. But forget the tech stuff — this novel is worth reading as a queer coming-of-middle-age story. What’s most moving is the care Amy has for her family, the seriousness with which she takes her renewed artistic practice, her shock and delight at finding real passion on a dating app.

The post Is This the World We Really Want? appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Take the festival’s first event, the Friday night keynote. Where the chumminess of the frat boys felt performed, the chumminess of headliners Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal was enough to make the packed Missouri Theater feel more like a bar or a barber shop. The two longtime friends invited the audience to bask in the warmth of their kind rapport, with Gay draped over his armchair, his lanky frame so comfortable as to create a kind of intimacy. This was an author talking to his friend; I got the feeling the conversation about art, inspiration and teachers would’ve sounded the same whether the writers were on a historic stage or a living room sofa.

Then it was my turn to talk to a friend onstage: my first author event was a conversation with festival director Alex George about my book How to Resist Amazon and Why, as well as independent bookselling in general (both George and I own bookstores in Midwestern college towns). This year, Unbound curated a series of author talks called Pen Pals, bringing together authors who are friends for on-stage conversations. While my talk with Alex wasn’t in the Pen Pals category, it may as well have been. Alex made me feel right at home with easy conversation and visible passion for books. This can often happen to authors in the hands of good event hosts, but the special thing about Alex is that he, through his festival, managed to make every Unbound attendee feel like that, or so it seemed to me. Our spirited discussion preceded an even more spirited audience Q&A, with a full crowd sending both of us feisty questions from their perches on the — you guessed it — comfy sofas of the smaller theater at Columbia’s funky Ragtag Cinema.

After the fun at Ragtag, I headed down the street to Top Ten Wines, which was kind enough to let poets take over their space for an entire day. The dusty and charming wine shop, with little stools and, of course, over-stuffed leather sofas, managed to host 12 poets across four hourlong chunks. What wine shop in America could claim as much? And what a lineup — from my new friend Jennifer Maritza McCauley, with whom I shared a delightful ride from the Kansas City Airport, to my own block of poets, which found me reading alongside two poet laureates: Maryfrances Wagner of Missouri, and Nnandi Comer of Michigan. That you could find such dignitaries of poetry before an intimate crowd speaks to the imaginative, community-first programming of Unbound. Poetry thrives when it can move off the college campus, and Unbound knows this. Still, I was nervous. And that was before I got to the mic and saw Ross Gay and Patrick Rosal in the audience, sprawled across those leather sofas.

Fittingly, my Unbound began and closed with Ross Gay, the patron saint of ecstatic gratitude. Just as my gratitude for a lively and community-focused day of literary programming was reaching its apex, I headed to Serendipity, a beauty salon that somehow features a ballroom. It was there that Gay would attempt a poetic marathon — to read the entirety of Be Holding, his revelatory 2020 book-length poem about Julius Irving and so much else. After a quick intro, Gay gave a self-effacing warning that there probably wouldn’t be time for questions and launched into the poem. The next hour was the most captivating and emotional live poetry experience I’ve ever had. To hear Gay stretch out into that poem, with all its punchlines and observations and heartbreak, was to see a master at work. To see it in the back of a beauty salon in a small Missouri college town was a testament to the fine minds of our region, using their creativity and panache to make literary happenings happen. And I’m grateful for that.

The post A Beauty Parlor, a Movie Theater and a Bunch of Sofas appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Oddball Hoedown calls upon an intergenerational dance tradition hailing from Europe and popularized in the so-called United States. Contra associations, organizations and enthusiasts from Charleston Folk to Portland Country Dance Community agree that “contra dancing is social interaction, meeting people and making new friends, set to music. The rest is just details.” European colonists brought contra to Turtle Island where it became known as New England or Appalachian folk dance or, most commonly, barn dance. Contra, although undoubtedly influenced by indigenous dance from both Turtle Island and West Africa, remains a pillar of Euroamerican ancestral culture.

Contra dances are inviting to beginners as there is a lesson before the dance commences. In the gender-flexible tradition of LGBT+ square dance clubs, Oddball Hoedown attendees were given the choice to be a Robin or a Lark (rather than lady or gentleman). No partner was required for attendance and with 75 folks adorned in blue-collar boots, cowboy hats and jeans, stylized with everything from corset modifications to floral embroidery, none were left wanting.

It was against this backdrop that our caller Charlie Myers oriented us to the space and structure of the evening. The lesson was characterized by repeated attempts to redirect the mostly-millennial, city-folk crowd’s giddy distractedness and capture the audience’s “listening ears.” The dynamic reflected varying levels of buy-in and felt indicative of a general discomfort with trying, failing and persevering. The lesson, scheduled for an hour, went over twice as long. Unfortunately, this meant that by the end of the night, the band Halfsider — Tricia Spencer, Howard Rains, Rachel Krause and 2022 Kansas State Fiddle champion Isaiah Sibi — hardly had a chance to play an entire song, let alone a curated set fashioned for continuous dancing. The bar was open for patronage and there was no shortage of dynamic outfits to compliment, which greased the wheels of social interaction. However, genuinely meeting new people was limited as we remained much in the same place and order for the majority of the evening.

In barn dance mutual aid tradition, Kansas City improvisational quilter Nathan Ford raffled two textiles to raise funds for KC Tenants, a citywide coalition of tenant unions advocating for safe, affordable, equitable housing in the face of discrimination and gentrifying development. KC Tenants was a pertinent cause as LGBT+ individuals are 120% more likely to experience houselessness than non-LGBT+ individuals and 20% have or will experience houselessness. At the time of the event, the conditions that create this disproportionate struggle were augmented by 340 anti-LGBT+ bills percolating through the nation. One-hundred and fifty of those bills target trans people, the most anti-trans bills ever filed in the US. Revitalizing LGBT+ social spaces and building our capacity to materially support one another is a tactic of resistance. Barn dances have long been sites that materially empower communities through fundraising, collective movement and social inclusion regardless of age, skill or ability.

With this sociopolitical context and at a gender-inclusive folk dance, Ford’s off-kilter textiles evoked the AIDS Memorial Quilt. However, antithetical to the optics of the quilts and the event being advertised as “inclusive” for “people of all identities and abilities,” COVID vaccinations were not checked at the door nor were masks required. It was haunting to watch a community fundamentally altered by the ongoing HIV/AIDS crisis perpetuate another health crisis that disproportionately affects the most marginalized in our community.

In the U.S., as the homogenizing fist of fascism tightens its grip, capitalist alienation and technological isolation are underscored by an uptick in highly-visible state-sanctioned and intercommunity violence. It is essential to cultivate deconstructionist, historically-informed ancestral reconnection that seeks to undo and resist assimilation and oppression. Contra dancing, especially when inclusive to the LGBT+ community, is a ripe opportunity to enter Euroamerican ancestral practice and reframe aestheticization and depoliticization of Americana. Further, the synchronous, communal nature of contra provides an opportunity to shed shame about our bodies and coregulate our nervous systems in step with one another.

I hope that, as people critically engage with communal dance spaces like the Oddball Hoedown, we have the opportunity to truly, inclusively dance, laugh and struggle together. I hope to see more masks, meet more elders and hear more music. I hope that the Oddball Hoedown continues to become a space that builds trust and community such that we may dance into the future, together.

Follow @Oddball_KCMO on Instagram
for updates on future dances and check out
Crosscurrents Barn Dance on Facebook for more
Kansas City area events.

The post Friendly Folk at the Oddball Hoedown Contra Dance appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

All Bolstad knew about Anna was that she settled in the prairies of North Dakota — an untamed woman on untamed land pursuing the American Dream — then disappeared in 1907.

But when a $2,400 check arrived in the mail for Bolstad’s mother from an oil and gas company during the 2009 Bakken oil boom in North Dakota, the Bolstads learned about the subsurface mineral rights to Anna’s old homestead. Three months later, Bolstad’s mother died and the rights became Bolstad’s inheritance.

Compelled by Anna’s mystery and the family mantra “We could be rich,” Bolstad decides to find out what happened to her great-grandmother and how these family rights came to be. Windfall is a memoir about Bolstad’s search for family inheritance alongside the North Dakota Bakken oil boom and the cruel treatment of women and the environment in pursuit of riches.

Welcome to Boomtown
Bolstad is a journalist who spent many years covering climate change and environmental issues for publications like The Washington Post and Scientific American. Part memoir, part travelogue and geological survey, Windfall weaves together personal family history with journalistic reporting on fracking’s negative impact on climate and communities. The chapters in Windfall are marked by the price of oil, keeping the oil boom at the forefront of the reader’s mind. “Chapter 2: Prairie Potholes. August 2013, North Dakota crude: $97.18 per barrel.”

Billions of barrels of oil were being fracked in the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota, leading Bolstad to think, “I was the only person who could write a story that connected this ancestor of mine to modern-day climate change.” Bolstad hopes her employer will approve her to research her family’s connection to the oil boom, but they decline. Determined to uncover Anna’s story, Bolstad takes a vacation and funds her own research. “Unexpected windfalls have a way of showing up,” her mother always said. Could this be hers?

When Bolstad arrives in North Dakota, she uses her press credentials to book a tour at Continental Resources oil and gas production facilities — a behind-the-scenes look at an industry mostly closed off to outsiders. As she drives, Bolstad is shaken by the methane flares that light up the night sky. The crisis written on the horizon. The pumpjacks burning off the natural gas, a visible representation of what is warming our climate.

Throughout Windfall, Bolstad’s journalistic strengths shine in her detailed account of history, geology and the mechanics of fracking.

Legacy and Lost Stories
The facts and figures that seem to move us away from Bolstad’s personal story are in fact inextricably intertwined with it.

As Anna’s story begins to unfold, we learn that shortly after applying for her homestead, she got married. Four months after she gave birth to her son, Anna’s husband had her involuntarily committed to an insane asylum; diagnosis: manic depressive insanity. Today we’d call it postpartum depression.

What does it mean for a woman to lose her grip? A cruel winter turned its brutality on a mother trying to manifest a better life. Anna’s ghost is with the reader, the wind blowing through each chapter. Silenced in her lifetime, with all the stories lost and never passed down.

When Inheritance Comes at a Cost
The American Dream has always been wrapped up in land ownership. Westward expansion. Manifest Destiny. The windswept privilege of opportunity.

At its core, Windfall is a story of disappearance and survival. The interconnected story of mental and climate health. Property and conquest of women and land. Progress brings peril. Wealth is the engine that drives destruction. With the possibility of “We could be rich” comes “We will destroy.”

Bolstad applies the same interrogation to her own circumstances as she does to her environmental reporting. Could Bolstad reconcile accepting the oil money at the expense of the environment? Could she accept the rights to minerals below land that wasn’t hers?

We mine our lineage, like the land, trying to dig up something that will tell us about ourselves. Who are we? Where do we come from? Where does real wealth come from?

The entry point may have been Bolstad’s family history, but the story at large is about all of us. The history of this nation, our relationship to capitalism and climate change. Our own cycles of boom and bust and the stories we might leave for the future to find.

The post A Complicated Inheritance appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

In the Author’s Note, Sawers writes, “Fairy tales are often the first stories that will teach us what stories can do.” And the stories in this collection do so much — deconstructing the prejudiced underpinnings of fairy tales and building a new framework. They’re similar to Helen Oyeyemi’s work in that way, but by also integrating Eastern legends and embracing the flash form, Sawers is completely original. Immensely smart in its bold confrontation of form, the compilation of flash stories, some a mere paragraph, offers a fresh reimagining for what fairy tales can be. The Anchored World was a finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, an achievement for any book, but a considerable feat for a weird slim book from a small independent press.

The individual stories are delightfully unique and humorous: there’s a retelling of “Thumbelina” where the protagonist, Hazel, has found her husband in a can of Spam; a tale of someone who has a goat inside their heart; and a title story which is a mashup of multiple tales, including “Jack and the Beanstalk” and Thai folklore. An index at the end of the book offers the origin for those stories based on fairy tales or legends, but many — and arguably the most compelling — are those in the vein of a fairy tale, but which transcend convention. In a story that needs a content warning, even for its title, “How to Commit Suicide,” Sawers uses the form of a list to weave a tale of domestic violence and gaslighting. The title is jarring (mental health activists have pushed for replacing ‘commit’ with ‘die by’), but the use of the anachronistic term seems intentional. It’s clear from these stories that Sawers is intimately familiar with the flash form, a genre where each word is chosen with care. And Sawers sometimes leverages the use of insensitive, even offensive words, such as in “All Your Fragile History,” a two-and-a-half page story told through a single sentence, which is about a person of mixed heritage getting their dog a DNA test rather than one for themself. The story uses humor to spin what becomes a brutal tale of racism and colorism, with its viciousness especially felt in the rapid succession of racial slurs the narrator has been called.

Some of the stories test the boundaries of fairy tales, such as “An Incomplete List of My Rodent Qualities, as Compiled by My Ex-Boyfriend When He Still Loved Me.” The list-form story is like “How to Commit Suicide,” with its hints at abusive relationship dynamics. But a fairy tale can be a cautionary story, as well as full of magic and enchantment. “Synergy Cooperative HousingTM and You!” begins, “Welcome to your new home! Don’t worry about the goblins that live in the walls.” It’s a contemporary horror story with a dash of gruesomeness, tempered by Sawers’ signature humor. There’s so much variety in these stories, but one thing they share is that the prose is gorgeous, poetic and sparse. An example from the last story, “The Gingerbread Cycle”: “The trick for troublesome mouse-types nibbling at your house, disturbing your hard-won peace, is a hot oven and the heartiest vegetables from your garden, a cage of bones, the howl of your loneliness transforming your touch into brambles, your hunger into fangs, your softness into brittle dough that cracks like thunder before it crumbles.”

The Anchored World is wholly original and full of enchantment. Sawers marks themself as a spellbinding writer willing to take risks and push the boundaries of convention, and the result is thrillingly new fairy tales for a contemporary readership.

The post Subversion and Enchantment appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Whether her essays are set in the central California coast of her childhood, the Nebraska plains of her grad school years or the New England acres of her adulthood chosen home, these essays stitch together the rootless angst and sufferings of her traumatic childhood with the broader reality of a planet irreparably harmed by an anxious and indifferent human species.

As the title suggests, many of these essays explore Montgomery’s lifelong search for a sense of home. This search draws connections to the narrator’s unpacking the traumatic experiences of her childhood: alcohol, violence, her parents’ haphazard approach to fostering other children, poverty, food insecurity and the consummate stress of constantly moving and feeling unsafe. Following the instability of childhood, Montgomery’s becomes an upwardly mobile college professor moving from California to Nebraska to Massachusetts, yet her childhood haunts her, making it difficult for any new place to truly feel like home, compounded by her growing awareness that climate change is making more and more places inhospitable.

Whereas Dillard could tell her memoirs as if all simply returns to the land, Montgomery writes plainly that we are “nostalgic for a time that will no return.”

Throughout the book, Montgomery underscores the various connections between her restlessness of spirit and her rootlessness of place. Prior generations might have prescribed staying in one place as a way to feel connected. But what if those places are no longer safe or inhabitable either due to external changes in the environment, personal trauma of the individual or — increasingly — both?

This sense of rootlessness is on display most in essays about her grad school years in Nebraska, and this relatively brief stay in the Midwest is one of the book’s few weaknesses –these essays lack the depth, nuance and humanity of the California and Massachusetts essays. Nebraska may have invited her to “be part of it rather than observer,” but to paraphrase Wendell Berry, she didn’t stick around long enough to even become disillusioned.

Out of 18 essays in the book, only two are not devoted to living on one of the coasts. In the essays about her time in Nebraska, she seems only able to skim the surface of what makes the Midwest appealing to the millions who call it home. “What I found was that it wasn’t hard to love the Midwest; it isn’t hard to love any space if you are mindful.” While this is a nice sentiment, it could be applied to any place.

Montgomery journals her cross-country drive to Lincoln in an essay about cartography. The essay is a well-researched study of cartography paired with great insights into the follies of mapmaking, of lands and human life alike. Reflecting on Lewis and Clark’s maps, she writes, “Read their journals and you’ll find the daily accounts of men looking to write the world onto a foldable space.”

While the Nebraska essays don’t carry the same power and weight as the rest of the book, Montgomery does describe well some aspects of the Midwestern landscape that can’t be found on the coasts or in the mountains: “Physical maps promise flatland, leave the page smooth and unblemished. In doing so, they neglect the Midwestern sky, which is as fierce and terrifying during a summer storm as it is awesome when calm, the way it domes across the expanse of space, curves higher and further than it could anywhere else in the country.”

Nature writers and memoirists of previous generations shared some level of privilege in writing about humanity’s relationship to the earth through more romantic or utopian lenses. As someone in the same generation as Montgomery, I found myself wondering if her approach to reckoning with these connections is the only option remaining for those of us whose life memories are necessarily clouded by the reality of a warming planet.

In “Descendent,” for example, Montgomery explores her family’s generational connections to the work of mining. She writes, “Trace our family tree back far enough and you’ll find generation after generation dead from mining America, mining England, scooping out the land and leaving it — and with it, ourselves — empty.”

I couldn’t help but remember the opening pages of Annie Dillard’s masterful 1987 memoir, An American Childhood, and the way Dillard suggests that if everything else fell away from her memory, she believes what would remain is the topography of her childhood Pennsylvania — the way the land is, was and always shall be. As much as I hold Dillard in high regard, I wonder now if it is another generational divide in which those in my parents’ and Dillard’s generation can believe fully in the resiliency of humanity and the earth itself, while my generation and those who follow can only strive to honestly process our memories in the context of broad-scale suffering, an altered planet and uncertain future. Whereas Dillard could tell her memoirs as if all simply returns to the land, Montgomery writes plainly that we are “nostalgic for a time that will not return.”

The post Restless in Spirit, Rootless in Place appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Enter Bridget Everett and the HBO series Somebody Somewhere. Born and raised in Manhattan, Kansas, Everett relocated in the late 1990s to Manhattan, New York, where she is best known for her raunchy bare-all cabaret acts. Now in her late 40s and with the star power to lead a show of her own, Somebody Somewhere asks: What happens if Everett never left Kansas?

Billed as a “coming-of-middle-age” story, each of the season’s seven half-hour episodes focuses on Sam Miller (Everett) and the small inroads she makes toward a sense of belonging in a town she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to. After a decade spent bartending in Lawrence, she returned to Manhattan to care for her sick sister Holly. Now six months removed from Holly’s death, Sam still finds herself in her hometown, paralyzed by grief and unable to leave her parents, Ed (the late Mike Hagerty) and M.J. (Jane Brody), and living sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison).

Sam’s house-bounding grief is no match for Joel (Jeff Hiller), a former classmate who works alongside her in a dreary standardized testing center. Joel better remembers Sam as a standout from their high school show choir days and makes it his mission to get Sam back into singing. With his extroverted encouragement, Sam joins a clandestine performance group known as “Choir Practice” — hosted late-night in the town’s mall church and home to Manhattan’s queer community — and finds a path back to herself (and her singing voice) again.

It feels like Everett made this show as much for Kansans as for herself. She joined producers Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, both proud Midwesterners (from Illinois and Minnesota, respectively), in the writer’s room. I get the sense HBO said, “Who in our ranks is from the Midwest?” and threw these three into a room together to make the quintessential Midwestern show. What they made is still revolutionary, and certainly more homehitting than Ted Lasso’s vaguely Midwest-ish niceties.

With Midwest voices crafting the narrative both on and off screen, the result is an accurate story that doesn’t treat Manhattan’s inhabitants as caricatures or the entire state as Conservative Flyover Country. The beauty of Somebody Somewhere is that it gives Kansans of all ages, beliefs and lifestyles permission to exist in nuanced ways against an authentic central Kansas backdrop of corn stalks and limestone buildings. Everett proves Kansans are not exempt from loneliness or heartbreak, even in the middle of a tornado warning.

The show’s visual landscape provides a scavenger hunt for Kansan viewers, adding a layer of specificity to the overarching themes of grief, homecoming and belonging. Real Kansas goods and places, like Kansas Earth and Sky candles, pepper B-roll footage and color in the background with regional loyalty. A bag of Guy’s Tasty Mix is in the foreground as Sam and her dad discuss what to do about this year’s crop harvest. Sam sips on a Boulevard Tank 7 during a backyard dinner, where it becomes obvious Sam’s mom is hiding a drinking problem. Tricia sports an Alma Creamery t-shirt as she sweeps up all the booze bottles their mom has hidden in the barn.

Somebody Somewhere texturizes its nonverbal storytelling with actual Kansas life. These snacks, drinks and T-shirts are the background terrain of our lives’ most intimate moments. They aren’t fake talismans of regionality like Ted Lasso’s JoeArthur Gatestack, an amalgamation of four different Kansas City BBQ restaurants. They are recognizable homegrown brands (though, as my husband pointed out in a recent re-watch, Tank 7 bottles aren’t yet twist-offs).

The irony that Everett had to leave the Little Apple for a career in the Big Apple to finally have the freedom to make a show set in Kansas is not lost on me. Somebody Somewhere is one of 23 total shows set in Kansas since the dawn of television. In the 2020s alone, there are already 20 shows set in New York City. I do wish there were room for native Kansas voices to have a seat at the table without first having to justify their performance chops in New York or Hollywood. Until that day comes, I am grateful for Everett’s voice having a presence on a premiere streaming platform — and for the promise of a second season.

The post Bringing Us Home appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Figures are forever in stages of becoming. In “Algal Bloom,” two adolescent friends flirt with one another, daring each other to swim in a toxic lake. The threat of the encounter is a complex coming-of-age moment where a lake destroyed by prior generations lures the young friends to swim into an erotic encounter. As with their immersion in algae, the boundaries of Harlan’s characters consistently fluctuate throughout the book, turning into landscape or animal or other even as they reach through time periods and generations. In “Take Only What Belongs to You,” the protagonist, Esther, takes her girlfriend to D.C. to posthumously confirm that a beloved author of Esther’s childhood was a lesbian. The story privileges Esther’s own coming into queerness, for unlike the girlfriend, who had an “unwavering moment of recognition, how kissing a girl was such clear evidence, how everything being dealt with from there began from that point of certainty,” Esther “had an entire adolescence of baffled, stomach-aching love … of the silence and then the language unspooling uselessly into it.” Harlan adeptly embraces subjective uncertainty and instability through a remarkable precision of prose.

Humanness often elides with the animal and plant: “When Vienna laughed, her mouth became a new animal,” or “Aunt Vera was contained like a dead bird in a cardboard box,” or later on, “She’s laid Naomi bare like a moth pinned to paper.” But animals are present in and of themselves, too, particularly pregnant ones — for instance, when “Dorothy sees that one of the cows in the next field is pregnant. She sees the fetus curled inside, its pink, alien body translucent and veined with dark blood, the flat moonstone of its underdeveloped eye,” or the description of parental habits of various insects and birds in “The Changeling” — “I was thinking about a kind of wasp that laid its eggs in caterpillars. Parasitoid wasps, which instead of stingers have a needle-sharp ovipositor and deposit their larvae beneath the host’s skin.” The stories interrogate conceptions of humanness, simultaneously illustrating the way daily interactions bring out different traits and how our supposedly non-human landscapes have been so permeated by human industry as to make them no longer natural.

There is something dangerous about the instability of these constant transitions between states. They are both material and psychological yet banal enough to be easily overlooked, except for the language. Harlan’s metaphors capture each change, fixing it in space and memory. She plays this idea to extremes, teasing out the erotic potential and nourishment of more-than-human flux. In her title story, “Fruiting Bodies,” the beloved, Agnes, grows mushrooms on her body and feeds her beloved. “I ate of my lover between her breasts, and held the little heads of the enokis in my mouth for her to taste. I ate of my lover at the musty crease of her belly, where the smallest frill of oyster mushrooms had begun.” Any certainty about what defines any of us therefore becomes flexible in this book, non-intrinsic, affording the magic of shape shifting in prose to amplify the ways in which definition is somehow arbitrary, necessary and potentially violent. “Nothing magical is safe, nothing safe is magical.”

The landscape in these stories is as important as the characters. An awareness of wildfires peppers characters’ conversations. Lakes are not passive bodies for swimming but dangerous realms of systemic toxicity and psychological expression. The destination of Glacier National Park for two sometime-lovers on a final road trip becomes a tourist excursion to absence. “The sign told me that in fifty years, 85 percent of the ice had melted. The sign told me that they expected it all to be gone by 2030.” While currently teaching writing at the University of Wisconsin, Harlan’s master of fine arts alma mater, it makes sense that the California native might be particularly aware of the reciprocal impacts of climate change and subjectivity. California is regularly affected by wildfires, drought, insect infestations and heat waves. But Harlan’s characters try to adapt to their precarity. They fall into love and friendships saturated with ambivalence and fraught attachments, asking, what is love at the end of a world? Harlan often mentions bones, algae, corn stalks, glaciers, skin, dead fish, soft animals and translucent or porous skin, as though each story contains a sublimated recipe of items (and related themes) whose ratios combine in different ways, bringing their distinct worlds to life.

Fruiting Bodies captures an uncynical approach to growing up in a world of ecological duress where no “away” exists, no not-human place, no pristine alpine landscape to stage the perfect Universal Forever Love Pop Song. The absence of that fantasy instead has presence, troubling the lives of characters as they attempt to forge their own way towards self-discovery. Even with the danger of inevitable disappointment, the characters in Fruiting Bodies maintain an appetite for intimacy, stories, magic and knowledge despite — or even because of — their fraught contingency.

The post Forever in Stages of Becoming appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

I did not want to be a serious snail-watcher. Life was busy. Plus, using a digital file as a field guide seemed antithetical to the way I normally thumb through guide books. Slimy snail fingers on my iPhone screen? No, thank you.

Then the pandemic hit. Time opened up. One day on a hike I crouched low to inspect two tiny snails clinging to a wet leaf. The shells were empty; no one was home. Perhaps, I thought, snails could teach me about the fragility of life. I brought them home to identify and was drawn into a new world.

Land Snails opens with a creation story: “The first man first began as a snail.” Although I found no such tale from primary sources of the Indigenous tribe the authors credit (they reference the Lewis & Clark papers), the authors’ attempt to mythologize the snail matches their reverence for gastropods throughout the guide book. The authors cover collecting methods, mollusk-mad naturalists (including sisters Frieda Schilling and Hessie Kemper, whose specimens live at major natural history museums), the geometry and vocabulary of shells, practical applications for snail and slug research (such as the study of the nervous system and learning) and evolutionary history. Personally, I was amazed to learn that slugs are more evolved organisms than snails. While snails depend on calcium-rich soil to form their shell, slugs can live in more diverse places. They maneuver easier. Our culture may not perceive slugs to be as desirable as snails, but they live free. I couldn’t stop thinking about this as a metaphor for materialism through the rest of the 2020 spring.

And throughout that cloudy, wet season I found that I couldn’t stop seeing slugs. Every outing spurred new observations, now that I had a guide to consult. When gray fieldslugs made lace out of our basil and peppers, I turned to the book and learned that garden menaces are usually not native species. Missouri-grown slugs would rather recycle dead matter than share in our fresh leaves. Identifying each species helps me understand how to live with them.

Near my house I found trees crowded at their bases with snails. Sometimes I tried using the guide to identify them. Their dark brown shells and black bodies ranged in size from that of a peppercorn all the way up to the size of my thumbnail. Did I hold a dusky button? Brown. Big whorls. “4 1⁄3 whorls” — a charming way to measure and compare their spiral asymmetry. But the opening was too big, and there was no lip to their shells. Things get more complicated from there. “Although very similar in appearance to Mesomphix firiabilis [brittle button!], the microsculpture of M. capnodes is very distinctive,” Oesch writes. “At high magnification, it has clear cut spiral and axial lines forming a regular pattern of microscopic highlights.”

This presented a dilemma. On one hand, if I had to use a microscope to determine differences, does such detailed identification really even matter? On the other hand, science invites us to consider the mysteries around us. Embracing the wonder of a world in snail-scale made me read closer and take the distinctions more seriously, even if I don’t retain the details of each shell’s sculpture.

Thus, snail study is not just for avid naturalists like Schilling or Kemper. It’s for people who believe they can strengthen bonds with their community by learning more about their neighbors. Snails and slugs experience the world in leaf bits and wood rot and ambivalence toward vertical inclines. That can be a happy place to be, especially in dark times.

As a writer of ecology, I love this book. It is full of vivid natural history, physiological traits and factors of the landscape. The common names alone gave me a new, poetic vocabulary: globular drop, cherrystone drop, slender walker and ice thorn. Plains snaggletooth, eightfold pinecone, rivercliff threetooth, lovely vallonia.

It’s a shame that MDC won’t print Land Snails, as they have with so many great guides (although the guide’s availability as a free download makes it wonderfully accessible). Medium notwithstanding, I must confess I’ll probably never be a great snail-watcher. Sometimes I do come home with a shell, wash my hands of soil and slime, open the PDF and try to enliven a specimen with a name. I always learn something just by looking. I always look to the ground with fresh eyes.

The post Slugs for the Next Generation appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Dessa, born Margaret Wander, was one of the last two original members to join the nine-member Minnesota hip-hop collective Doomtree. She has enjoyed a successful career with the collective since joining in 2005 as a solo artist, through poetry and fiction writing, guest and keynote speaking, and local musical education outreach. Defining a precise Minnesota sound may be futile, but based on growing up in the state and listening to artists like Prince, Atmosphere, Brother Ali, Desdemona and Doomtree, the Minnesota hip-hop sound seems to contain a few key elements. It at least includes lived experience and storytelling, tight and contextualized music production, an edge of indie-production and, more than anything, flow that rivals the most articulate and word-savvy artists out there. Dessa’s recent EP, IDES, exhibits many elements of this sound, resulting in a tight and overall successful album.

IDES comprises seven tracks, the first six of which were released on the 15th of each month from January 2021 to the following June — the Ides of March, the Roman day for settling debts, occurs yearly on the 15th of the month. The seventh and final track, “LYTP,” was released November 15, 2021, and includes a remix in the final EP release. Through releasing IDES as a monthly installment, Dessa has negotiated an increasingly prevalent issue: the promotion of streaming services based on number of streams or views, especially of singles. This has led some artists to focus less on the overall flow and structure of a full album and choose instead to promote singles. With IDES, Dessa has allowed each track to have its own release, giving each its own time and space while still functioning together as a full EP. Some tracks take on the role of a single, while others successfully work to bridge songs and tie the EP together.

Two of the most notable elements of this EP present themselves with full force from the opening of the first track, “Rome”: the crisp and clean production of the album and Dessa’s flow. Though there are many nuanced ideas about flow, it is basically the rhythm, articulation and unique style of a rapping voice. In “Rome,” Dessa pulls no punches while displaying that her flow and wordplay stand with the best. She raps, “Chekhov says you got a gun, you gotta use it / Guess they’re reading Chekhov downtown, in their cruisers,” dropping the listener right into the thick of important social commentary. In every track of IDES, the beats and various melodic material never get in the way of Dessa’s voice, something that some hip-hop artists struggle with. Each track’s production team comprises some combination of Andy Thompson, Lazerbeak, Paper Tiger, Michael Piroli and Dessa.

“Bombs Away” and “Life on Land,” the second and third tracks, are a departure from the opening. These both ride at a slower tempo, evoke nostalgia and are heartachingly beautiful. Rather than a focus on social commentary, these two tracks draw especially on Dessa’s creative writing talents. “This song started as a simple keyboard line,” she writes about “Life on Land” on her personal website. “There was a woman who had exhausted both her luck and her company. The details were blurry, but she was in a decadent setting, a casino, maybe — proximity to pleasure. And even while commiserating half-heartedly with a companion, she was occasionally whisked out of her own world, as she had been many times before, to a calmer, alien place far away from the flashing lights and traffic of the human scene.” The music and lyrics come together especially well here to tell a reflective, melancholic story. This duo of tracks also functions extremely well as a bridge to the fourth track.

Named for the iconic NPR journalist and interviewer, Dessa’s fourth track, “Terry Gross,” (“I can see, you take your influences wichoo, everywhere you go / Mine were Carmen Sandiego, Lauryn Hill and Terry Gross”) brings the listener back to the movement and flow of the first song. Here the soundscape is marked with rather sparse but meticulous and interesting trap and bass drum accents. The fifth track, “Talking Business,” gives us an insane display of wordplay based around a wild relationship; real or imagined, the imagery is explicit and evocative: “Facedown on the bedspread, color nearly half-dead / Still recognizable as a regular guest / Missing wallet, missing watch / Something in his tumbler probably stronger than the double scotch.”

At this point in the full album, the drum beats and sparse soundscapes of the more flow-driven tracks become a bit repetitive. However, the penultimate sixth track, “I Already Like You,” opens with a brief but gripping synth keyboard riff before launching into a refreshing and driving groove that pushes through the rest of the song. With a renewed push through the end of the EP, Dessa’s words summarize the track nearly perfectly. “It’s been a long year, man,” she says. “Never wrote one before, but 2021 called for a sexy summer driving song. Windows down, volume up, and maybe a wave for the cute driver one lane over.” This sets up the final track, “LYTP,” which was released five months after “I Already Like You.” This track is a wonderful encapsulation of everything that came before. It has complex wordplay, a beautiful soundscape and a chorus that is crushing: “It looks like she loved you to pieces / But time is on nobody’s side.”

With a play time of just over 21 minutes, IDES runs the gamut of excellent modern hip-hop, engaging complex flow, unbelievable writing and wordplay, production that stands up to the best out there and a range of emotions expressing anger, frustration, serenity, beauty, love and heartbreak. As concepts, a distinct Minnesota sound or a concrete understanding of the knowledge in hip-hop are so ethereal. Yet to listen to Dessa’s IDES is to get a glimpse of this sound and knowledge. This is an album that deserves recognition and will long be on my own playlists. To read more about and listen to the album, see photos of Dessa and her work, watch the official music videos and peruse her creative writing, go to www.dessawander.com.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING:
Doomtree, All Hands (2015)
Dessa, Parts of Speech (2013)
Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998)
Atmosphere, God Loves Ugly (2002)

The post A Minnesota Sound appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.