When we seek to make sense of the geographical world, we turn to maps. Their lines, bold or fine, solid or dashed, provide a comforting order. We feel that we know where things are, and how those things are situated to us. Maps, with the plethora of literature and...
Last year, I couldn’t make it to the Mountain Jam Festival, at Hunter Mountain in New York. But I also couldn’t miss out on hearing some of my favorite bands perform, so I faithfully tuned in to XM radio to listen to as much as I could. One day, happily leaving work,...
Amy Engel’s The Roanoke Girls, her first novel for adults, is as gripping and emotional a ride as any in the young adult genre where the Kansas City author got her start. A modern-day take on the Southern gothic style, the book is as captivating as it is deeply...
Sarah Menkedick’s debut memoir, Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm, offers a meditation on the way we live our lives through the stories we tell, and the way that youthful itinerancy ultimately yields to the desire for rootedness, family and home....
I kept seeing “Annie Oakley” written on flyers and newspapers, advertising a band making its way around the Oklahoma folk/Americana music circuit. I kept hearing their name from friends, some even less hip and more out of touch than me, who were fans. At the same...
In a new book by Mark Athitakis, the Midwest is not what we think it is, and, more crucially, neither are the stories spun of it. The Midwest (or the country’s idea of it) momentarily holds a place in the national spotlight for its role in the 2016 election — real,...
