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.

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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.

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.”

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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.

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