Set in a small rural Kansas town, it would be easy to imagine it a place so quiet and self-contained that the return of a wealthy family’s prodigal daughter qualifies as legitimate news. Indeed, when a sudden family emergency beckons Lane Roanoke, our primary protagonist, back to the family homestead she’d abruptly abandoned eleven years prior, she returns to find that the more she thought that things changed in her life, the more they actually stayed the same. She’d left before, determined to bury her unsavory memories of Roanoke deep in her subconscious, but much to her chagrin, when she does begrudgingly have to come back, she returns to a place where time has, in effect, been standing still.

In The Roanoke Girls, things seldom are what they seem. Most notably, the namesake cousins of this novel know all-too-well the intimacies of the word “family,” but mostly in a warped, jaded sense of the word. With a time-hopping, character-to-character pace of storytelling that will be easily recognizable to anyone familiar with Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Engel’s commentary through the eyes of Lane and other women in her family challenges many of the preconceived notions and perceptions about what familial love should and could mean to many different people, both readers and characters alike. While the Roanokes have the appearance of a normal well-kept, affluent family in a small town, something much more sinister bubbles just below the surface in a way that only those inside the family know. Unfortunately, they are far from the only people affected by the ripples of the events that unfold within the family.

Lane is hardly an entirely-sympathetic figure. Her story isn’t that of someone trying to escape a place in order to preserve a squeaky clean image as it is about mitigating the amount of damage that her name and presence can leave on those around her. It’s easy to understand how she becomes so prone to self-sabotage, but tough to excuse it, a fact that isn’t entirely lost on her. In fact, the novel is full of moments of introspection, such as this one on page 103: “I wipe tears from my cheeks with the palm of my hand, trying to forget who I am and where I came from. Trying to forget what it means to be me.” But the more and more that Lane comes to grips with her family’s dark heritage, the more she becomes a creature of impulse.

Trouble and tragedy haunt Lane and her fiery cousin Allegra as they try to come to palatable (though largely self-defeating) terms with their own places in the line of multiple generations of troubled women that share their last name. Their dark family secret informs every move the girls make, and neither spend much time fighting the current, self-preservation be damned. As Allegra says: “Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.”

This sordid tale of betrayal, mischief and, ultimately, sadness, is no respecter of person; it leaves an indelible mark on every character it touches, from Allegra, victim of her own self-fulfilling prophecy, to Gran, the seemingly-innocent matriarch of the family, whose quiet tolerance ends up being gravely mistaken for tacit compliance; from Cooper Sullivan, Lane’s formerly-jilted lover with a tough-as-nails exterior but heart of gold, to Sarah, the woman heartbreakingly resolved to staying in a marriage to Allegra’s former flame knowing that his heart will never truly belong to her. No one (un)lucky enough to have contact with the Roanoke girls is safe from the side effects. Suspenseful from the very first page, The Roanoke Girls isn’t here to ask you to choose sides; that would be far too myopic. The scale of relative good versus unspeakable evil is merely a sliding one, and alliances are fluid for both the characters and readers. Trapped in many ways in both in legacy and location, our protagonists know that escape isn’t as simple as leaving. How ironic, then, that only by sticking around do the girls eventually realize, for better or worse, ways to finally transcend their lot in life.

It’s hard not to feel pulled in by the swirling tide of emotions from of this harrowing tale, and by the end, to desire escape or to want out — not because of exhaustion from reading, but for the solace in knowing that you can extricate yourself from the tapestry in a way that the characters are dying to do.

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27240 N. Longwood Dr.

Forest Haven, Illinois

By Jenny Mueller

“Our trees are aspens, but people / mistake them for birches” — so begins Lisel Mueller’s “Another Version,” set in 1970s Midwestern suburbia. This proves to be a territory of error. After mistaking the aspens, which spread along the southern edge of the property where Lisel and Paul Mueller had lived nearly 20 years, their visitors romanticize the couple “as characters / in a Russian novel, Kitty and Levin / living contentedly in the country.” My parents surely matched Tolstoy’s Kitty and Levin in the strength and longevity of their marriage.

But not all happy families feel happy. Nor, by the end of the 70s, did we live in “country” anymore, even though the guests still think so, gazing out with pleasure on the scene.

Our friends from the city watch the birds

and rabbits feeding together

on top of the deep, white snow.

(We have Russian winters in Illinois,

but no sleigh bells, possums instead of wolves . . .

The city friends came from Chicago and its neighbor-city, Evanston. My parents had moved from Evanston in the late 1950s, buying one acre in Lake County, to Chicago’s north. There they built one of the first houses in “Forest Haven,” a tiny subdivision near the interstate. The house stood at the dead end of one of the subdivision’s five streets, in a northwest corner lot separated by barbed wire from a farm that bordered all of Forest Haven’s north end, as well as our portion of its west. In my childhood, in the 1960s, I gazed west through the wire at the edge of the backyard, looking past the small cattle herd that grazed in the sunset, toward the dark line of woods where the pasture ended and my sight ran out. Past that lay the railroad, another small new subdivision, and the Des Plaines River. Contrails burned their courses over me, arrowing back and forth from O’Hare — newly opened to passenger traffic, half an hour down the interstate.

In those early days, it was almost country around the house where Lisel Mueller’s poems were born. She came to this writing late in life — already 41 when her first book was published in 1965. By 1997, when her selected poems won the Pulitzer, she had nearly stopped writing. Glaucoma diminished her ability to read, and she could no longer drive. One day she found my father at the kitchen table, trying and failing to write his own name. He was losing his language to Lewy-Body Disease. She sold the house and moved them to a complex in Chicago, five minutes’ walk from both groceries and my father’s nursing unit. She never wrote another book of poetry.

In “Another Version,” we seem to be at the comfortable end of the 70s American lyric, with its quiet voice, personal sorrows, nature ready-to-hand for muted unities. While the city-slickers admire the peaceable kingdom outside a contented country home, an old man is dying inside. “He is my father,” Mueller writes,

he lets go of life in such slow motion,

year after year, that the grief

is stuck inside me, a poisoned apple

that won’t go up or down.

But “like the three sisters” in Chekhov’s play, “we rarely speak / of what keeps us awake at night.”

like them, we complain about things

that don’t really matter and talk

of our pleasures and of the future:

we tell each other the willows

are early this year, hazy with green.

“Another Version” begins with the visitors’ error and ends with their hosts’ secrecy. The misunderstandings pile up like northern Illinois snow. Russian allusions mask a German story. The old man was Fritz Neumann, who first arrived in Illinois as a political refugee. As a child in Nazi Germany, Lisel was forced to keep quiet about her father, whose known leftism had marked him as an enemy, someone against whom her schoolmates and neighbors should inform. Neumann, too, kept quiet when at home, but often he was far away. For much of the 1930s he took ill-paying temporary teaching work in France and Italy, while his wife raised two daughters alone in Hamburg. In 1937, luck landed him a scholarship to study at a teacher’s college near Evanston. His wife and children joined him in the US in 1939, ending the years in which Lisel clamped her lips tight to suppress her fears — the child’s terror that her parents might disappear, made very real by her father’s two arrests. Now Lisel became a Midwesterner. She lived all her adult life in Indiana and Illinois. She wrote often of her own luck. But she never lost her night fears, and when an interviewer asked if she considered the Midwest home, she dodged the question, answering, “Let me say what countless other displaced persons must have said: I am more at home here than anywhere.”

Her father remained on the move: from teaching job to teaching job in America, then returning to his native Hamburg after the death of his wife in the 1950s. Remarried unhappily, he kept traveling, steamshipping across the Atlantic for long US visits. One night in the 1970s, he touched down at O’Hare and never left. A stroke had stricken him with aphasia. He retained, however, a teacher’s memory for history: treaties, battles, empires, republics.

But how many people understood that there were non-Jewish German political refugees? In my experience, the old man who came to die with us represented little-known history that always puzzles Americans, even now. My mother sometimes invoked a more famous poet, Brecht, as a short-hand. In poems about her parents, she borrowed Brecht’s description of European exiles “changing countries more often than shoes,” and she quoted Brecht’s sorrow at talk of small pleasures in terrible times, his despair that a casual “talk about trees is almost a crime / since it means being silent about so much evil.”

Undoubtedly, Lisel Mueller talked about trees: aspens and willows, the great maple that still stands at an edge of the front yard — if I can trust the internet. But I can’t, of course, since the house is currently listed on Zillow as “uninhabitable.” On my laptop, I can see that the windows are boarded in the upstairs room that became my mother’s study, from which we saw the long views north and west. In that study, she wrote the books for which she won awards, poems that were popularized on the radio by the era’s voice of the Midwest, Garrison Keillor. The Poetry Foundation praises her work “for its attentiveness to quiet moments of domestic drama, and its ability to speak to the experiences of family and semi-rural life.” Happy families in suburban nature, quietly sad, the great luck of a long, loving marriage. But she also wrote, almost always, of displaced persons, and in a journal she commented, “My preoccupation with history marks me as outside the mainstream of American poetry. No matter how long I’ve lived and written here, that has not changed and will not change.”

In “Another Version,” when the daughter can’t speak of her father, whose life was determined by history, she talks about trees instead. Her poem makes the pain of such evasion its point.

Suburbia is full of oscillations, migrations. My father, who worked in the city, drove back and forth for years on ever more crowded roads. As the subdivisions multiplied along them, our yard filled up with deer, displaced from the cleared woods. My mother likened them to “refugees,” “risking death on the road / to reach us, their dispossessors.” My sister and I moved to Chicago — which made us the city visitors gazing out on the aspens, itching to return to urban streets. There, we were sure, our authentic lives waited.

But some things never change. In 2020, reviewing an anthology of poems responding to the pandemic, the New York Times took furious aim against its “tepid” contents’ resort to natural imagery. There were too many poems “about flowers. Or birds. Or trees.” The New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, had been “wise to rage against tree poems,” the critic complained. And perhaps the book really was tepid. But what an astonishing charge! As if we could still see no urgency in trees. As if we still believed that trees crowded out our witness of history, not the other way around. As if we hadn’t all learned to pronounce a new urbane word, Anthropocene, to slip inside our poems. As if grief, the poisoned apple in my throat, were only for childhood and not for aspens, “country,” snow.

Jenny Mueller lives in St. Louis. She is the author of two books of poetry, State Park and Bonneville, both published by Denver’s Elixir Press. She is also the editor of Moonie, a posthumous e-book of poetry by Brian Young, published by Fence Digital. She is the younger daughter and literary executor of Lisel Mueller. Unlike her mother, Jenny has been able to do years of coursework in creative writing, a privilege she tries to pass on to her students at McKendree University in Lebanon, Illinois.

Photo by Marianne Connell.

To read “Another Version” in its entirety, please visit the website of the Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois, where Lisel Mueller is a featured poet.

The post Lisel Mueller – Forest Haven, Illinois appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

4633 Westminster Place

St. Louis, Missouri

By Devin Thomas O’Shea

Tennessee Williams called St. Louis “cold, smug, complacent, intolerant, stupid and provincial,” in a 1947 interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, playing the heel to his childhood home as he was on his way to becoming one of the most influential and celebrated American playwrights of the twentieth century.

Williams’ relationship to the Midwest is the antithesis of The New Territory’s ethos, “Here is Good.” For Tom, as he was known as a young man, here was very bad. But the repression St. Louis represented was a creative pressure cooker, according to Henry Schvey in Blue Song: St. Louis in the Life and Work of Tennessee Williams. Wild birds would become a ubiquitous symbol throughout Williams’ work: “I feel uncomfortable in the house with Dad when I know he thinks I’m a hopeless loafer,” Tom journaled. “Soon as I gather my forces (and I shall!) I must make a definite break… I have pinned pictures of wild birds on my lavatory screen — significant — I’m anxious to escape — But where & how? — . . . What a terrible trap to be caught in!”

Williams nicknamed his river city home “Saint Pollution” and indeed, the city had a few characteristics of a sulfuric runoff swamp. In the 1920s, St. Louis was the fourth largest city in America, following New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and it was one of the most polluted urban spaces on the planet, culminating in “the day the sun didn’t shine,” in November 1939.

On “Black Tuesday,” as it came to be known, a weather pattern trapped coal emissions close to the ground, blanketing the entire city in a thick smog that smelled of ash. The streetlamps were lit all day, and in his poem “Demon Smoke,” written in 1925, Williams captured the noisy, smelly, industrialized hellscape:

crash and clap of Olive Street

Where nature and man’s work compete

For mastery in the dingy sky;

Where clouds of smoke

And jets of steam

Defy pure air and sunlight’s gleam.

Saint Pollution was no place for wild birds, though as Schvey points out, Tom’s true antagonist lay “not in the physical city, but within his own family.” His father, Cornelius C. Williams, was either absent, drunk, abusive or some combination of all three. Tom’s mother, Edwina Williams, was a repressed socialite never contented with her station in St. Louis society. Tom’s older sister, Rose, was schizophrenic — diagnosed with “dementia praecox” and confined to a mental institution in Farmington Missouri. “She is like a person half-asleep now,” Tom wrote of his sister. “Quiet, gentle and thank God — not in any way revolting like so many of the others.”

All three members of the Williams family were inspiration for various characters throughout Williams’ writing career. “So much of this writer’s work was forged in a crucible of anger and self-conscious rebellion against both family and home,” Schvey writes.

The smokestacks poisoning downtown with demonic coal ash caused all kinds of people to flee west, touching off St. Louis’ westward suburbia as early as the 1880s. The rich built mansion neighborhoods in the clean air, at the periphery of the city, like the Central West End where the Williams family lived for a time, which is now the site of the Tennessee Williams Festival.

In 2021, confronted with COVID-19 restrictions, the festival staged a production of The Glass Menagerie outside of Williams’ childhood home on Westminster Avenue. The production made use of the fire escapes that Williams once walked on, which inspired scenes in the play, as part of the outdoor theater set.

When the Williams family moved out of Westminster Place to their residence on South Taylor, Tom noted the “radical step down in the social scale, a thing we’d never had to consider in Mississippi; and all our former friends dropped us completely — St. Louis being a place where location of residence was of prime importance.” A sensitive, shy Tom Williams seemed to adopt many of his mother’s opinions of the city. “Social status in St. Louis depended on how much money you possessed,” Edwina Williams complained in her memoir Remember Me to Tom. His mother’s inveterate disdain for the city was based largely on her failure to find a social position equivalent to what she possessed as the rector’s beautiful daughter in her previous homes, Columbus and Clarksdale.

Meanwhile, Tom’s father Cornelius was often drunk and fighting with Edwina — complaining loudly about his wife’s disdain for sexual intercourse, warring over the bottle hidden behind the bathtub. Williams describes a Cornelius-like figure in his short story, “Hot Milk at Three in the Morning,” noting that his father often entered the house with “the intention of tearing it down from the inside.”

With this kind of family life, surely a bookish young man could find sanctuary in school, right? As the historian David Loth points out, St. Louis was a booming metropolis known for the “best city school system in the Midwest, and by several years of national ratings, it was considered one of the best school systems in America.” In University City High, Tom learned Latin and received a classical education in art, reading, and writing, but he was teased for his southern accent and “effeminate” manner.

College was not much better. Williams was so ashamed of failing to graduate from Washington University that he omitted mention of his enrollment from his memoir. “I was a very slight youth,” Williams describes himself. A young man beginning to come into his queer sexuality, he writes, “somewhere deep in my nerves there was imprisoned a young girl, a sort of blushing school maiden.”

“Williams was addicted to escaping St. Louis from first to last,” Schvey writes in Blue Song. “It was the great triumph of his life that, unlike his sister, he did manage to literally leave it behind.” After a lifetime of flight, it seems ironic that Williams would be returned to Missouri and buried in Calvary Cemetery alongside his family, but as Schvey notes, “Williams remained tethered to the city for the rest of his life… It was his tragedy that for all his desperate attempts, Tom Williams never really left home. The imagination and willpower that allowed him to devote his life to writing also kept forcing him to return home again in his imagination.”

The restrictive turmoil of the city is a symbolic throughline in William’s work — a wound he returned to over and over.

The Tennessee Williams Festival now carries on his legacy in the Central West End, projecting the author’s words from the cast iron balconies of his former home. A sculpture of the writer decorates the corner of McPherson and Euclid Avenue, across the street from the historic Left Bank Books, capturing a moment in bronze of Williams emphasizing something profound with a cigarette. But St. Louis still owes a debt to Tom Williams — an obligation to prevent yesterday’s traumas and protect the city’s LGBTQ+ community, its wild birds, and its artists.

Devin’s writing is published in Slate, The Nation, The Emerson Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. @devintoshea on twitter, @devintoshea on instagram.

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