May 2, 2023 | Illinois, Literary Landscapes, Nature, Poets, Volume 11
Lisel Mueller 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...
Dec 18, 2022 | Literary Landscapes, Missouri, Nonfiction, Volume 10
Kathleen Finneran North CountySt. Louis, Missouri By Marina Henke In the middle of winter a red cardinal lands on a birdbath. It sits, jumps onto a kitchen windowsill and flies away. A suburban backyard just north of St. Louis, Missouri. Such is the opening scene, and...
Oct 6, 2021 | Literary Landscapes, Novelists, Oklahoma, Volume 5
S.E. HINTON CrutchfieldTulsa, Oklahoma By Caleb Freeman One day in the winter of 1981, when the film adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders was still in pre-production, Hinton and Francis Ford Coppola, the film’s director, rode double on a...
Sep 11, 2021 | Literary Landscapes, Novelists, Ohio, Volume 2
Helen Hooven Santmyer Greene County CourthouseXenia, Ohio By Jacob A. Bruggeman I first visited Xenia, Ohio, a small city in the state’s southwestern corner, on a hot May afternoon in 2018. Headed north from Cincinnati on Interstate 71, smoke started rising out from...
Sep 11, 2021 | Literary Landscapes, Missouri, Novelists, Volume 1
William Gass ParkviewSt. Louis, Missouri By Devin Thomas O’Shea The epigraph of The Tunnel reads, “The descent to hell is the same from every place,” but William Gass chose to set his magnum opus in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, called Parkview. Parkview is...
