Arkansas River
Wichita, Kansas

By Amy Barnes

For thirty years, I’ve had the closing line of a poem stuck in my head: “snow fills all the empty graves.” My creative writing teacher at Wichita State University read the poem to an eager circle of young writers. It’s an evocative image of community, grief, emptiness, frigid midwestern winters in a way like no other poem or prose I’ve read. I periodically searched for the impactful words without success.

I spent my childhood in Kansas. School didn’t close when it snowed, and the mail came like clockwork through wind, snow, and sleet. My adult life, married and with children, has been in a series of Southern states, where a light jacket serves in January, and inches of snow keep the mailman away for a week.

My mother recently sent me a book of photographs from my colder childhood years in the Midwest — mostly images of me standing awkwardly next to boyfriends while wearing gaudy, poofy 80s prom dresses. My own adult children are now the same age I was in the photos. But there were also peripheral surprises in the snapshots: grandparents, my first car, first bike, first date, a Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor. 

In one image, I’m caught mid-twirl holding hands with one of those young men, in the middle of the frozen Arkansas River in downtown Wichita. It was more than a sheet of ice that winter. It was thick and turned into a temporary ice-skating rink for lovers and ducks alike.

For the first time since 1996, I recently went back to the region, in part to promote my Belle Point Press collection Child Craft at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, a creative writer’s conference in Kansas City, Missouri. In Tennessee, where I live, there was an unexpected seven inches of snow that paralyzed the area. By contrast, Kansas City was temperate and dry.

In 1991, I was still enrolled at Wichita State University taking creative writing courses from the venerable Albert Goldbarth as a 20-something with little writing and even less life experience. He spoke eloquently of snow, grief and people, read his own poetry aloud to the class, and critiqued our fledgling attempts at imitation. All in a circle. Like mourners around an empty winter grave that stood poetically in my head for decades.

While prolific, Goldbarth is resolutely reclusive. I went in search of that memorable poem, one that I thought was his. While I didn’t locate that specific poem, I came across something in my searches that felt more relevant. The non-fiction piece “These Quiet Poems” by Rick Mulkey and Susan Tekulve appeared in The Georgia Review. The authors open by talking about being Goldbarth’s students two decades earlier, perhaps even when I was also a student. They’re walking along the same Arkansas River that I once ice skated on with a long-ago beau. Goldbarth takes them to a series of his installed, poetic plaques etched in stone that read:

“Snow. Rain. Stream. Sea.

Dew. Mist. Boiled for tea.

The life of water never ends.

It merely has different bodies.”

Those simple words, lined up like a Burma Shave advertisement, summed up everything I felt once I got to AWP: a sense of place, different bodies of water/snow/self, poetry, a return to a new/old home, reading Albert Goldbarth differently three decades apart. Skating on an iced-over pond in my 20s. Writing in my 20s. Writing in my 50s.

At the conference, Goldbarth and I texted briefly, in the same state for a moment. We crossed paths — riding the pink Barbie trolley in opposite directions. We both had off-site readings ironically at the exact same time, a few miles apart. When I asked about the poetry that had eaten at my thoughts for years, he had a quick answer: Maxine Kumin.

I left Kansas City with that name. When I got home, I found myself entranced by not just that one poem I’d sought out, but also her other stunning work — on grief, loss, change, community, war, snow, and life. She died a few years ago, but I discovered so much exploring the profound words she left behind. It was a fitting end to my literary quest only a few hundred miles from where it began.

Those boys buried in plastic photo album sleeves are scattered like snowflakes now and I’ve mailed copies of my collections to the professor, before our empty graves are filled.

Amy Cipolla Barnes is the author of three collections: Mother Figures, Ambrotypes, and Child Craft (Belle Point Press, 2023). She has words at Spartan Lit, Leon Review, Complete Sentence, The Bureau Dispatch, Nurture Lit, X-R-A-Y Lit, McSweeney’s, -ette review, Smokelong Quarterly, The Rumpus, and many other sites. Her writing has been long-listed for the Wigleaf Top50 in 2021-2024, included in Best Microfiction 2025, and The Best Small Fictions, 2022. She’s a Fractured Lit Associate Editor, Gone Lawn co-editor, Ruby Lit assistant editor, Narratively Chief Submissions Reader and course instructor, and also reads for The MacGuffin. 

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Ablah Library

Wichita, Kansas

By Abby Bayani-Heitzman

Filipino American writer Bienvenido “Ben” N. Santos had a complicated relationship with the Midwest. He first arrived in the United States in 1941 as a pensionado, or government-sponsored scholar, to study at the University of Illinois. After World War II, he settled into a career as an educator and taught as a Fulbright exchange professor at the University of Iowa before arriving in 1973 at Wichita State University. He served as a Professor of Creative Writing and Distinguished Writer in Residence until 1982, a period that coincided with his voluntary exile from the Philippines.

During the dictatorship of Philippine President Ferdinand E. Marcos (1965–1986), Santos’ 1982 novel The Praying Man was banned for its perceived criticism of the Marcos regime due to its depiction of political corruption. Although living and working in the Midwest kept Santos free from political persecution, it also distanced him from the country and culture he loved.

I first learned about Ben Santos and his writing while I was a student at Wichita State; as a Filipino American and aspiring writer in Kansas, his story really resonated with me, not least because of his ties to both the Philippines and the Midwest.

After learning about Santos, I started to look at the Wichita State campus differently. I imagined him frequenting Ablah Library, which holds a collection of his personal writings and was my favorite place to study and write. Although there is no sign or sculpture at Wichita State that visibly marks Santos’ time there, I felt that I was following in his footsteps whenever I walked along the path between the library and the English department offices. I also imagined how lonely it must have been for him while he was living so far from both his home country and the well-established Filipino American communities on the coasts.

Themes of geographic distance as well as the distance created by passing time permeate Santos’ stories set in the Midwest. In the 1955 story “The Day the Dancers Came,” Fil, an older Filipino man, eagerly awaits the arrival of a Philippine dancing troupe, planning to invite them to dinner and give them a tour of Chicago, where they are performing. Fil sees the young Filipinos as a way to reconnect with and relive the happy memories he has of his home country. However, his hopes are crushed when the dancers avoid and ignore his invitations.

Before the dancers’ performance, Fil gets the idea to record the audio of the performance—the stomping of feet, the shouting and singing in dialects—with what he calls his “sound mirror,” a portable tape recorder. In this way, he seeks to preserve the past forever, creating a way to immerse himself in his idealized memories through sound.

As a member of an earlier generation of Filipino immigrants, Fil is not only separated from the Philippines he left by a great distance but also by the cultural changes that happen over time. Having not been back to the Philippines since he left as a young man, Fil knows the country only as he remembers it and is reluctant to accept that that place no longer exists. For him, “time was the villain” because it creates a distance that can never be bridged. He knows that what is lost to time is lost forever, and that clinging to a memory can warp how a person perceives the present: “Like time, memory was often a villain, a betrayer.”

Fil records the performance, but in the end, he fails to preserve his sentimental memories of Philippines, its people, and its cultures. By accident, he partially erases the tape and is left with nothing but confused noise:

“Frantically, he tried to rewind and play back the sounds and the music, but there was nothing now but the full creaking of the tape on the spool and meaningless sounds that somehow had not been erased, the thud of dancing feet, a quick clapping of hands, alien voices and words: in this country… everything… all of them… talking eyes… and the scent… a fading away into nothingness, till about the end when there was a screaming, senseless kind of finale detached from the body of a song in the background, drums and sticks and the tolling of a bell.”

Santos seems to suggest that attempting to preserve the past according to subjective beliefs as to what is important is a fruitless struggle. His stories are often concerned with finding a sense of belonging amidst the changes of modernity, and Santos surely experienced these struggles himself while in the Midwest. However, he accepted the changes that life brought and became an American citizen in 1976, while he was living in Wichita. Eventually, he returned to the Philippines — one he may not have recognized but embraced nonetheless.

When I returned to the Wichita State campus to photograph Ablah Library, I was shocked to see all the construction and renovation going on around campus. The place was still recognizable, but I felt a little melancholy that some of my favorite spots might one day disappear or be replaced. Ironically, Ablah Library itself is an example of this kind of development; built in 1962, it was designed by John Hickman, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, and was modeled after Wright’s “Prairie Style” that reflected the expansive landscapes of the Midwest through a dramatic emphasis on horizontal lines. The original long, low profile and details such as a concrete cantilevered balcony over the entrance were eventually obscured by new additions to the building.

The world is a palimpsest, constantly overwriting itself. Like people, cultures, and countries, places change with time. It’s unavoidable, and it’s often necessary, but that doesn’t make it hurt less when we lose what means so much to us. Even so, while I struggle to accept change, I take comfort in the fact that no one can ever really alter the past and the impression that it has left on me. When I visit the places that hold special meaning for me, I see ghosts, traces that show: this was a person, this was a place, and this really happened.

Abby Bayani-Heitzman was born and raised in northeast Kansas, where she continues to live and work. She received her MA in English from Wichita State University and participated in the second cohort of the Kansas Creative Arts and Industries Commission’s Critical Writing Initiative. Since 2020, she has served as coordinator for the Filipino American community organization Malaya Kansas, a chapter of Malaya Movement USA

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