Lakeview Park

Lorain, Ohio

By Ashley Burge

As a teenager, I entered what Toni Morrison calls her narrative “village” through her first book, The Bluest Eye (1970), and I was pleased to see three young Black girls traverse the familiar experiences of home life while prodding the unfamiliar territory of adolescence. I found much comfort in these girls’ fantasies and fears, and I wept, as I still do, over their tragedies. I was also entranced by the way Morrison framed her beautifully tragic characters in picturesque settings of nature and growth and beauty. Any serious Morrison reader is well attuned to her complex and intriguing characters, sparse but rich prose, and “unspeakable” thematic materials. I remember sprawling on my bed admiring these Black girls amidst golden-brown autumn leaves or tight red rosebuds. To me, these snapshots of nature were a buffer to the hopelessly tragic story that would soon unfold.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses the backdrop of Lorain, Ohio, her midwestern hometown, to illuminate the traumas inflicted on young Black girls and women in the 1940s. Specifically, she represents the Edenic Lakeview Park, with its beautiful rose gardens, situated among the pristine beachfronts on West Erie Avenue, as a pathway to cathartic revelation and renewal. For Morrison, nature and the natural world are a catalyst for survival, so the book’s version of Lakeview, called Lake Shore Park, is an ideal space to anchor her vision.

Lakeview Park has become a landmark in Lorain County with its approximately 2,500 roses planted in a rotary wheel. The park sits on Lake Erie, its circular design symbolizing wholeness and rebirth. In a more just world, it would be the ideal space for Morrison’s tragic protagonists to transcend the confines of intersectional oppression. But in 1940s Lorain, Ohio, spaces such as these were inaccessible to the three Black girls who epitomize themes of victimhood and survival in Middle America. In The Bluest Eye, these girls, Claudia, Fredia, and Pecola, are accosted by the traumas of racism, sexism, and classism well before they have escaped the naïve joy and confusion of adolescence. The tragic character Pecola does not understand or question her obsessive desire for blue eyes, but she is awestruck when the green-eyed “high-yellow dream child” Maureen Peal enchants teachers, parents, and students. Portrayed as a type of Persephone embodied in Morrison’s season themed narrative, Maureen disrupts the equilibrium of the girls’ identities and symbolizes the overwhelming otherness of Black girlhood in America. In these young girls’ experiences with racism and sexism, Morrison interrogates the worst possible scenarios for those who are othered, marginalized, and dismissed, and she indicts the communities that are complicit in their annihilation.

In many ways, The Bluest Eye is an autobiographical rendering of Morrison’s own othered identity in the small Midwestern industrial town of Lorain, Ohio. Morrison adamantly affirmed her Midwestern roots throughout her career. In conversation with Collette Dowling, she said, “Everything I write starts there…. Whether I end up there is another question, but that’s the place where I start…. It’s my beginning, my ‘thing,’ and I have distorted it, piled things on, I have done whatever it is that writers do to places, and made it my own. So it is mine now.”  Even while claiming the Midwest as her own, she confessed to Robert Stepto, “I know that I never felt like an American or an Ohian or even a Lorainite.”

Morrison’s allegiance to the Midwest shows in her ability to carve out the validity of Black identity in a region that often silences diverse voices. Morrison’s family faced such disenfranchisement. Before relocating to the Midwest for better opportunities, they had deep roots in the South, with her mother being from Alabama and her father from Georgia. She often recounts the story of 88 acres of land that were legally taken from her Native American maternal great-grandmother to show how white supremacy and systematic oppression renders land inaccessible to Black and brown people.

Morrison emphasizes this extension of day-to-day oppression in The Bluest Eye as she traces the growth and then disintegration of Pecola’s character. Before a pivotal scene in which Pecola is rejected by her mother and humiliated in front of the little white girl who her mother cares for, Morrison details the natural beauty of the white neighborhood that these young girls cannot access:

“We reached Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables. It was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water. Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.”

Here, Morrison embosses the fictionalized Lake Shore Park onto Lorain’s own Lakeview Park, with its lush rose gardens, manicured lawns, and picturesque lakeside. The tragedy of its beauty is that these young Black girls in 1940s Lorain are denied access to the dream of smelling those rosebuds, playing on those lawns, or frolicking on that lakeside. They are shut out from its beauty in nature and, therefore, alienated from their community, which adds to the despair that leads to Pecola’s demise.

When I reflect on my first immersion into The Bluest Eye as a teenager, I realize that my delight in Morrison’s poetic rendering of nature points to the reclamation of spaces that have been historically inaccessible to the Black community. Within that legalized denial enacted prior to the 1960s there was not only the unspoken denial of the ecstasy of nature but also the disenfranchisement of property, wealth, and mobility that still plagues Black Americans today. I was not personally denied access to Lorain’s natural enclaves, but the tragic narrative of denial was a tangible specter that haunted my hometown of Birmingham, Alabama even in my adolescence.  

These are, perhaps, the sentiments that impressed upon me as I empathized with Claudia, Frieda, and Pecola. And these are, perhaps, the sentiments that many Black Americans must navigate as they encounter the traumas connected to public parks and natural resources in America. It would not be difficult to surmise that Morrison incorporates the tragic denial of Lake Shore Park in her narrative because her desire to access its beauty and nature also dominated her own dreams as a child. However, Morrison’s novels never persist in the tragic nor linger too long into despair. At their core, they are about healing that can lead to survival and subjectivity. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison took the pang of rejection and adorned the park with flourish and meaning and gravitas and three little Black girls whose voices would have otherwise been silenced. Now, Lakeview Park is forever hers, and through her reclamation, it becomes ours.

Dr. Ashley Burge is an Assistant Professor of African American literature at Augustana College–Illinois specializing in 19th and 20th century African American literature. Her research and teaching emphasize the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class. She also explores Black feminism and ecocriticism in her writings. Her essays have appeared in the North Carolina Literary Review, the Pennsylvania Communication Annual, the African American Encyclopedia of Culture, and the critical anthology Through Mama’s Eyes. Her current book project establishes a theoretical paradigm that transmutes trauma and fragmentation to wholeness and subjectivity in African American literature. 

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River Cabin
Blackhawk Island, WI

By Shanley Wells-Rau

I was the solitary plover

a pencil

______for a wing-bone

What more solitary place than a small off-grid cabin on an island that’s not really an island jutting into a lake that’s not really a lake. The cabin was a writing sanctuary for Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), said to be America’s greatest unknown poet, who will forever be linked to Blackhawk Island in southeast Wisconsin.

Look at Blackhawk Island on a map and you’ll see it’s actually more of a peninsula that points into what is called Lake Koshkonong, an open water area that is really just the Rock River being messy all over its flood plain. The river likes to outstretch itself and in its flood-prone ways created a recreational haven for boaters and fishers.

Placed less than 100 feet from the Rock River, Niedecker’s cabin was bought as a kit from a catalog and assembled by her father in 1946. He sited it closer to the road than the river in hopes of preventing displacement during the regular floods of spring. Elevated on concrete feet, the 20×20 one-room house hovers over four cement steps. The front and only door faces east, away from the river, as if to shrug off the idea of annual flooding. This one room contained her life: bed, books, table, typewriter, sink, pencils, hand-held magnifying glass. With no running water, she hauled buckets as needed from her parents’ house across the road. That was the house she grew up in. The house she needed to escape.

Her father, a congenial carp seiner and fisherman’s guide who was inept with finances, was carrying on an affair with a married neighbor close in age to his daughter. This neighbor and her husband were milking Henry Niedecker of property and money. Her mother, Daisy, had lost her hearing after her only child’s birth and turned her head away from her husband. Her “big blind ears” couldn’t hear what her eyes couldn’t see. A lifetime of fighting flood mud, “buckled floors,” and increasing poverty seem to have settled around her like a mourning shawl.

Niedecker left the area a few times—for college until the family’s finances made her quit (early 1920s), for artistic and romantic companionship with a fellow poet in NYC (early 1930s), for work as a writer and research editor for the WPA in Madison (1938-1942), and finally for Milwaukee in 1963 when she married a man who lived and worked there. But that spit of land brought her back after each exodus. Once married, Niedecker and her husband, Al Millen, returned to the river every weekend, eventually building a cottage riverside just steps from her cabin. They moved into the cottage for good in 1968 when Millen retired. Niedecker lived there until her death on Dec. 31, 1970.

In the opening lines of her autobiographical poem “Paean to Place,” Niedecker submerges herself deep inside a location she said she “never seemed to really get away from.”

Fish

____fowl

________flood

____Water lily mud

My life

____

in the leaves and on water

My mother and I

_________________born

____

in swale and swamp and sworn

to water

Painted green when built, the cabin today is chocolate brown. Sturdy wood, unfinished inside. A brass plaque by the door shines with the lines: “New-sawed / clean-smelling house / sweet cedar pink / flesh tint / I love you.” Her signature is embossed below. When I visited, it was hot and dry. The riverside window was open, allowing a breeze to push stifling July heat into the plywood corners. A lovely space. I could see myself writing there. I told myself I could even manage life with “becky,” as she called her outhouse.

It’s not hard to imagine the constant cleanup from the river’s yearly ice melt and flooding. Tall maples and willows accustomed to watery life block the sun over a dirt yard that would easily mud with rain. The only access to sunshine seemed to be on the riverbank or in a boat on the river itself. The tree canopy jittered with life, a “noise-storm” as Niedecker once wrote to a friend. I looked to see what birds were holding conference, hoping to meet one of the famous plovers so linked to her work. I saw none. Just movement, shadows, and chittering, and I thought of her technique to overcome her own failing eyesight by memorizing bird song. She could see birds as they took flight. Sitting still, they were invisible to her except through their calls and conversations with one another.

I grew in green

slide and slant

_____of shore and shade

Neighbors saw her walking, always walking, stopping to peer in close at some flowering plant. She bent in—nose distance—to see past her own bad eyesight. Before her marriage to Millen, she worked as a hospital janitor in Ft. Atkinson. Her failing eyes required that she work with her body, no longer able to serve as a librarian’s assistant as she did in in the late 1920s or a magazine proofreader as in the late 1940s. Her eyesight wouldn’t allow her to drive. If a ride wasn’t available, she walked the four miles to work. Four miles home again.

Out-of-place electric guitar riffs float past underbrush the afternoon of my visit. Someone is listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” seemingly not at peace with bird song or tree breeze. The blaring music makes me think of Lorine’s struggle with disrespectful vacationers and rude neighbors. She persisted in centering poetry inside her hardworking life in a community slowly turning blue-collar loud. Her neighbors didn’t know she was writing her way into the poetry canon.

The current owners are descendants of the couple who bought the property in 1986 from Millen’s estate. They kindly allow poets on pilgrimage, and they seem to care lovingly for the property. As I walked to the river to meet it up close, the owner appeared with a genial greeting. He asked if I’d noticed the 1959 flood marks on the wall inside the cabin. I hadn’t. Eagerly, he guided me back to Niedecker’s “sweet cedar pink” to show me that and other details. After friendly conversation, I decided to head back to town. I didn’t need to meet the river up close. I’ve already met it many times in her poetry.

After a career in the oil industry, Shanley Wells-Rau earned her MFA in poetry at Oklahoma State University, where she served as an editorial assistant for Cimarron Review. Her poetry has been published or forthcoming in The Maine Review, Bluestem Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, and Plants & Poetry, among others. She teaches literature and writing for OLLI and OSU and lives with her husband and a clingy dog outside town on a windy hill, where she wanders the prairie to visit with native flora and fauna.

_____

For further reading, digital archives, and more, please visit the Friends of Lorine Niedecker. Special thanks to Amy Lutzke, who spent a very hot day driving me around and showing me Niedecker’s personal library.

Photograph by Jim Furley, April 1979. Permission granted by Dwight Foster Public Library.

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Angelou Memorial
Stamps, Arkansas

By Greer Veon

Despite living in southwest Arkansas most of my life, my first visit to Stamps was with my parents in August 2018. We made the trip on a Sunday afternoon before my flight back north the following morning, my parents joking that Stamps was the kind of place that kept to itself. I sat in the backseat picturing the red clay that Maya Angelou once walked across and imagined feeling the breeze she once breathed.

In September 2017, a local newspaper reported that a memorial sign dedicated to Angelou disappeared from the grounds of Lake June days after Stamps elected Brenda Davis, their first Black mayor. “It makes you wonder,” Mayor Davis told reporters. “But I wouldn’t speculate.” All the same, the mayor’s suspicions resonated, coming as they did in the Southern town that served as the backdrop for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou’s painful 1969 memoir about coming of age during the Jim Crow era. Over time I searched for updates, but the suspects’ names were never printed, and the story went cold.

In a way, Angelou’s memoir prefigures Mayor Davis’s wariness:

What sets one Southern town apart from another, or from a Northern town or hamlet, or city high rise? The answer must be in the experiences shared between the unknowing majority (it) and the knowing minority (you). All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment.

In the early 20th century, Stamps served as a flag stop for the railroads that stretched across Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana. I grew up forty-five minutes away on the state line between the twin cities of Texarkana, one of the bigger stops on that same line, the Cotton Belt Route. Many of my childhood memories are set in the backseat of our family car as we took weekend drives on local roads through one-stoplight towns filled with forgotten gas stations and churches. Most of the newer highways bypassed Stamps. So did most people. When my ninth-grade English class read Angelou’s memoir, our teacher spoke less about how close we lived to the town and more about parents’ letters asking that my classmates be excused from the reading.

I didn’t revisit that memory until shortly after I moved away and read a piece on the Celebrate Maya Project, which was holding a 2018 celebration for the author’s 90th birthday. Angelou’s admirers gathered in Stamps to honor her and witness her childhood landscape. Still, I couldn’t shake the missing sign. I wondered what remained, and I longed to visit Maya’s hometown the next time I returned home.

On the way to Stamps that afternoon, we stopped at Burge’s, a retro dairy barn in nearby Lewisville, where we ordered from the front window. Minutes after stuffing ourselves with brisket and chocolate pies, we entered Stamps’ historic downtown, marked by a post office and outdoor storefronts. Paint cans and a ladder leaned against a half-completed mural. As we crossed over the train tracks, I looked for Annie Henderson’s merchandise store, the center of Angelou’s life in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, but it’s gone.

We found Lake June on the edge of town, the water drained enough to expose its bottom brush. Despite reports that the state would replace the missing sign, there, almost a year after it was stolen, stood a wooden skeleton of the memorial. There’s something sobering to see that as the same place where a young Angelou spent her alone time. Even Maya Angelou, a voice of her generation, still faces these attempts at erasure, even in the town that played such a vital role in her legacy. Angelou’s memoir addresses a childhood filled with love and pain that stayed with her no matter where she moved. What “heroes and bogeymen” have other children first encountered here and other towns alike?  I feared who decides what parts of our homes will be made forgotten. Will they make space or blot out the experiences, the identities of their neighbors? I inhaled the damp air and left without answers.

Greer Veon is a writer who works for the Office of Residence Life at Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. In 2019, she earned her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Sarah Lawrence College. Her most recent work has been featured in ELLE. Find her at greerveon.com.

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Crutchfield
Tulsa, 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 bicycle down North Tulsa’s side streets. More than 60 pounds of film equipment sat in their handlebar basket, so they had to stop periodically to keep from falling onto the pavement. Their route took them into one of the city’s oldest mixed-use neighborhoods. They rode past houses in various states of disrepair, many of them built shortly after the city was incorporated in 1898, as well as industrial sites and manufacturing plants, some empty and derelict, abandoned in the years of suburban sprawl.

Their destination was a house that Coppola had stumbled upon, a dilapidated Craftsman bungalow located at 731 North St. Louis Ave. in the Crutchfield neighborhood. With its rusted chain-link fence and overgrown lawn, it was a promising candidate for the Curtis house, where Darry, Sodapop, and Ponyboy, the orphaned protagonists of The Outsiders, would live. Hinton agreed, and when production began the next year, that house was at the heart of it.

Hinton’s novel of warring teenage gangs, written fifteen years earlier when she was a student at Will Rogers High School, has a complicated relationship with Tulsa. Hinton is from Tulsa, and by all accounts set the story here too, but chose not to include any real names or landmarks in order to, as she told the local newspaper, “protect the guilty.” When she wrote The Outsiders, Hinton was bearing witness to teenage alienation and violent socioeconomic segregation, and these weren’t Tulsa problems; they were everywhere.

The film took a different approach, fully embedding itself in Tulsa. In March 1982, Zoetrope Studios moved into Crutchfield, setting up their production team in the former Lowell Elementary School building, which had been closed four years prior. In a type of method acting, the young cast members haunted the city as greasers, stealing from local drug stores, staying out all night, and sometimes sleeping in the Curtis house, which didn’t have any heat. Local markers — the Oklahoma Steel Castings Company, the Admiral Twin Drive-In, the Art Deco architecture of Will Rogers High School and Boston Avenue Methodist Church — appear in the film. Hinton and Coppola even revised the story so that the Greasers would live on the north side instead of the east, a more accurate geographic representation of Tulsa’s class and racial divide. When the filming was done, Coppola threw a party in Crutchfield Park, complete with carnival rides, an abundance of food and beer, and an ice sculpture. He received a key to the city from the mayor and an appreciation plaque from the Crutchfield Neighborhood Association.

Then he left. The film came out in 1983, and members of the Oklahoma Film Industry Task Force, which had lobbied hard for Coppola to film in Tulsa, relished their success. Much of the young cast went on to become celebrities. Crutchfield, on the other hand, faded into memory.

The neighborhood is still here, though, just north of the historic “Frisco” Railway, which once brought hopeful settlers and cutthroat opportunists to Tulsa back when the area was still known as Indian Territory. Now you drive through Crutchfield and see the husks of uninhabited buildings. The neighborhood kindergarten was shut down in 1986. The Oklahoma Steel Castings Company closed a year later, leaving behind a polluted 10-acre lot. The oil bust of the 1980s drove out many of the neighborhood’s remaining manufacturers, and many residents who could afford to leave did. By 2007, approximately one-third of the houses in the neighborhood were abandoned. Rates of violent crime rose to become the highest in Tulsa.

The neighborhood association, led by longtime residents — truck drivers, store owners, church leaders — advocated tirelessly for Crutchfield. They organized neighborhood cleanups, met with city officials, and developed a revitalization plan which called in part for better infrastructure and more public facilities, including a new school. Although the City of Tulsa approved the plan in 2004, little has changed. In 2006, Tulsa Public Schools spent $3.3 million converting the old Lowell Elementary building, the former production site for The Outsiders, into a four-and-a-half acre “state-of-the-art” ropes course. Although it was touted as a boon to the community, the course was fenced off and inaccessible to the neighborhood’s residents. The course was later closed in 2017 due to budget cuts, and the site once again sits abandoned.

Today, Crutchfield is still without a school or a grocery store. Its predominately Hispanic population experiences some of the worst health outcomes and rates of poverty in the city. Although the neighborhood is one of Tulsa’s oldest, the City has never treated it with the same significance as its other historic neighborhoods.

As my girlfriend and I drive through Crutchfield in the winter of 2021, I wonder about the decision to bring The Outsiders film to Tulsa. When the novel was released, local media was quick to absolve the city. The Tulsa World suggested that, although the setting was Tulsa, “it could be any city.” After watching the film, though, I wonder if Hinton might say otherwise.

The Outsiders is a story about boundary lines, divisions that we create and perpetuate. It’s a fitting story for Tulsa, a city whose inclination towards boosterism — as the self-proclaimed “Magic City” and “Oil Capital of the World” — frequently has sanitized and distorted its history, almost always at the expense of its marginalized communities.

Crutchfield sits just north of the line that divided Cherokee Nation and Muscogee (Creek) Nation land, one of the lines established by the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The neighborhood was named after Vinita Crutchfield, who was allotted the land after the General Allotment Act. She appears on the Dawes Roll as a nine-year-old Cherokee girl living with her mother. Growing up, Crutchfield would have lived on the dividing line much like the characters in Hinton’s novel.

One mile to the east of Crutchfield is Tulsa’s Greenwood district, which was once 40 square blocks of Black-owned land known as “Black Wall Street.” Born of entrepreneurship, Greenwood was a precarious haven for Black Oklahomans during a time when the state adopted strict Jim Crow laws. Local newspapermen disparaged Greenwood as “Little Africa,” and the growth of the KKK in Tulsa posed an increasing threat. In May 1921, a white mob invaded, razed, and, in the end, partially annexed Greenwood, killing its residents in a state-sanctioned slaughter. For decades, the Tulsa Race Massacre, as it would come to be known, remained a secret, a part of Tulsa’s history hidden from people like me who never learned about it in school. From Crutchfield, just beyond the borderlines of Lansing Ave. and the Midland Valley railway tracks, you would have been able to see the smoke of Greenwood’s burning buildings.

When we arrive at the Curtis home, which was purchased in 2016 and converted into a small museum dedicated to The Outsiders, I think about the people of Crutchfield. Surrounding the home are boarded-up houses flying tattered American flags. Stray dogs roam the area. Less than a block away from the house is an auto shop, the same type of place where Ponyboy might have worked. We stay for a little while, driving around the neighborhood. When we leave, I think about the tyranny of boundaries and the exorbitant privilege of being able to cross them.

Caleb Freeman was born and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is a freelance writer, an adjunct English instructor, and a part-time librarian. When he is not working with words, he is more than likely annoying his cats. Follow him on Twitter @calebdfreeman. 

 

Photograph by Megan Hosmer, an artist, teacher, and Tulsa transplant. Her work primarily centers around feminist questions of identity and community through photographic portraiture. Check out her artwork at https://www.meganhosmer.com/.

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The Mesa
Taos, New Mexico

By Tracy Tucker

I am an American pilgrim. I’ve visited a hundred holy sites trying to find my way, seeking an intercession, hoping to meet my gods in the air. I’ve found myself at Walden Pond, naturally, and the stone wall at Robert Frost’s farm, but there are many stations on this journey: the American Gothic house, Steinbeck’s “Mother Road,” First Avenue in Minneapolis, and a spot on the side of a Missouri highway where Ira Louvin died.

But by profession, as a writer, as an archivist, I hold one figure above them all — Willa Cather. I’ve traveled where she traveled, slept where she slept, and chased the horizons that populate her novels and short stories. From her birth house in Gore, Virginia, to her grave in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, and so many places she wandered in between, I’ve been there, trailing after her spirit, looking for my own.

Cather wrote in a 1912 letter that, for the first time, she was glad to be away from New Mexico and Arizona; though she enjoyed the summer, she “was ready to leave when the time came.  … The country,” she continued, “is wonderful, fabulous; but after all, ‘dans le desert,’ as Balzac said, ‘il y a tout, et il n’y a rien; Dieu sans les hommes.’” The desert is everything and nothing. God without men.

And so I am in Taos, seeing the sights, but it’s the desert that calls me. For days, I let myself be led and, while I keep in mind a place to sleep, the roads just run.  I think of Cather’s letter quoting Balzac. I see everything and nothing.

On the mesa west of town, the road runs out but I walk on, the scent of chamiso pardo and rabbitbrush rising like prayers as I brush by. I breathe in their incense. Cactus spikes whisper against my pack. I have visions. I try to fathom Cather in this land. She rides through at a distance, but I can barely make her out. Between us are other figures, but they might be mirages. Smoke and sand. Wind shaking the wild oats.

A dried fruit of a tree cholla clings to the back of my coat. I don’t discover it until I’m back in Nebraska, and I tuck it away in the console with other relics: sea glass from Nantucket Harbor and limestone from my family’s farm and corroded buttons found buried in the dirt of an abandoned Colorado soddy.

At home I look at Cather’s letter again. After she quotes Balzac, she writes, “You see, you get so lonely (I mean your soul gets lonely) in a land which has had only a geological history. Your spirit can’t find anything to hang on by!” But it can, I think, and mine has hung on to that mesa, returning again and again, a lost traveler walking in circles in the only place that feels real, independent of man.

Back in Cather’s Nebraska, the cholla fruit, dense and desiccated, splits its skin, and its seeds pour out, tiny miracles. Their prickles are everywhere I touch, snagging. When I think I’m rid of them, I notice tiny cholla growing in the sand at the edge of the yard. I tease them out, nurture them, but I don’t think they need me. The desert is real. I’m the mirage.

Tracy Tucker is the Education Director and Archivist at the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and an Affiliate Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Tucker’s research, writing, and photography focuses on the Plains and has appeared in Old Northwest Review, Midwestern Gothic, Whirlwind, Open Mic, Prairie Fire, the Willa Cather Review, and others. A forthcoming chapter comparing the work of Willa Cather, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Sanora Babb will be published in Unknown No More: Essays on Sanora Babb (Oklahoma University Press, 2021).

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

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Pavelka Farmstead
Red Cloud, Nebraska

By Christine Pivovar

Willa Cather’s My Ántonia (1918) contains the first written use of the word “kolaches” in English, according to the OED. It comes in at the end of the novel, when the narrator, Jim, visits his childhood friend Ántonia at her “wide farm-house, with a red barn and an ash grove,” and meets her brood of boisterous children. The sweet, fruit-filled Czech pastries they serve him are still commonplace in bakeries throughout Nebraska today, but I’d never expected to find such a small, prosaic piece of our culture appear in one of the twentieth century’s great American novels. I’ve made kolaches myself, using my grandma’s recipe, which can’t be much different from the one Ántonia’s daughters used. Reading that scene, I had a powerful sense of seeing myself in a novel in a different way than I ever had before. Ántonia could have been my own great-grandmother.

Part of why I could picture that scene so vividly is because I have been to the “wide farm-house” Cather describes. A few miles north of Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, it was the home of her friend Annie Pavelka, who became the inspiration for the character of Ántonia.

Situated near the geographical center of the continental U.S., Red Cloud is a town of brick streets, charming Victorian houses and a wide-open sky. It’s the kind of town where cowboys in full gear stroll into the Subway and two of the town’s three restaurants close for the weekend because of a family wedding. It was founded in 1871, and when the railroad came through in 1879 it brought settlers from all over Europe and the eastern United States. Born in Virginia, Cather moved to Nebraska with her family in 1883. She lived in and around Red Cloud until she left for college in Lincoln. Her memories of this place, in particular the hard but vibrant lives of the pioneer farmers, inspired many of her novels and stories.

Today the Pavelka Farmstead is one of the sites maintained by the Willa Cather Foundation, which provides guided tours of significant places in the author’s life and work. The tour guides can tell you which of Cather’s friends were the models for which characters, what living room a particular scene takes place in. Although their close reading can feel restrictive at times — the books are fiction, after all — there seems to be a kind of pragmatic Nebraskan mindset that looks for these concrete connections. Readers and tourists are used to hunting down literary settings in New York and Boston. Why shouldn’t they also do so in Red Cloud?

This year, the Foundation is restoring the farmhouse: upgrading the foundation, installing electricity, and returning it to its “period of significance.” As works of preservation, the farmhouse restoration and Cather’s books both allow the visitor to step into a world that’s passed out of firsthand memory. Taken together, the physical space can cement the fictional scenes in real experience. When I visited the Pavelka house, it was empty and gutted, but even from the building’s bones, from its sloping yard surrounded by head-high rows of corn, I could picture the lives lived there. I could imagine myself as one of Ántonia’s daughters, kneading the dough for kolaches.

Christine Pivovar is originally from Omaha and today lives near an old pioneer cemetery in Kansas City. She was a Durwood Fellow at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she earned her MFA in creative writing and media arts. She has reviewed books for The Millions, The Rumpus and The Kansas City Star, and her fiction has been published in The Southeast Review and Hot Metal Bridge. She also works as a product designer at a software company.

Photo by Barb Kurdna, courtesy of the National Willa Cather Center.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Red Cloud, Nebraska appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Glacier Creek Preserve
Omaha, Nebraska

By Conor Gearin

“The red of the grass made all the great prairie the color of wine-stains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up.” One of Willa Cather’s most famous lines, from the 1918 novel My Ántonia, mainly refers to the color of little bluestem (Schizachyrium scoparium), one of the key grasses of the mixed grass prairie where she grew up in Red Cloud, Nebraska. The species has a bluish color in spring but matures to a copper-red in autumn that reflects the fire of a Great Plains sunset.

The first place I connected Cather’s words to little bluestem wasn’t in farm country but instead at Glacier Creek Preserve on the outskirts of Omaha. Years of restoration transformed terraced crop fields into a glimpse at the flora of mixed grass and tallgrass prairies accessible to city dwellers. In the Midwest, we’ve lost nearly all of our native grasslands to agriculture, meaning that if you grew up in a city like Omaha or St. Louis — my hometown — your first look at a grassland was probably a restored site down the road like Glacier Creek. This modest-sized preserve offers a glimpse of the most threatened type of ecosystem in the world.  As a biology teaching assistant, I would help lead university students at the preserve in collecting soil samples, estimating plant biomass, and identifying bird species.

When Cather was a student at the University of Nebraska Lincoln in the 1890s, Omaha was a cultural destination, and she wrote incisive theater reviews to help establish herself as a writer. Her fiction reflects this early view of the big city. Especially in My Ántonia and O Pioneers!, Omaha looms as an urban hub, reachable by train for a cosmopolitan weekend outing, the place to go for fancy fabric and renowned actors. Cather’s careful depictions of small-town Nebraska take their meaning partly from the contrast she draws to these growing cities a few rail stops away.

Later in her career, Cather returned to Omaha on a brief Midwestern speaking tour. At a 1921 gathering of the Nebraska League of Women Voters in the tea room of the stately Brandeis department store in downtown Omaha, Cather advised the audience not to imitate other places. “It seems to me as I travel out through the great middle west, the people are trying to imitate New York,” she said, as quoted by the Omaha World-Herald. “Red Cloud and Hastings are trying to be like Omaha; Omaha and Chicago are trying to be like New York. One thing I like about New York is that there we wear the kinds of hats we like, we wear the kind of clothes that please us.”

The remark feels strikingly contemporary. Reading it, I think of how today’s Midwestern communities often converge on a suburban sameness: small towns grasping for big box stores, larger cities sprawling out subdivisions into farm country. The result is a landscape that’s hard to distinguish from hundreds of others, their quirks of ecology smoothed over and refashioned with evenly distributed brand names. But I think, too, of the distinguishing features that remain: the grasses and herbs of eastern Nebraska I saw in the field and through the microscope; the improbably steep slopes of the Loess Hills across the Missouri River; all the different kinds of live music wafting out of bars in Omaha’s Benson neighborhood on a First Friday. I think of Omaha’s cultural legacies — the Indigenous peoples of the Oceti Sakowin; Black families that arrived in the Great Migration; generations of immigrants from throughout Europe, Asia, Mexico, Central America, and more recently Sudan, Nigeria, and other African nations — and how those legacies often appeared in the students of my commuter campus. Foregrounding these, it’s harder to write off the city as interchangeable with any other in the Corn Belt.

Historically, Omaha has looked to Cather’s words for help in establishing a sense of place. When I lived there, my local library was the Willa Cather Branch. There’s a Willa Cather elementary school and a Willa Cather playground. Despite living 200 miles from Red Cloud, many people in Omaha (like their fellow Nebraskans) have felt better represented in her fiction than in contemporary works like The Great Gatsby — where the Great Plains are a grim wasteland, a place to escape.

But it would be a mistake to portray Cather as some kind of saint of Midwestern culture. Her legacy is more complex than that. She left Nebraska for New York to make her way in the literary world. She also largely erased Native Americans in her writing and essentially celebrated white settlement on Indigenous lands. Her view of Midwestern uniqueness was hitched to pioneer exploitation.

We’re not beholden to that limited view. Instead, I see Cather’s work as a starting point that many writers have riffed on throughout the past century. The thread of her legacy that stands out to me now is the awakening of a Midwestern ecological consciousness, distinguishing the particularity of one place from another. That awareness offers another way to envision the future of a place, one away from evenly-spread amenities and toward a unique trajectory linked to local ecology and culture — a celebration of difference.

If I imagine standing at Glacier Creek Preserve now, I can look southeast toward downtown Omaha, north and west toward farmland, and south toward recently built subdivisions. Despite suburban sprawl, I wouldn’t mistake the view for St. Louis or Chicago. The sources of Omaha’s uniqueness haven’t been completely smothered. But the threats to grassland habitats are as dire as ever. Looking around at the little bluestem, switchgrass, and side-oats grama, I think about Cather’s hunch that if we could articulate the special character, the this–ness of a landscape, that might tell us something about how best to relate to that place. If writers and naturalists — myself included — could help more people see grasslands as vital, with inhabitants that have names and life histories, I wonder what new shape our communities might take.

Conor Gearin is a writer from St. Louis living in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Atlantic, The Millions, New Scientist, and The New Territory, where he is a contributing editor. He writes a newsletter called Possum Notes.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Omaha, Nebraska appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Old Burying Ground
Jaffrey, New Hampshire

By Catherine Seiberling Pond

In her first known correspondence from Jaffrey, New Hampshire, Willa Cather wrote to her brother Roscoe on a postcard from the Shattuck Inn, “I am working well in this lovely country.” It was 1917, and the acclaimed writer was 43 years old, mid-career, and making revisions to her novel, My Ántonia.

For her first few stays, Cather often wrote in a large canvas tent in the lower pasture of “High Mowing,” a nearby summer home. I first heard about Cather’s tent retreats and her association with the farm in the late 1970s from my best friend’s mother, an English professor and owner of the property for twenty-five years. I had recently read O Pioneers! and My Ántonia, both novels inspired by the Nebraska prairie and Cather’s childhood home of Red Cloud, over 1,500 miles from Jaffrey.

Over the next three decades, Cather spent part of many years at “this quiet hotel in the woods,” as she described it in one letter, often with her partner, Edith Lewis. The sublime and solitary presence of Mount Monadnock loomed just to the west of the inn, and mornings of writing were followed by long walks in the afternoon. Cather’s time in Jaffrey was restorative and a needed place of “happy solitude” for her writing. Here she was able to work “in comfort and quiet” — something her busy and parallel life in New York seldom allowed.

In a 1945 letter to her brother Roscoe, Cather compared her rooms at a Maine inn where she was staying that summer with her teenage bedroom, still preserved in the Willa Cather Childhood Home in Red Cloud today, along with its original “rose bower” wallpaper. The room was also similar to her preferred third floor rooms at the Shattuck Inn:

“I have a funny little room in the attic here, with a sloping ceiling, like my ‘rose bower’ in our old first house. Do you remember? I can always work best in a low room under the roof. All my best books were written in Jaffrey N.H. in a little room where I could almost touch the ceiling with my hand.”

Cather wrote to Eleanor Shattuck Austermann only three months before her death, in January 1947. She had not been to Jaffrey for many years because of family illness and loss, but hoped to “drift back to the Shattuck Inn again,” which was not to be: “But I have never found any place where I could work in such peace and happiness as in the little rooms up in the top of the Shattuck Inn,” she wrote, “and I have often wished I were there…”

Cather once described being “homesick for New England” in the autumn, a trait that I share. Having spent much of my life in the region, it’s not hard to picture Jaffrey’s stunning foliage, or the invigorating air and azure skies of fall in New Hampshire — and the best sleeping weather of the year. Still, not everything is the same. The original Shattuck Inn has been torn down, though the Annex remains, now refurbished into condominiums.

A few years before Cather died, she wrote to a childhood friend that she was traveling to her “old resting place in Jaffrey, New Hampshire.” It would, indeed, become just that. After her death in 1947, she was buried at the Old Burying Ground behind the historic Jaffrey Meetinghouse. With availability always a question in the Colonial cemetery, her innkeeper friends, George and Eleanor Austermann, arranged for a plot near their own. No one knows exactly why Cather chose Jaffrey over Red Cloud, to where she often returned to visit dear family and friends, but I believe that her own letters reveal much of that answer. In 1972, Edith Lewis was buried alongside her — while she outlived Cather by twenty-five years, they had been together for almost forty.

The gravesite in the southwest corner is framed by white pines and an old stone wall. It is a place of pilgrimage for Cather enthusiasts — and for me, whenever I can return. Since we moved to Kentucky in 2008, I have often been homesick for my grandparents’ old Jaffrey farm, for the people and places of my childhood, and for the landscapes of New England. The Old Burying Ground, with its adjacent meetinghouse and classic village setting, provides sturdy mooring. Many family friends are also buried there, so visiting is now its own kind of homecoming.

The last time I stopped by Cather’s grave, I was on my way to visit my mother for what would be the last time before her death. It was autumn and the leaves were glowing, the air clear and intoxicating, and Mount Monadnock a comforting fixture against the bluest sky. Later I would learn that this was also Willa Cather’s favorite time to be in Jaffrey.

Other visitors leave small stones, flowers, even jewelry, and ponder the words on her granite headstone: “The truth and charity of her great spirit will live on in the work which is her enduring gift to her country and all its people.” Cather’s writing is deeply connected to both the people she loved and the places where she lived and wrote. For me, it will forever illuminate the wonder of our collective human experience, starting with my first reading of My Ántonia and continuing into the cosmos with a quotation from it inscribed near the base of her headstone: “…that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great.”

We can only speculate, but the answer may be in the very passage from the novel that Cather edited on her first visit to Jaffrey thirty years before. Perhaps she just wanted to be buried in the place where she felt she had done her best work.

Catherine Seiberling Pond has written for Old-House Interiors, Victoria, Yankee, Literary Hub, and Rethink:Rural. She earned her master’s in historic preservation studies from Boston University and has been marketing coordinator for the National Willa Cather Center in Red Cloud, Nebraska, since 2018, the centenary celebration of My Ántonia. She works remotely from her farm in Kentucky and is writing a memoir about family farms and homeplaces. After the past year, she will again welcome semi-annual trips across the prairie to Red Cloud and hopefully another pilgrimage to New Hampshire.

Photo courtesy of the National Willa Cather Center.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Jaffrey, New Hampshire appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

The Fine Arts Building
Chicago, Illinois

By Jesse Raber

Chicago isn’t an iconic setting for Willa Cather, the great novelist of the prairies. Yet, in a sense, during Cather’s time Chicago writing was prairie writing. When H.L. Mencken crowned Chicago “The Literary Capital of the United States” in 1920, he credited the city’s literature to the “remote wheat-towns and far-flung railway junctions” of its hinterland. “The newcomers who pour in from the wheat lands,” he wrote, full of “elemental curiosity” and “prairie energy,” seek in the city’s cultural scene “some imaginative equivalent for the stupendous activity they were bred to.” Mencken’s description of country talent “pour[ing] in” to the city seems to imagine Chicago writing as a river fed by the vast “Middle Empire that has Chicago for its capital.”

But where Mencken, the consummate urbanite, saw brain drain, Cather sees back-and-forth circulation between country and city. Chicago drummers teach the townsfolk the latest songs in My Ántonia, and the South Dakota grande dame in A Lost Lady often entertains Chicago friends. The Chicago voice teacher Madison Bowers, in The Song of the Lark, trains soloists from across the Midwest and takes “long journeys to hear and instruct a chorus.” The closing paragraph of The Song of the Lark sums up the dynamic:

The many naked little sandbars which lie between Venice and the mainland, in the seemingly stagnant water of the lagoons, are made habitable and wholesome only because, every night, a foot and a half of tide creeps in from the sea and winds its fresh brine up through all that network of shining waterways. So, into all the little settlements of quiet people, tidings of what their boys and girls are doing in the world bring real refreshment; bring to the old, memories, and to the young, dreams.

The prairie towns aren’t unsoiled streams flowing into the urban river; they are points in a “network” that regularly communicates, through Chicago, with a wider world.

Cather’s Chicago itself is a symbol of hypercirculation, a “blur of smoke and wind and noise” whose disorienting flux creates eddies of creativity. “In little towns,” Cather writes in Lucy Gayheart, “lives roll along so close to one another; loves and hates beat about, their wings almost touching.” By contrast Chicago, with its uncaring crowds, allows Cather’s prairie-bred artists to make themselves secret nests. Rather than exposing them to a wider swath of humanity, the city helps them find themselves and their own kind.

The most memorable of these artistic aeries is the singer Clement Sebastian’s studio in the Fine Arts Building. Practicing there, Lucy Gayheart feels “it was as if they were on the lonely spur of a mountain, enveloped by mist. They saw no one … heard no one; the city below was blotted out.” Located a few blocks south of the Art Institute on Michigan Avenue, the Fine Arts Building has cultivated artistic tenants since 1898. A ten-story structure in the Richardsonian Romanesque style of rusticated stones and stately arches, in Lucy’s day it was the city’s literary epicenter, and many of its greatest occupants presented themselves as obscure “little” niches in the big boisterous city. There was the Little Room, an aesthetic society featuring Hamlin Garland and Harriet Monroe (among many others); Margaret Anderson’s Little Review, which faced obscenity charges for publishing parts of Ulysses; and Ellen von Volkenburg and Maurice Browne’s movement-launching Little Theater.

Today the Fine Arts Building still has some of that cloistral spirit. When I first went inside, during an open studio night, it was like stepping between worlds. Lush Art Deco murals cover the lobby walls, and the antique elevators have human operators. The upper floors are all dark wood trim and muted white paint, like the outside of a Tudor house. That evening, drifting between studios, each its own aesthetic universe, I bought a postcard-sized watercolor of Colorado pines, painted at the western fringe of Chicago’s old railroad kingdom.

Years later I returned to visit the new Dial Bookshop, named for the old magazine and decorated with portraits of Chicago writers, including fellow Fine Arts tenant L. Frank Baum. The store was lovely, but I wondered if this veneration of the building’s past meant that creativity had lapsed into nostalgia.  This question bothered me as I thought about what the Fine Arts Building represents today.

One evening, as I was brainstorming this vignette, I joined a six-foot-spaced circle around a fire pit on my friends’ lawn. “Does anybody happen to have any stories,” I asked, “about the Fine Arts Building?” It turned out they did. I heard about a filmmaker with an office there, working for years on a documentary about feuding martial artists. Another friend recalled her amazement at wandering into a violin-maker’s workshop — a luthier’s shop, she insists — while looking for a replacement guitar string. (The luthiers were unhelpful.) A third reminisced about how the old movie theater there casually mixed art house and mainstream films. Some of that old spirit of hidden wonders lives on, it seems. My favorite story, though, was a little older — about one friend’s dad who used to take the Greyhound there to see films that didn’t play in his hometown. He sometimes had to leave the movie early to catch the bus back to DeKalb, Illinois, way out in Chicago’s Middle Empire.

Jesse Raber is an Instructor at the Harvard Extension School and has also taught literature courses at several Chicago universities (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Loyola University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Chicago). He is the co-creator of the Chicago Writing gallery at the American Writers Museum and is currently working on a literary history of Chicago.

Willa Cather Special Edition

Please enjoy this special volume of Literary Landscapes focused exclusively on Willa Cather. Although Cather is well known as a writer of the plains, she has substantial attachments to places all across the country — and that means we get to stretch Literary Landscapes beyond our customary Midwestern boundaries!

Special thanks to the National Willa Cather Center for access to portraits of Cather and archival photos of Mount Monadnock and the Pavelka Farmstead. Located in Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud, Nebraska, the NWCC is an archive, museum, and study center owned and operated by the Willa Cather Foundation, which also maintains the largest collection of historic sites and landscapes related to any American writer.

Thank you for reading! If you would like to contribute to Literary Landscapes, click here for more information and a list of potential sites.

Andy Oler, Outpost Editor
The New Territory

The post Willa Cather – Chicago, Illinois appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.