Riverside Park

Independence, Kansas

By Autumn Finley

Growing up in a flyover state, I never much considered the literary merit of my home in the southeast corner of Kansas. Apart from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie, the novels I read were never set here. Then, in my senior year of high school, my drama teacher, Heather Wilson, introduced our class to the works of playwright William Inge. We were performing Picnic for the spring play, and we also read snippets of his other plays set in a fictionalized Independence, Kansas. I knew that Independence Community College had the Inge Center and the Inge Festival, but I had never processed that there was a famous playwright born and raised less than thirty miles from my family’s farm.

Learning about Inge made my corner of Kansas feel important. Our class took a field trip, looking at the homes in the historic areas of Independence to gain inspiration for our set. The professors at ICC opened the Inge home for our class to tour. It was then used as a home for their Playwrights in Residence program, and we saw the staircase and landing which likely inspired scenes in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. We visited the Inge cemetery plot, paying our respects while marveling at how a literary giant rose to fame from our tiny corner of the lower Midwest.

However, the place I associate most with Inge is a small picnic spot by the Verdigris River, which can be accessed down a slight ravine beyond the larger picnic areas at the Riverside Park and Ralph Mitchell Zoo. A lone concrete table was nestled in the bottom of the ravine, time wearing it down to a pocked finish, but the area was well-kept and mown for park-goers.

As the spring semester of my senior year rolled to a close, with opening night looming, our cast met up for our own picnic by the Verdigris, overlooking the murky water and an old concrete bridge. We munched on our sandwiches, mulling the fleetingness of our youth, understanding that the innocence of our own childhoods was fading, much like the realizations many of the characters have throughout the play. Helen Potts, a middle-aged character, reflects on the juxtaposition of day-to-day life and the energy of the teenage and young adult characters, saying to her neighbor, “I feel sort of excited, Flo. I think we plan picnics just to give ourselves an excuse … to let something thrilling and romantic happen to us—” The play hinges on love, both romantic and familial, and how those bonds shape people’s choices and dreams. For me and my classmates, our own hopes and plans echoed around the picnic table, the sound eventually carried down the lazy Verdigris.

Now, all that remains of that concrete picnic table is the base that anchored it to the ground. The bridge has been reduced to its pillars, likely worn down by flooding and the passage of time. Despite the rubble and debris dotting a ravine along the bank, the area remains a serene spot to enjoy views of the park to the west and the tangled woods around the river to the east.

A few years after graduation, I took the time to watch the film version of Splendor in the Grass. I knew the screenplay was Inge’s, but I was impressed by how much control he managed to maintain over the set design. The film featured Natalie Wood as Wilma Dean (Deanie) and Warren Beatty as Bud, and there they were on my TV screen, cast into a familiar setting of clapboard houses and screened porches. In that technicolor Independence, Kansas, were the high school students clad like so many photos from yearbooks past, and there was that concrete bridge and picnic area, nearly identical to my childhood memories of the place. Although rendered a brighter green than I remembered, there was the park where I had played with my family before riding the carousel, which still only costs a nickel, the same place I had gathered with friends on field trips. That same place was depicted by the Hollywood-cast coeds, swimming, chatting, and enjoying the everyday pleasures of growing up in small-town USA.

The screenplay itself is a marvel—the storyline, plot, and dialogue rich with commentary about young love and lower Midwest culture in the early twentieth century, yet it was the set design that swelled my pride. Independence seemed so important and large on the screen, perhaps as important as the British settings I was used to studying in college. Inge saw the importance of those literary connections too, tying his work to William Wordsworth’s poem of the same title. In an early classroom scene, Natalie Wood as Deanie recites:

“Though nothing can bring back the hour

Of splendour in the grass,

Of glory in the flower,

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind”

This universal truth of innocence lost, growth, and distance in time persists as grass withers, dies, and grows again each year. Time moves forward despite personal and communal setbacks. Park benches and picnic tables are rearranged; bridges crumble and fade into memories. Still, we can take strength in the shared understanding of our community places. Inge bridged a gap in my understanding—that my childhood places were worthy of being a literary landscape.

Autumn Finley grew up in Altamont, KS, but has lived and studied in various communities across Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. She is currently an Associate Professor of literature and composition at Southwest Baptist University in Bolivar, MO.

Photo by Liz Finley.

The post William Inge – Independence, Kansas appeared first on The New Territory Magazine.

Topeka High School

Topeka, Kansas

By Molly Hatesohl

There are many things in Room 103 of Topeka High School that evince its history. Designed in 1930 during the Collegiate Gothic Revival, its granite fireplace and wrought iron chandeliers imbue the classroom with scholastic grandeur. A prodigious display of THS Debate and Forensics memorabilia encircle the room, some photos of former champs more sun-faded than others. But perhaps the most conspicuous artifact hangs high on the back wall, dwarfing the surrounding images: an extra-large portrait of Ben Lerner. Though he is, these days, an accomplished writer teaching at Brooklyn College, this particular photo was taken after he won the 1997 National Speech and Debate Championship.

I first encountered this unsmiling relic in the fall of 2012, when I nervously entered 103 as a sweaty freshman with frazzled hair. As I walked in, the room filled with a sweet, ozonic smell emanating from the huge photocopier in the back corner. It was hard at work, churning out copies of that day’s reading, ripped from the most recent issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Forewarned about the fiery longtime debate coach Pam McComas, I was eager to prove myself.

Wasting no time, Pam gathered the printouts, licked a manicured finger, and tossed stacks of paper at us. The article was titled “A Contest of Words” and was, according to its subhead, an account of high school debate and the demise of public speech written by Ben Lerner. “The individual who wrote this essay,” she said, pointing at the portrait, “is known as the 1997 International Extemp Champion, AKA, my former student.”

I took in the image of the teenager standing over me posing with four giant trophies — straight-faced, oily-haired, and undeniably adolescent. Pam continued, “This will tell you not only everything you need to know about this activity but also how to craft language. In layman’s terms, this is how you beat people up with your words.” I got the sense this was a phrase she had enjoyed using for years.

I gave the text a cursory scan, only kind of understanding Lerner’s elevated prose. His portrait’s eyes stared over my shoulder as I tried to read.

For the next four years, it felt like neither milestone nor mistake could escape Ben Lerner’s scrutinizing gaze. Upon the wall he remained, ever watchful, as I researched the federal budget for transportation infrastructure (the 2012 Debate Resolution). He was there too, when I discovered my parents, who also practiced beating each other up with their words, had received marital counseling from Ben Lerner’s father, a well-known psychologist. I wondered if Dr. Lerner saw something of his son in my father, who was also a competitive high school debater. When, during my sophomore year, Pam confronted me about my apparent lack of motivation, and I confided in her about my parents’ bitter divorce, Ben was, in a way, the only other person in the room. I couldn’t help but feel like Ben Lerner continued to look down on me throughout the tenderest moments of my coming-of-age.

With adulthood, the scopaesthesia diminished. It wasn’t until earlier last year, as I stuffed my life into a U-Haul and relocated from Kansas to Chicago, that I recognized that exacting gaze.

Surrounded by unfamiliar landscapes, and longing for ways to relate to my hometown from a new home, I reached for Lerner’s 2019 novel The Topeka School. Adapted from my first reading assignment in Room 103, Lerner’s novel features a loosely fictionalized version of his high school self named Adam, who, on the cusp of both the National Debate and Forensics Championship and his own manhood, struggles to find his voice amidst the crescendoing chorus of conservative toxic masculinity reportedly endemic to Kansas.

But, what I hoped would reconnect me to the distinctive place I grew up turned out to be something far more disingenuous. Despite its title, The Topeka School is not a book about the unique, history-laden city, nor is it about the multifaceted people who live there. It is, as Lerner has described it, “a book about the prehistory of the bankruptcy of American political discourse.”

Being a prehistory, Lerner’s book assumes an archeological tone of supposed objectivity and encourages readers to do the same. Describing his teenage persona giving practice speeches with a coach, Lerner writes, “Weird to look through the window of the classroom door with the detachment of an anthropologist… and see these two men, if that’s what they are, arguing in an otherwise empty room in a largely empty school.” Suddenly, I was back in Room 103, this time looking down from high upon the back wall, watching my teenage self figure out how to find her voice, utterly incapable of extricating myself from that particular site of our shared history.

Lerner doesn’t write to me, a Topekan, the subject of his study, but to an outsider audience. It’s as if he were a foreign correspondent, reporting back to Brooklynites about trouble brewing on the homefront. In the novel, Adam’s parents worry about how Topeka’s conservative culture might influence their sensitive and intellectual son, whom Lerner characterizes to stand out against this homogenous red state background. Topeka and its high schools serve as a mutable backdrop against which Lerner paints an imaginary Trumpland, the primordial soup that incubated all that’s wrong with America today.

Maybe I would have bought it, had I not grown up in a version of Topeka from which Ben Lerner was impossible to subtract.

This is the problem with casting yourself as the anthropologist of your own culture. In the process of observing specimens, you too are leaving your trace, creating future fossils that others will find and use to construct their own subjective histories. Lerner’s portrait, an important artifact in my memory, was the index of another young person who became himself in the very same place I did.

I don’t wish to pretend that the phenomena Lerner describes in The Topeka School don’t exist. Topeka is full of working parents and latchkey kids, homophobes and misogynists, and white boys with anger issues, sure. So is New York. I also don’t wish to pretend that Lerner or I can be separated from this history simply because we had parents who embraced therapy or because we expatriated to blue state metropolises. Now, having left my hometown, trying again to find my voice, I’m thinking a lot about how we choose to talk about the places where we grew up. I don’t want to pin the decline of civilization on the place that harbored a younger version of me. The land and people I was raised on shaped the person I’m becoming, and I want to honor that. When I write, I want to be integrated with my home, not clash with it.

In an interview promoting The Topeka School, Lerner proclaimed, “Memory lives in places… There are always pockets of the past in the landscape of the present.” He and I are embedded in the history of Topeka, just as a fossil is embedded in the ground. We may not assume the voice of the narrator, nor the anthropologist, lest we forget our own footprints.

Molly Hatesohl is a Topekan living in Chicago.

Photograph by Adam Krohe, a photography student at Topeka High School, Class of 2024.

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