This is Leslie VonHolten of Kansas with another Radio Readers Book Byte.
My summer reading recommendation is not a book, but a magazine—which is also, in so many ways, a community. The New Territory calls itself “an autobiography of the Lower Midwest,”—the Lower Midwest being Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Northwest Arkansas, Southern Illinois, and Iowa. But in their words, quote, “When it feels right, we color outside those border lines.”
I love this focus on place, and the looseness used in defining it. New Territory goes deeper than townie boosterism or defensiveness. Yes, the Midwest is a great place to live, but it’s more than our friendliness or our better housing prices. New Territory shows us that there is deep culture here, nuanced but close to the land. Culture that is rooted in stories—stories we have been told across generations, and also new stories being brought to us through demographic shifts and youth. Stories that we ourselves are creating.
In the print magazine, these stories are beautifully rendered and expansive. Sometimes it is longform journalism meeting literature, such as Daniel Clausen’s article on grassland ecotourism in Nebraska that was influenced by conservation parks in Namibia. Other articles are focused on memoirs: rich, hyperlocal stories of a writer’s search for home. In Issue 13, Marika Josephson takes us on the hunt for lotus seeds, which she uses to brew beer. We travel in her muddy canoe through a history of Indigenous cooking, the Mississippi River, Zen poetry, and ancient cartography. Like I said, expansive.
There is poetry and fiction, too. Reviews of Midwestern-set movies and books, shout-outs to crafters, interviews with people working to make change in our region. In the latest issue, there is even a behind-the-scenes story of the Tumbleweed Festival from HPPR’s Jenny Inzerillo. In the report she nails the Lower Midwest spirit in the context of running a rural nonprofit: it’s a “goopy-eyed optimism with an ardent, fangs-out refusal to fail.”
And I mentioned community. With our cultural lives sparking again, the New Territory is growing. It is now an official nonprofit with an interest in bringing us Lower Midwesterners together. I was fortunate to read my piece about poet Ronald Johnson and St. Jacob’s Well at a New Territory event in Kansas City this spring. It was a wonderful experience, meeting folks who drove from across Kansas and Missouri and even from Iowa, other creators and thinkers who were eager to share their stories with me. In one conversation we traded descriptions of the flat land-and-sky horizon of the High Plains, when a Nebraska transplant quietly said to herself, but also to all of us, “My god, I miss it out there.”
I was a casual reader of New Territory until the pandemic lockdowns. In my anxiety, I found myself comforted by the beautiful photos and artwork in the two issues I had at home. My life had been busy, fraught with maintaining an exhausting career and managing a home with a soon-to-graduate teenager. But in those quiet days of unknowing, New Territory held me with its love of the Midwest, its stories of resilience and life-making. Its dedication to Place. This place. It changed me, reawakened in me a desire to slow down, to make life beautiful through careful, deep listening. Through stories of home. Find The New Territory at https://newterritorymag.com .
This is Radio Reader Leslie VonHolten hoping you will look into New Territory, the autobiography of the Lower Midwest. You can find more summer reading recommendations at HPPR.org, or Like us on Facebook.
