“Lingering Inland” Journeys Through the Midwest’s Literary Sites, Familiar and Obscure

The picture atop the page is deceptively simple: a wooden signpost with an empty frame, standing on the grassy bank of a pond or lake. But beneath this photo, a surprising revelation awaits. The accompanying essay identifies this vacant corner of Stamps, Arkansas, as a memorial to Maya Angelou, one of the most enduring voices in American literature.

The tribute “disappeared” from the grounds of Lake June shortly after Stamps elected its first Black mayor in 2017, essayist Greer Veon writes. This Southern town was the backdrop of Angelou’s celebrated autobiography “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Veon returned to Stamps in 2018 for a commemoration of what would have been Angelou’s ninetieth birthday, writing:

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… 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.

Themes of place and legacy, and of celebration and erasure, resonate throughout “Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest.” The wide-ranging anthology of more than seventy personal essays from a range of contemporary writers explores how Midwestern landscapes and locales have inspired American letters—from canonical authors including Angelou, Willa Cather, Toni Morrison and F. Scott Fitzgerald, to lesser-known writers who have been obscured by time or geography.

Each essay begins with a photograph. Some are recognizable as authors’ homes or museums or gravesites; others represent pieces of Midwestern landscapes. A railroad crossing sign just before the curve of a country road. A nature preserve teeming with tall reeds, beet red and swaying beneath the midday sun. An expanse of river with the slightest hint of an island in the distance, guarded by a pair of tiny ducks.

The writers diverge creatively from there in form and content, weaving in personal narratives and experiences with these places and authors, the specific poem or story or book that has lingered with them long after first reading.

Lingering Inland” originated from the ongoing “Literary Landscapes” series in The New Territory, a biannual print magazine about the writers and stories of the Midwest, Great Plains and Ozarks. The editor of that series, Andy Oler, is also the editor of “Lingering Inland.” His academic writing and teaching concentrate on Midwestern and regional literature, though he is currently based in Florida (“further from the Midwest than he’d like,” according to his bio).

“I was thinking a lot about how and why place-based literature is relevant to people,” Oler says.“The answer, to me, is that connections to stories were very personal and often very mundane. So I came up with a way to get lots of people to share their experiences and their enthusiasms. ‘Lingering Inland’ extends both the relevance and the enthusiasm to a new audience.”

Some authors included in the anthology are the focus of multiple essays—including Cather, Morrison and Mark Twain—while other well-known writers are conspicuously absent, such as Oak Park darling Ernest Hemingway. Of course, no collection by and about Midwestern writers can be all-inclusive, given the volume of writers who were born in or passed meaningfully through this expansive part of the country.

Half of the authors whose works are discussed within these essays will likely be new to readers, and yet, anyone who is a native Midwesterner or has ties to the region will find something both surprising and familiar. I discovered the work of one of my former WashU professors, Henry Schvey, cited in an essay about Tennessee Williams and the playwright’s complicated relationship with his St. Louis roots.

Speaking about the decision to feature canonical and underrepresented Midwestern authors in conversation with one another throughout this book, Oler says, “Part of the goal of this project is to provide a more accurate view of the Midwest. I’m less worried about the idea of ‘flyover country’ and more interested in showing the vibrancy as well as the warts. It’s all there, in both the stories and people’s lives.”

There are essays set in the cities of Omaha and Indianapolis and Louisville and Cleveland. There is a story in which a contemporary mother contemplates Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening” and how on earth she was able to support six children as a single, widowed mother in the late nineteenth century. There is a story about Rachel, last name unknown, who filed her own petition for freedom after being held in slavery at Fort Crawford in Wisconsin in 1834, the petition itself a priceless literary achievement.

Featured Chicago writers include Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright and recent Harold Washington Literary Award winner Sandra Cisneros. In her essay about Cisneros, Olga L. Herrera shares what happened to the place that inspired her bestselling novel “The House on Mango Street” and how this is tied to gentrification in Cisneros’ old Humboldt Park neighborhood:

If you do an online image search for the “real” house on Mango Street, you will find images of a red-brick two-story house with a flat roof and small front yard bordered by a black wrought-iron fence. It looks just as Esperanza describes. But it’s not a picture of the original house. At a symposium I attended in 2017, Cisneros explained that this image had circulated for years but was, in fact, a photograph of the house directly across the street… Her childhood home had been demolished in the early 2000s, and a new condominium building was constructed in its place.

A story of erasure and legacy. While Humboldt Park changed, “The House on Mango Street” sold millions of copies over the past forty years, inspiring generations of young readers and dreamers.

Another Chicago-area native, award-winning poet José Olivarez, is both the subject of an essay in “Lingering Inland” and author of the book’s foreword. In it, he describes a pivotal moment in his Calumet City childhood when he realized “Chicago was a literary landscape.” Oler invited Olivarez to craft the words that open this diverse collection after admiring his use of place-specific themes in his poetry.

“When I read Olivarez’s first book, ‘Citizen Illegal,’ I was completely taken with the way he anchors his voice in Calumet City but lets loose his imagination far beyond it,” Oler says. “His poems are full of very specific local detail, told in the voice of a speaker whose personal experience and family histories cover a much larger geography.”

The same might be said of “Lingering Inland,” whose contributors illustrate that the Midwest’s impact on literature extends well beyond the boundaries of our sprawling landscapes, to far-flung places we can only imagine.

“Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest” edited by Andy Oler was released on December 23, 2025, from 3 Fields Books, an imprint of the University of Illinois Press.

Published in the print edition of the January 2026 issue, with the headline “Midwest as Muse: ‘Lingering Inland’ Journeys Through Literary Sites Familiar and Obscure.”