TOWARD A LITERATURE OF NO MAN’S LAND
an introduction to okie modern
“My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I’ve heard New York, Paris, or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble.”
- Joy Harjo, “My House is the Red Earth”
When the writer Wendell Berry decided to leave New York City to return to his native state of Kentucky, other authors warned him that leaving would mean the end of his literary and intellectual life. In his essay “Native Hill,” Berry reflects on this pivotal moment in his career:
“[...]there was the belief, long honored among American intellectuals and artists and writers, that a place such as I came from could be returned to only at the price of intellectual death; cut off from the cultural springs of the metropolis, the American countryside is Circe and Mammon. Finally, there was the assumption that the life of the metropolis is the experience, the modern experience, and that the life of the rural towns, the farms, the wilderness places is not only irrelevant to our time, but archaic as well because unknown or unconsidered by the people who really matter – that is, the urban intellectuals.”
Defying the prevailing urban mood, Berry went back anyway, following his instincts many miles south to the lands his father and grandfather farmed. He went home. Berry is a great champion of regional writing and has argued for a certain responsibility writers have to their origins both in literature and in life. At Okie Modern, we may not be Kentuckians, but Berry’s ideas resonate.
We established Okie Modern to promote the literature of a state with a complicated historical inheritance–a place once called “No Man’s Land.” We are a journal that believes literature and life can and do flourish in the so-called “flyover” regions of our country–in the places derided for their supposed emptiness, in the places shrouded in myth and obscured by stereotypes. We love our state because we are from here and because we know it is worth loving. Berry writes later in the same essay, “Why should I love one place so much more than any other? What could be the meaning or use of such love?” We don’t believe love needs a meaning or a use, it just needs to be.
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Growing up in Tulsa in the 2010s, we witnessed a time of increased growth and cosmopolitan development – along with the unfortunate gentrification that so often accompanies “urban progress.” Then and now coffee shops, city hall, and cultural hubs across the city echo with frequent calls to “put this place on a map.”
Once that phrase meant something to us. It felt hopeful, this idea that one day we might rise in the minds of our fellow Americans to a cartographic point that really stood for something. In our naïveté and in our shame we did not then see the implication inherent in that statement: that we were nowhere; that we did not exist on the mind-map of our countrymen and women, at least not yet; and that we should strive to be seen by those who did not care to see us. It was a kind surrender to invisibility, paired with a simultaneous, obstinate desire to be seen and recognized by people who did not live here and never would.
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In 2019, shortly after graduating college, the journal’s co-editor and co-founder, Maddie Roper, and I visited a friend in New York City. I can still recall how Maddie remarked as we got off at a subway station, “I know the names of so many of these places, but no one knows the names of our streets.”
We’d heard of these places through the books we read and the movies we saw. We had studied the landmarks and avenues of a city we lived half a country from, considering it the landscape of a life worth living–a place we might one day transplant ourselves as we shed the red dirt of our home and became Worthwhile People. (In another wake-up moment to this representational coastal bias, I remember my mother saying, after reading Long Island Compromise: “I just can’t stand to read another book about New York.” A long time reader, the scales suddenly fell from her eyes.)
It is no surprise that when I first started writing, I often set my stories anywhere but my home. I wrote about New York and Chicago and California and even far-off Europe because those were the places that the books I read were written about, and so I supposed those were the places I should write about, too. It was those places, not my home, that seemed to matter. It would be a long time before I left this habit behind and started to turn to literature about the people and places I knew, the people and places of home.
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We should add that, to the extent that this magazine is pro-Oklahoman, it should not be seen as anti-coastal or anti-anywhere else. We support those who leave the state and understand that life has ways of taking us away from home and sometimes there really is no coming back. In full transparency, neither my co-founder nor I currently reside in our home state, and yet it calls us back if only through the written page.
Our mission is simple: to stop pretending Oklahoma is a place of nowhere that needs to be “put on a map” and start seeing it as a place that matters in and of itself. We believe that literature is a powerful tool in seeing ourselves as meaningful stitches in the larger American fabric, in recognizing that our place has meaning and always has.
At Okie Modern, we are interested in a process of literary production–our goal, first and foremost, is to publish new Oklahoma writing–but we are also deeply invested in a process of literary (re)discovery. That is: we not only hope to elevate the voices of new writers, but also to foster greater knowledge of the vast body of literature that has long existed in and about this state. To say there is no Oklahoma literature would be to perpetrate the same act of erasure that this region has long been subject to ever since it was called “No Man’s Land” and the “Great American Desert.” In this mission, we hope to join in the network of scholars, artists, and writers who have long been involved in this process of rediscovery – people like Jeanetta Calhoun Mish and Cullen Whisenhunt who run a blog on Oklahoma literary history, the late Lee Roy Chapman whose historical work has made him something of a legend in the Tulsa community, the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival, and the many regional and urban writing groups that exist across the state. Needless to say, this does not even scratch the surface of the literary ventures, presses, local bookstores, and organizations Oklahoma hosts.
We feel an obligation to acknowledge the work these individuals and organizations have already been doing. At Okie Modern, we are not doing something new, merely joining a vibrant community with the hopes that we might amplify the voices already speaking. We owe a debt to these literary workers who make Oklahoma literature what it is and have laid down a groundwork on the road to what it can become.
But what do we mean by “Oklahoma writing” and “Oklahoma literature”? These terms can be variously interpreted, but we shall set forth a simple and rather open-ended list of what these terms encapsulate for us:
Literature by writers born, raised, living, or having lived in the state of Oklahoma, whose work reflects the influence inherent in living and writing in the state
Literature that contains a certain “Oklahoma ethos” (broadly defined)
Literature that directly references Oklahoma–its history, landmarks, and people
Literature that engages with, expands upon, and confronts the Oklahoma-imaginary (the myths, symbols, and (mis)representations of the state)
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Okie Modern is dedicated to publishing literature from and about Oklahoma. We are invested in collecting and promoting the literature that already exists and putting forth new works that are constantly created in libraries and homes and in offices and roadside stopovers all across the state. We are working toward building a literature of No Man’s Land. We are writing and reading the literature of this place we call home. We hope you’ll join us.
-Elizabeth J. Wenger
Co-Founder
