I first discovered the Oklahoma-based magazine This Land on Twitter through an extraordinary story by Kiera Feldman about a sexual abuse scandal and cover-up at a Tulsa Christian school. Longreads later named “Grace in Broken Arrow” one of the best stories of 2012.
This Land Press, which was founded in 2010 with a seven-figure investment by publisher Vincent LoVoi and editorial leadership from Michael Mason, announced last week it was halting its print operations. CJR called it “one of the most audacious local news experiments of the past decade.” To me, the magazine represented everything that I ever wanted to help celebrate through Longreads: Outstanding reporting from a specific place, with storytelling that resonates around the world. (I grew up nowhere near Tulsa, but I often saw shades of my own hometown, Fresno, California, in the perspectives that This Land shared.)
Here’s a powerful story from Rilla Askew, author of Fire in Beulah, about race and growing up in Oklahoma. Askew spoke during our night of storytelling with This Land Press in New York City.
The full talk is below, and you can see all our storytellers at our YouTube page:
This year, Longreads worked with a group of outstanding writers and publishers to produce original stories and exclusives that hadn’t been previously published online. It was all funded with support from our Longreads Members. You can read them all here.
Mark Singer has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1974. Singer’s account of the collapse of the Penn Square Bank of Oklahoma City appeared in The New Yorker in 1985 and was published as a book, Funny Money.
Rilla Askew is an Oklahoma-born writer and author of the novel Fire in Beulah, set against the backdrop of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921.
Ginger Strand is the author of Inventing Niagara, the untold story of America’s waterfall. Her essays and fiction have appeared in Harper’s, The Believer, The Iowa Review, and the New York Times. Her articles for This Land magazine span fracking, Oklahoma’s water wars, and homicidal truck drivers.
Marcos Barbery is a journalist and documentarian. His This Land article “From One Fire” tells the story of an unlikely civil rights leader in the Cherokee Nation.
Feldman, a Brooklyn-based journalist, and This Land Press have worked together before—her story “Grace in Broken Arrow” was named our top pick for Best of Longreads 2012, and it explored another scandal inside a religious institution, sex abuse at a Tulsa Christian school. I exchanged emails with Feldman to discuss the making of the Oral Roberts story, and her start in journalism.
Thanks to Longreads Members’ support (join us here), we’re able to bring you outstanding stories from publishers and writers around the world—including today’s Member Pick from This Land Press, which is doing some incredible work out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and whose story by Kiera Feldman, “Grace in Broken Arrow,” topped our Best of 2012 list.
Today’s story is “A Stiller Ground,” a devastating piece from Gordon Grice about the loss of a child. The story will be featured in an upcoming issue of This Land, and we’d like to thank them for sharing it early with Longreads Members. A brief excerpt is below.
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I walked in graveyards, gathering trash and fallen branches. I pulled weeds that obscured the names on old headstones, and when I was through, most of the names I’d revealed meant nothing to me. I took special care with the graves of children. I put the ceramic animal caricatures back on the stones they’d fallen off of. After a rain, I thumbed mud from the Lucite-covered photographs set in stones. I took the time to read a turn of the century marker made of crudely hand-lettered cement. On it was an asymmetric heart pieced from small stones. I subtracted compulsively: death year minus birth year equals age, give or take one.
I started, almost always, with the graves of my own ancestors and cousins. My mother’s mother, dead before I was born. Carved next to her name was my grandfather’s. He was still alive, though his name had been written in the city of the dead for thirty-four years. My cousin, a suicide at twenty-one. His epitaph declared his heart too big to last in this world. I read his stone with double vision: the disdain I’d always had for such sentiments; the tolerance I had now for anything, anything at all, to ease the pain. I walked along the rows, taking care of people past caring.
That was my daily routine. Sometimes the woman I loved would come with me. I envied her. She seemed to know how to grieve. To let herself feel things; to take time. She wrote letters to our stillborn daughter. She ordered photographs from the hospital and put them in a scrapbook. She talked. Most of these activities were strange to me, though I clumsily tried to emulate her for the sake of my mental health. I wanted to have my private scene at the cemetery, unwitnessed, and be cured for good, or at least for a little while.
Mark Armstrong 