Poetry can return us to the rich strangeness of childhood, as we learn through Rustin Larson’s poem, “Writing Letters.”

Publisher Jon Andelson talks with Associate Editor Sophia Unzicker about the interconnected importance of place, handcrafting, and knowing one’s neighbors.

A college class’s struggle to frame a land acknowledgement statement reminded Rootstalk Editor Mark Baechtel of the time when, trying to write a newspaper column about an indigenous artist and the issue of respect, he learned a painful lesson about white privilege.

From the screech of a hawk to the chirp of a grasshopper, nature is filled with music. So, for your listening pleasure, Rootstalk has created a collection of animal and insect sounds that can be heard during the day and night in the Prairie Pothole Region.

Experimental archaeology reveals the effectiveness of hunting bison with ancient weaponry.

Photo essays from two frequent Rootstalk contributor—Bruce Leventhal depicting South Dakota’s Badlands and Keith Kozloff depicting the high plains of Colorado—illustrate the extreme variability life and geography can have in the Prairie Region.

The end of things is always the start of something else. David R. James explores this fact with these two poems of memory.

For many, the coyote is a symbol of America’s wide-open spaces. So why is it appearing in our cities, our parks, our back yards? For essayist Anika Jane Beamer the coyote’s tenacity and resilience amidst urbanization and climate change make it a lens we can use to examine the broader implications of human and ecological displacement.

Can you name the plants in your front yard? Do you know which ones are edible? Join Associate Editor Kailee Shermak on her journey to answer these questions by learning the ways of foraging.

An hour-and-a-half drive from Chicago, the Zumwalt Acres farm operation calls tiny Sheldon, Illinois, home. Sheldon is 98 percent white and politically ruby red—a fact that might make it seem an unlikely place to be managed according to traditional Jewish principles. But the Welbel sisters are doing exactly that, on land that’s been in their family for six generations. Associate Editor Felix Benardo describes what it’s like to live and work there.

Some dread the coming of a prairie winter. Since 2010, Dan McCue has helped his family view the cold with anticipation. He builds them an ice rink in his backyard in Grinnell, Iowa.

When Associate Editor Mary Ann Schwindt’s Belgian forebears immigrated to the Midwest, they brought Rolle Bolle with them. The sport—sort of an amalgam of curling and horseshoes, played with a lopsided cross between a discus and bocce ball—still brings families like hers together for friendly competition. Her film takes us inside the Rolle Bolle subculture.

Ceramic artist and college professor Zoé Strecker is friends with her neighbor, who just happens to be one of the most respected and influential figures in American letters and environmental activism: Wendell Barry. Her essay limns the effect Barry has had on her life and her work.

The phrase commodity crop is familiar to anyone living in the rural Midwest. Generally, it applies to corn and soybeans, but in Associate Editor Luke Bryson’s multimedia project, we can see how the machinery of marketing has been employed to co-opt one of the Midwest’s iconic wildflowers.

Fermilab, the United States’ premier particle accelerator laboratory, is on a 6,800-acre campus in Batavia, Illinois. It’s also home to a small herd of bison whose genetic purity makes them important to the species’ survival.

A significant omission in a Nativity display gives a father and son on a holiday walk a chance to explore the importance of our enduring symbols.

Betty Moffett takes daily walks on the acreage where she and her husband are restoring the prairie. The couple’s dog always accompanies her on these rambles, and one day her companion provided her with a reminder that even in the tamest territory, the wild is a hairsbreadth away.

Spring on the prairie can be a chancy season: one day summer-like heat, the next a white-out snowstorm. Yuan Changming’s poem serves to remind us of the Midwest’s fickle weather.

A hotbed of activity for truckers and families alike that garners over 5,000 visitors a year from across the country.

Thomas Agran—painter and creator of numerous public murals—was recently awarded the Tallgrass Artist Residency in Matfield Green, Kansas. A collage of images and words inspired by the residency and created by Associate Editor Maizie Schaffner brings the artist’s experience to our pages.

Once seen as a symptom of urban blight, graffiti has had an image-change. No longer a form of vandalism, in many places—and Iowa City, Iowa is one of them—it is now seen as a form of public art.

It’s a familiar story: an artist leaves her rural home to feed her creative process amid the hurly-burly of the big city. What happens, though, when an artist reverses that process? Meet Lisa Bergh, who did exactly that.

When most people hear "Prairie School Design," they probably think of Frank Lloyd Wright’s low-slung houses or Louis B. Sullivan’s towering office blocks. Ceramics, though, are one of the ways high-end prairie-influenced design became known to average people. And among the day’s most influential potteries was the American Terracotta and Ceramics Works, in Terra Cotta, Illinois.

What stories can fabric scraps tell? So many stories of love and family, of laughter and healing, and of community.

Past contributor Mirzam Perez has favored us with her recent mixed media piece, “Mississippi Mud,” which combines earthy tones with a texture that calls out for contact.

When frequent contributor and native New-Englander Dan Weeks arrived on campus for his first year of college, he met Louise, a rancher’s daughter from the Sandhills of Nebraska. What followed was “ab-so-lute-ly wonderful,” but not at all what he expected.

Visions for Iowa is a podcast episode that reflects on the future of Iowa’s land use as envisioned by several Iowans. Stay tuned for more episodes from this series this summer, 2024.

Driving the back roads of rural Iowa with civil rights icon John Lewis, contributor Jack Menner learned the meaning of retail politics.

The prairie’s perennial message: Slow down. Look Close. Then look again. Susan Jaret McKinstry’s poem makes clear what the rewards will be.