From Missouri, ‘The New Territory’ tells stories of the Midwest

For nearly a decade now, Tina Casagrand has been focused on bucking all the trends in journalism: She’s publishing a 128-page print magazine, focused on the Midwest. And it’s working.

The magazine, a biannual, is called The New Territory, and Casagrand makes no pretenses that it’s a moneymaker. After seven years of bootstrapping the publication, she formally organized a board of directors and obtained nonprofit tax status in 2022 for what had always, in truth, been a venture without profit. Thanks to philanthropic support and a Patreon that allows subscribers to donate, she’s proud that The New Territory pays its contributors—far from a given in journalism these days.

And now The New Territory’s work has led to its first book. The anthology Lingering Inland features 73 short essays first dreamed up by departments editor Andy Oler and published by the magazine in a series called “Literary Landscapes.” Each explores a Midwestern location that’s relevant to literature, whether it’s Toni Morrison’s Lorain, Ohio, or Kate Chopin’s St. Louis. Says Casagrand, “They’re little bite-sized essays that you could read over a cup of coffee and then go throughout the rest of your day, thinking about how literature leaves its mark on your own life and on your community.” The series began as Oler’s pandemic project, but took off from there, eventually catching the attention of University of Illinois Press. 

For Casagrand, the book is a natural outgrowth of the magazine’s interest in telling the stories of the Midwest in a leisurely way outside the noise that shapes so much online conversation. As she describes her goal in founding The New Territory in 2016, “I wanted to create a publication that could collect the ongoing story and conversation of this region, and knew that I could work my connections and my Missouri bonafides, but I was also very interested in what other journalists had to share from their communities.”

A native of Dixon, Missouri, a tiny town just west of Rolla, Casagrand studied journalism at the University of Missouri, creating a magazine as her capstone project. When she found herself needing to stay in the Jefferson City area after college to assist her grandparents, she had just enough hubris to start the magazine she wanted to read. “I knew how to start a magazine because I did it once as a capstone,” she says. “And I was young enough and dumb enough to believe I could do it.” 

The New Territory’s definition of the Midwest is not the simplified collection of states that lumps together places as diverse as Michigan and Nebraska—or the Great Lakes region that incorporates some of the Midwest’s biggest cities. It’s focused on the area it shorthands as “the Great Plains and the Ozarks.” Casagrand says 25 percent of the magazine’s readers are in Missouri, with Kansas a close second. “From there, it’s the states that we cover—so in addition to those, it’s Nebraska, Oklahoma, northwest Arkansas, and Southern Illinois.” 

On December 13, The New Territory will show off its work in the biggest metro area within that region. At Wydown United Church (6501 Wydown) in St. Louis, the magazine will team up with Left Bank Books and the Left Bank Books Foundation to show off its new book, introduce some contributors with strong St. Louis and Missouri connections, and enjoy live music and, in Casagrand’s words, “merriment.” (The event is free, but RSVPs are encouraged.)

In typical form, the musical accompaniment for The New Territory’s St. Louis book party is homegrown: It’s a short wind quintet playing a piece by Nathan Buckwalter of Fulton, Missouri, with the band organized by Alex Dzurick, a Fulton native whose own contribution to Lingering Island is a treat. 

It will not be the kind of launch party you might find for a book published in New York City. But it may well be a lot more fun.