Dear Readers:
Welcome home. And please welcome us home too.
This Land Press is proud to launch a new imprint, The Pickup, that will bring a fresh eye to Tulsa with the same courage, savvy, and critical insight as This Land did from 2010 through 2016. With This Land, we hit a motherlode, finding stories that were enlightening, funny, terrifying, insightful, and often profoundly moving. All of our work with This Land, I hope, deepened our readers’ understanding of and appreciation for this place. Tulsa. The middle of America. This land.
With The Pickup, we hope to do the same and give you even more to think about. There are plenty of untold stories still here. The Pickup will be an online subscription-based magazine that features a wide range of voices. It will be forward-looking, with an editorial mix blending local commentary with community-oriented journalism and feature stories, as well as weekly roundups of Tulsa food, music, arts, cultural events, and local news from the middle of America.
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Seven years ago, we announced that This Land Press would take a publishing hiatus and focus its energies on other projects. My letter then explained our thinking. It also explained what we stand for and why we’d return. In short, what we stand for is this: that creative individuals in the middle of America need a strong, shared home base to unapologetically tell stories that might not fit into conventional pathways.
These stories still need to be told. So we spent the past few years exploring how to meet this need in a more sustainable, focused, and creative way. During this hiatus, many friends, subscribers, writers, and others would ask when we would resume publishing. My standard reply was that we would when the right person with the right vision walked in my door. Well, that person showed up.
Matt Carney is the right person at the right time to lead The Pickup.