For some folks who grew up here, Oklahoma has been a place to dream about leaving. For those looking in from somewhere else, it’s often a caricature or a question mark—a blank spot shaped by booms and busts, the Bible Belt's buckle, and a particular sort of magical thinking that tends to leave tragedy unacknowledged in its wake.
For The Pickup’s publisher This Land Press, the question “What IS this place?” was and is a driving obsession. This Land’s stories from “the middle of somewhere” pulled Oklahoma’s strangeness and beauty to the forefront, rewriting old ideas about this state along the way.
In 2013, This Land Press took that mission one step further, inviting 46 of America’s most important and influential writers to imagine their own flash fiction versions of the 46th state. Many of those writers—and we’re talking some of the greats, like Emily St. John Mandel, Lauren Groff, Jonathan Lethem, Wayne Koestenbaum—had never set foot in Oklahoma. They delivered strange, evocative, beautiful tales that range from cryptid fables to surreal situations to meditations that feel like sitting on the back porch watching the sky turn green as a storm rolls in.
Combined with original art and, in some cases, audio versions produced by Allison Herrera, these stories were praised by The Paris Review for finding, among other things, "the pulse of that secret, sinister history circulating beneath the state." Reading them today is like a hallucinatory road trip, a series of mirages that somehow feel more real than the thing itself.
Flash fiction is one of the best genres to read in the summer, quick and direct as an ice-cold popsicle to the brain. We're pleased to bring a taste of Imaginary Oklahoma to you in the heat of the season, as you do your own Oklahoma dreaming.
Read Stories From Imaginary Oklahoma
