Photography & Art

Kai Carlson-Wee, Second Place winner of Narrative’s 2017 Spring Story Contest, is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he received a BA in English from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in poetry from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Carlson-Wee lives in San Francisco.


Read the poems inspired by Carlson-Wee’s travels.

Badlands

Photography

by Kai Carlson-Wee

I grew up in a small town in southern Minnesota, a block from the Soo Line Railroad yard. My brother Anders and I used to play by the tracks and watch grainers and double-stacks roll through the crossings and out past the green rows of corn. We imagined their routes through the heart of the country, and it captured our imaginations so much that we used to have “hobo days,” wearing dirt-stained shirts and eating cold cans of Spam in the woods. It was playacting, of course, but as we got older and started to explore the country on our own, we remained fascinated by the westward myth and the spell it casts on the national psyche.

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