The Spring 2025 edition of Vernacular Journal is live and includes my poem “The Crossroads of America” in it! Vernacular Journal defines its vision as:

Vernacular is anything that reveals a sense of place.
Vernacular is the local and the vulgar – food, music, buildings, speech, flora, fauna, etc. Something regional that serves as a means of reaffirming or establishing identity.
Familiar forms in an informal city.

About from Vernacular Journal

I was really drawn in with this vision and immediately thought of two pieces that explored local language and identity with the lens on place. “The Crossroads of America” is a piece inspired by my long drives across my home state of Indiana and a conversation with my husband about sound barriers along the highway. Being from an engineer background, he explained the physics behind various road barriers ranging from sound to car crashes but I was curious about the various socio-economics that influence the structure and appearance of barriers or fences people to use: What things are they keeping out? What things are they keeping in? What is public versus private on each side of town? What do the materials and porousness of each mean to the communities they were built in?

So much can be learned by local definitions and vocabulary, often allowing a quickfire way to indicate the in-group versus out-group. It’s a fast tell that someone isn’t from my home region when they call the locals Indianaianas or refer to Indianapolis by spelling it as Indie or they don’t drive around 465 like a bat out of hell. But even within the city and donut counties, we still have references and terminology to distinguish belonging and our in-group. Within a 15 minute drive you could be code-switching and interfacing in different ways. I know this is very common in any city but I really wanted to explore what this looks like in my home city, exploring what my state’s slogan of “The Crossroads of America” means as a state that prides itself at being a pit stop on a journey to somewhere with a better final destination.

You can read my piece (and many others) at Vernacular Journal here: https://vernacularjournal.com/The-Crossroads-of-America