Ohio. How is the state, the landscape, the word itself used in literature? As a community to be idolized or escaped, as a locale of unexpected psychological mystery? Or, simply, as a bouncy amphibrach (unstressed-stressed-unstressed) to end a line?

In stories and poems, Ohio often seems to stand for America itself, or at least a certain slice of America. It can be gritty or used for nostalgia. It can indicate Industrial and Post-Industrial and Rural and Suburban.

We continue to be curious about the specific ways writers have used our home in the past, and how they might use it today. Following up on our feature from Issue 25, we asked seven writers to reflect on Ohio, the 45,000-square-mile concept that’s often known as “The Heart of It All.”

• Rachel Rinehart on Ohio rurality and mortality in Mary Oliver’s “The River Styx, Ohio.”
  
• Therese Gleason on Ohio River trauma in James Wright’s “On a Phrase from Southern Ohio” and “Ohio Valley Swains.”

• Betsy K. Brown interviews Ohio’s first poet laureate, Amit Majmudar.

• Vrinda Jagota on spatial connections in Hanif Abdurraqib’s “Just a Kid from Northeast Ohio,” “The Vanishing Monuments of Columbus, Ohio,” and “Columbus Sunsets.”

• Molly Rideout on the meaning of her grandfather’s monograph about Sherwood Anderson and Anderson’s novel Winesburg, Ohio.
  
• Caitlin Horrocks on Midwestern hipness and family dynamics in Michael Cunningham’s “White Angel.”
  
• Michael O’Connell on the “Great Ohio Desert” in David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System.