We fill up on deep-fried bricks of cheese and rib eyes big as our heads at Burly’s Roughrider Bar & Steakhouse. Our neatly laced Merrells and moisture-wicking Patagonias set us apart from the mud-splattered, steel-toed boots under most every…
During the summer of 2023, I graduated with my MFA, packed my car, and drove three thousand miles from Seattle to Philadelphia. Halfway through the trip, I stopped in Belfield, North Dakota, to explore Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Going from the rainforests and mountains of Washington to the rugged badlands of the upper Midwest was disorienting: the dust-clouded terrain, as if cropped from an old Western film, teemed with bison, wild horses, and buzzing insects. Its vibrancy stood in stark contrast to the 38.5 million acres of uniform ranchland beyond the park. If I needed a reminder of the United States’ utilitarian relationship with its heartland, I had found it.
A year later, scrolling paleontology TikTok, I came across aerial footage of a mosasaur fossil—a spine imprinted in rock postextraction. Its hollowness struck me as much as its beauty, and I thought about how land holds memories, most of which we will never access. When I began writing “Thin Places,” the mosasaur, Loon, was the only character with any emotions, agency, or history. June, the story’s narrator, emerged as a reflection of the mosasaur: shaped by her surroundings, hollowed out in places.
Nature writer Barry Lopez, in “A Literature of Place,” argues that land compels language and shapes human identity. He suggests that developing a relationship with a place requires a willingness to be open and vulnerable to it. This openness fosters intimacy, which can lead to a profound sense of belonging and connection to the world. And yet, this vulnerability can feel impossible. We often see land as a resource rather than a relationship. June wrestles with this complicity. She participates in the illegal excavation of Loon’s fossil but also begins to feel the weight of what it means to mine, to chisel, to take. She starts to see herself in what is being excavated, and in what remains.
The “thin place” metaphor gave me a way to tie the land’s spiritual resonance to June’s inner conflict. Rooted in Celtic belief, a “thin place” blurs the boundary between the mundane and the divine. In writing about the badlands, I found these boundaries increasingly eroded. The illegal dig became a space to explore uncomfortable tensions: scientific curiosity and commercial greed; stewardship and exploitation; the deep history embedded in the land and the dispossession of those who historically inhabited it. None of these ideas resolve cleanly. The story holds that discomfort because I’m still learning to sit with it.
The relationship between June and Lionel surfaced as another lens for these tensions. Lionel’s manipulation of June’s ambition and vulnerability mirrors the extraction happening in the badlands, as their relationship shifts into something transactional and fraught. Like the fossil, June is something to be chiseled at, excavated, and pieced back together only insofar as it serves someone else. By the story’s end, when June aligns herself with the land’s quiet endurance, that pivotal moment doesn’t feel like a resolution but a beginning: a step toward imagining what reciprocity might look like, even if she isn’t sure how to get there.
The North Dakota badlands, like all of the United States, rest on Indigenous land, layered with stories of care and resilience that are too often displaced or erased. Organizations like the Lakota People’s Law Project work to protect sacred lands and uphold Indigenous rights, advocating for justice and preservation. Please support them.
EMILY GIANGIULIO is a writer and educator from Philadelphia. In 2023, she received her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle. Recent short fiction has appeared in Bennington Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Nimrod International Journal. Stories have been nominated and/or shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, and The Masters Review Short Story Award. She teaches writing among the loons of rural New Hampshire and is at work on a novel.
