Inlandia: A Literary Journey through California’s Inland Empire
Click the balloons on the map to discover an Inlandia story.
Over eighty writers are represented in the 2006 anthology that started the Inlandia Institute. Material ranges from Indian stories and early explorers’ narratives to pieces written by local emerging authors. Showcasing poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and other literature by such luminaries as Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, M.F.K. Fisher, and others, Inlandia put a new literary region on the map.
Coyotes howling at the moon, gang warfare, neighborhoods of tract homes for an exploding population, miles of orange groves now abandoned, the prattle of military training guns jarring the desert quiet, a landscape rich with the stories of Native American tribes.
These disparate images comprise the fabric of one of the fastest growing regions in America, California’s Riverside and San Bernardino Counties, the so-called Inland Empire. Discover the places that inspired the creation of California’s newest literary region.