I shall not easily forget the mortal toil, and the vexations of flesh and spirit, that we underwent occasionally, in our wanderings through the Cross Timber. It was like struggling through forests of cast iron.
— A Tour on the Prairies, Washington Irving.
Tales from the Crosstimbers takes its name from an ancient forest that starts in southeastern Kansas, stretches across Oklahoma and beyond, into north Texas. The forest is a metaphor for our community, for our fiction, and for ourselves.
In 1832, Washington Irving joined a party of mounted rangers on an expedition to Indian Territory. They found a prairie bounded by dense, forbidding forests. This dark mosaic of gnarled, blackjack and post oaks hunkered close to the rocky ground. Prickly underbrush snagged all who entered and blocked progress. These forests, these Crosstimbers, stood as a barrier and a boundary between the civilized East and the wild West.
Today, these forests endure, stretching from southeastern Kansas, coiling around Tulsa, and snaking along I-44 to Oklahoma City and beyond. These trees are small in stature, usually less than thirty feet tall, but they are survivors. They can live for centuries. Many of the ones Irving wrote about are still around. They survived droughts and downpours, dust storms and blizzards, fires and farming. They even survived urban intrusions. The forests are mostly oak, but they are diverse. They include hickory, pine, redbud, and hackberry trees. Vines, briars, and sumac tangle about their rough bark.
Like our namesake, we are survivors. We’re diverse. The path we take to good craft can be prickly, but we’ll push through. We’re in this for the long term. We’re not flashy, but we’ve got all the basic elements down. We won’t let a few crowd out everyone else–every author contributes to the ecology of our group.
We are the Crosstimbers.
You can learn more about the Cross Timbers at the Oklahoma Biological Survey.