Inwood is a real place. It is an unincorporated community in Marshall County, Indiana, at latitude 41.318 and longitude -86.203. The census calls it a “populated place,” which is a careful way of saying it is less than a town and more than an empty lot. It has no mayor and no incorporation papers. It has houses, fields, a railroad, and a name.

The town had two other names first

It was platted in 1854 as Pearsonville. That name did not last.

For a while it was Ironwood, after the ironwood trees that grew thick here. Ironwood is a small tree, and the wood is hard enough that the settlers used it to make tools. If you have ever tried to drive a nail into it, you know the name was earned.

When the railroad came through, the company shortened it to Inwood, for the woods it sat in. By 1866 the gazetteer lists Inwood with a population of two hundred. By 1882 it was around five hundred, and busy, mostly with lumber.

Then the lumber ran out. A directory from that period puts it plainly: the village “used to be quite a lively one, especially in the lumbering business, but now that the lumber has nearly all been cut off, it is quite quiet.” It has been quiet ever since. The trees that gave the town its name, twice, are the same trees that were cut down to keep it alive.

That is the whole history, and we think it is a good one. A place named for its woods, which then sold its woods, and kept the name.

Why a press is named after it

Inwood Indiana Press is, by our own measure, the smallest press in the world. It is named for the town because the town is the point.

America is full of Inwoods: places that were something once, that got smaller, and that are still there. Not ghost towns — ghost towns are romantic and photogenic and empty. Inwood is not empty. People live here. The mail comes. That is a harder and more interesting thing to write about than a ruin.

So this is what we published: stories and poems set in small towns, and in particular the kind of small town that most writing overlooks. Rural fiction. Farm poetry. The Midwest at two in the morning. Work about the people who stayed, and the ones who left, and the ones who came back and wish they hadn’t.

And the strange things

The other half of the premise, and we will be honest with you about which half is which.

The town is real. The history above is documented. The rest — the things that come up missing, what moves in the black water out at the pit, the old lady on the corner who seems to know your secrets, the footsteps — is the fiction we invited writers to send us. Inwood Indiana Press began as a place to document strange happenings in a small town, and then a great many writers took the invitation seriously and sent us the strangest work they had.

Some of it reads like it might be true. That was always the idea. A place this quiet gives you room to imagine what the quiet is covering.

Read the archive

The journal is closed to submissions. Everything we published stays online, free to read.

  • Fiction — the largest section: small-town stories, rural gothic, and work that does not sit still.
  • Poetry — the biggest part of the archive.
  • Micro & Flash Fiction — short, and quick to get under your skin.
  • Start at the beginning — the front page, and the rest of the sections.

The printed issues are still available in paperback from Prolific Press.