Smith Hall
Bear’s freshman residence hall — a boomerang-shaped building with a four-story central atrium, glass walls, and the particular mixture of noise, cleaner, air-conditioning, and uncertainty that marks the beginning of college life.
From the plains to the hills
Explore Bear’s World
Bear’s journey is shaped by more than the people he loves. Redfield teaches him where he comes from. Hillcrest and Eastern Missouri University show him how much larger life can become.
This guide centers on places introduced through High School Lineman and Freshman Year, with a small glimpse of 91.7 KEMU as Bear’s sophomore year comes into view.
Redfield, Kansas
Home
Hillcrest, Missouri
A larger community
Eastern Missouri University
A new beginning
Where the chronicles begin
Redfield, Kansas
Small town. Big expectations.
Redfield is the kind of place where people know one another’s families, Friday night football can feel like a civic ritual, and the water tower stands over an almost endless Kansas horizon. Main Street is lined with weathered brick storefronts, while grain elevators, train horns, wheat fields, and pickup trucks form the everyday scenery of Bear’s childhood.
It is home in the deepest sense: familiar, affectionate, and sometimes suffocating. For Bear, Redfield represents both the people who raised him and the expectations he has to learn to question before he can decide who he wants to become.
- Region
- Central Kansas
- School
- Redfield High School
- Team
- The Greenhorns
- Visual landmarks
- Water tower, wheat, grain elevators, football field
The town beyond campus
Hillcrest, Missouri
A college town built beside a university — and changed by it every semester.
Hillcrest sits in the rolling hills of north-central Missouri, with a winding river forming a natural boundary along its southern edge and wooded slopes and fields extending north. The landscape itself feels different to Bear after a lifetime of flat Kansas horizons.
The town and Eastern Missouri University exist side by side. Local businesses depend on the students who arrive each year, while longtime residents sometimes feel the pressure of that constant influx. On game days the relationship becomes unmistakable, with maroon and white spilling beyond campus into the streets. Away from those crowds, Hillcrest settles back into a quieter rhythm of local restaurants, bars, shops, and university events.
- Region
- North-central Missouri
- Landscape
- Rolling hills, woods, fields, and river
- Relationship to EMU
- College town and university community
A bigger world
Eastern Missouri University
Large enough for Bear to disappear into something new. Small enough that the right people still learn his name.
Eastern Missouri University blends older brick and stone buildings with newer facilities, giving Bear a campus that feels both established and in motion. When he first visits, it feels warmer and more personal than the larger university competing for his attention. By the time he arrives as a freshman, the campus is alive with bicycles, students on the lawns, the bookstore, stadiums, art studios, and thousands of lives unfolding at once.
EMU has roughly 12,000 students and strong programs across the arts, communications, education, and health sciences. Its size gives Bear something Redfield never could: the ability to discover new parts of himself without everyone already knowing the story they expect him to live.
The Quad
The old academic heart of campus: green space crossed by concrete paths and surrounded by historic buildings, where students study, socialize, and move between the different parts of university life.
Fine Arts
The part of campus where Bear begins taking himself seriously as an artist — studios, classrooms, critique, computers, and the first hints that creativity might become more than a private talent.
Greek Row
Home to fraternity and sorority houses, including Tau Phi Epsilon. What first feels like an unfamiliar social world slowly becomes one of Bear’s strongest sources of belonging.
KEMU FM
91.7
The Voice of EMU
Coming into focus in Book Three
91.7 KEMU
The Voice of Eastern Missouri University.
KEMU is EMU’s campus radio station: a place of microphones, music, student voices, and the controlled panic of keeping dead air off the dial. It begins at the edge of Bear’s college world and becomes increasingly important as his sophomore year unfolds.
For Bear, KEMU represents another doorway into campus life—a place where listening, speaking, and finding the right words will matter in ways he does not yet expect.
Explore Book ThreeKeep exploring
Places Become Part of Us
Redfield remains part of Bear even after he leaves it. EMU changes because he learns to call it home. Each new book widens that world, carrying Bear into new places while deepening the meaning of the ones he already knows.