The Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, with spires, rosette stained glass and gargoyles, is one of the most colorful sites in the world. In addition to its Gothic beauty, every part of the building evokes a story.

Joan of Arc and Napoleon knelt in these aisles. Quasimodo of “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” lived in the shadowy belfry, at least in the movies. This harbor on the Seine River could have been any other village without this 900-year-old edifice and its dramas. The stories create the place as much as the stonework.

I visited Paris from Kansas, where I write about a very different geography, the Great Plains. In the Old West, writings about place emerge slowly. Pulp fiction and movies celebrated the brief cattle drive years. But by the end of the 19th century, single-family farms and ranches dotted this region.

In 1896, William Allen White extolled this area in “What’s the Matter with Kansas,” when his hometown was a collection of wholesome gingerbread houses. In the 1980s, businesses deserted the old main street for bland malls. Now the commercial center of town is in a Wal-Mart complex, hardly an inspiration to literary artists.

Nonetheless, this landscape is the backdrop for a developing literature, as Paris is the setting for its world-famous stories.

In the Middle Ages, the new village of Paris must have been an unsung collection of cottages, not unlike Midwestern towns. Like those early Parisians, Kansas writers celebrate their young, no-frills towns. They use similar literary traditions of poetry and prose. They remember their European forbears, who referenced a Holy Land and “old country” from hundreds of years ago.

At the same time, area writers look beyond the outskirts of town, outward to the explosive tangerine sunsets, the fringed prairie orchids and the shelves of flint rock that underlie the jagged horizon. The grassland vistas are the revered cathedrals.

Victor Contoski, a Kansas University professor, forms poetry from a tangle of influences when he describes the west wind wandering over the plains “like a violin lost in the slow movement/of a Russian concerto.” He describes the great starry skies, “Arcturus descends andante molto cantabile.” In Contoski’s work, I hear the echoes of the Catholic Mass at Notre Dame.

William Stafford, a National Book Award winner, is one of the best-known of the mid-continent poets. In each poem he folds his word-origami inside-out, as in the last stanza of “The Farm on the Great Plains”: “My self will be the plain,/wise as winter is gray,/pure as cold posts go/pacing toward what I know.”

Stafford reaches backward in time to indigenous languages as well as the European tradition. He explains a Siouan name for a Kansas river, “They called it Neosho, meaning/’a river made muddy by buffalo.'” Stafford cherishes the badgers, the blue herons, the bluestem grasses and the rippled hills of the region. His revelry in these details renders them mysterious, as Parisians marvel at Notre Dame stonework from the Crusades.

N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa writer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, writes about the Great Plains from the perspective of his undated oral tradition. His people lived on the Great Plains, including Kansas, since the arrival of the horse, and his stories go back even further, to the Kiowa migration through Yellowstone. In his culture, there is no distant Holy Land, but rather stories related to sun and stars and earth of this very region.

His book “The Way to Rainy Mountain” transforms grasslands into mythic sites, as he describes the Oklahoma “knoll” his people call a mountain. Montparnasse in Paris is not a large mountain, but like it, Rainy Mountain rises beyond mere physical dimensions.

Contemporary Great Plains writers connect with the human and animal cultures around them, as the French storytellers did in Paris. William Least Heat-Moon, Robert Day, Linda Hasselstrom, Kathleen Norris, Harley Elliott, Steven Hind, Patricia Traxler, Phil Heldrich, Philip Kimball, Lance Henson and others inscribe the stories of the prairies. Storytellers persuade their audience to look within a place and see its inner spirit.

A people’s stories are the cornerstone of both physical and cultural survival, for a nation and for the land itself.

Denise Low is chair of the English department at Haskell Indian Nations University and a member of The Prairie Writers Circle, a project of The Land Institute, a natural systems agriculture research organization in Salina.