Wiegenstein’s new novel (September) is set in 1904, partly at the St. Louis World’s Fair and partly in the setting already known to his many readers, Daybreak. Daybreak, the utopian settlement founded before the Civil War, is a receding influence now except for Charlotte Turner, wife of the founder and its only surviving disciple. Daybreak is fictional but set in the rugged Ozarks, in southeastern Missouri.
Charlotte has two sons, Adam and Newton. Businessman Newton is a pillar of the community and perhaps has political ambitions. Adam has always been the dreamer, the dilettante, but he becomes the reason for the story when he publishes THE HILL-BILLIES OF HEAVEN HOLLER, a sort of mishmash of Harold Bell Wright and Zane Grey with a religious message. The book’s enormous success coincides with the World’s Fair, and Adam and his publisher come up with the idea to build a mock-up hillbilly exhibit to mirror this overwrought version of the Arcadian Ozarks. It seems Branson has always been with us.
You could say LAND OF JOYS is a woman-centric novel. For instance, there’s the remarkable secondary character, Josephine Bridges, the acerbic businesswoman. She hasn’t exactly mellowed from previous appearances but she’s absorbed a lot of Charlotte’s restraining wisdom. Then there’s Petey Turner, Adam’s precocious teenage daughter and Charlotte’s inquisitive confidante. Charlotte herself is the novel’s prime actor, but Petey is its likable conscience. If the world doesn’t turn out right for Petey, then there’s no hope.
The world does turn out all right, or at least continues to spin. There’s a brutal murder at the Fair, a breezy prostitute whom Adam, full of himself because of his book, has a dalliance with. Several subplots deal with troubled race relations both in the city and the country. Charlotte can’t always solve such endemic problems, though she tries.
The moral is almost that the city corrupts, the country purifies.
Wiegenstein delivers all of this with a snappy pace, but he has room for many a fine thought, usually attributed to Charlotte: “dwelling in the past was a sure path to despair, for its glories were gone while its regrets remained.”
LAND OF JOYS is an entertaining and thoughtful novel, and Wiegenstein is a tireless crusader for Ozarks—and Missouri—literature. He should be represented in every library. Indeed, he was the recipient of the Missouri Library Association’s Missouri Author Award in 2022.
Though connected, each of the novels in Wiegenstein’s series stands alone. Those novels are: SLANT OF LIGHT (2012), THIS OLD WORLD (2014), and THE LANGUAGE OF TREES (2017). He is also the author of SCATTERED LIGHTS (2020), a highly-praised collection of Ozarks stories that was a finalist for the Penn/Faulkner award.
Howerton collects a generous sample of poems from C.D. Albin, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Paulette Guerin, John J. Han, Gerry Sloan, the late Mark Spitzer, Agnes Vojta, Amy Wright Vollmar, and Howerton himself. There are 189 poems here, enough to keep you in contemplation and revery for many months.
Last year’s ghastly heat and drought inspires several of these poems, notably Albin’s “Pharoah Dreamed of Cattle,” which portrays a man surveying a farm shrunken under the heat, and, like the man himself, hanging on until rains return. Maybe they won’t return. Maybe something has changed that can’t be reversed.
That sense of ecological doom informs several of these poems. There’s Carlisle’s “Kings River,” for instance, certainly a celebration of a pure stream, and yet the poet imagines another stream, and “floating/on the stagnant water among the plastic bags and beer cans.” Wild nature is awfully frail, these days.
Each poet writes a two-page autobiography that includes the reason he or she writes poetry. Carlisle’s is perhaps the most striking: “I write poetry because prose confuses me, because my head fills up with rhyme, because poetry sussurrates and moans and sighs and whispers and sings at my shoulder. Poetry because it is in every corner, around every dogleg turn, because it is dilemma and euphoria. Poetry because without poetry, what?”
Howerton’s “Rain Crow” also evokes climate change, in a wry twist on the folkloric notion that crows can predict rain. The signs aren’t there anymore and keep changing, mystifying the laconic crows. Howerton provides another definition of poetry: “Perhaps it’s an overstatementto say that a poem should never be about what it first appears to be about.” That sentiment jumps out from “Barn Removal,” a short, disconcerting portrait of swallows returning to their former home, a barn that’s been torn down. Home, the thing of all things we depended on, isn’t there anymore. What do we do now?
Most of these poets celebrate nature with minute portrayals that resonate beyond the page: Guerin and Sloan and Vollmar with the near-nature of back yards, and urban environments clashing against rural ones; Vojta’s desire to merge with nature (“I want to spend a year by the river/and live in her seasons”); and Han with his masterful haiku:
summer breeze
a baby turtle
peeks out of its shell
And then there’s Mark Spitzer, whose poetry doesn’t fit with any other of these poets. You might say it’s the freest of free verse:
so I went to the storied Devil’s Hole
clearly marked on Google Earth
got onto the farmer’s land
and found a sinkhole
stuffed with the stuff of dumps
Only that last line seems somewhat poetic, but Spitzer is a concrete poet, something of a rarity these days. He dazzles with line placement, citations from newspapers, and photos to create hisoriginal take on mythic creatures such as the terrible green gowrow and Big Al, an impossibly large alligator gar.
Spitzer was very funny. He died on January 17th at the tender age of 57. He wrote thirty-some books, and there are two in the pipeline, including Crytozarkia, from Cornerpost. He was boundlessly enthusiastic about writing, about fish, about life, and he’ll be impossible to replace.
Wild Muse, clearly a labor of love, should stand up for quite some time as the essential collection of Ozarks poetry. It celebrates and grieves for the Ozarks, with its pure rivers and distinct wildlife, itself a great and troubled poem of nature.
Dave Malone, from West Plains, Missouri seems like a sketch artist to me, one of those people who carry around a pad and fine pencils or pens to record life as it rushes by. His poems are not shallow, however.. They are polished, exact, and always with characters whom Malone brings to life in a few, sparse lines.
The title poem evokes the curiosity and quiet terror of school kids crouched beneath their desks as a tornado threatens, then strikes. “Fruit” is a menacing tale of teenaged girls who accept a ride from “two old men in a truck,” and, as darkness falls, may live to regret it.
“Mattress” is a downbeat love poem, a discarded mattress standing in for a love gone sour.
A section of Malone’s book is entitled “Quarantine,” by which Malone refers to our national experience with Covid and also a feeling of being shut off from life, curtailed in some way. In “Elegy,” a man mulches trees as he mourns the loss of a friend. It’s August, and no new trees can be planted. Death is all there will be for a while. “After the Funeral” charts similar territory, musing over a highway death with causal explanations, but the death might actually have been a suicide.
Malone can be playful, too. My favorite is this sometimes whimsical little book is “Summer Afternoon in the Pod.” It’s about a woman—living in quarantine times—who buys a cheap, blow-up pool and puts it in her back yard. She
fills the pool with chilled water,
drops magnolia blooms
in its low tide when
her girlfriends arrive,
and she serves apple quarantinis
as sweet as laughter.
Around seven, a storm
tumbles in from the west
like a toddler. But she shoos
it north. To a better home.
What a lovely little portrait, evoking a circumscribed life and joy at once. If it were fiction, which of course it is not, I’d say John Cheever and A. A. Milne had a few drinks and decided to collaborate.
Brooks Blevins is the author of the three-volume A HISTORY OF THE OZARKS. In UP SOUTH, he collects thirteen essays that strive to define an undefinable region.
Agriculture certainly survives but those remote, self-sustaining, hard-scrabble hill farms are in short supply. They lie fallow, or abandoned, or have been subsumed by corporate operations.
The region is no longer known for moonshine. It never was; they made moonshine in Tennessee, too.
Even the notion that Ozarkers are of Scots-Irish descent is questionable, though you wouldn’t know it from all the festivals with their dulcimers and folk music.
Blevins is sometimes quite personal, reflecting on his life in education with a commendable humility. He recalls his undergraduate days at Lyons College, where he wrote an upstart paper claiming that black and white relations were better in the “upland south” he grew up in than in the Deep South of Alabama or Mississippi. He portrayed LaCrosse, a little Arkansas town where, anecdotally at least, whites and blacks got along quite well.
But as Blevins reconsiders his student paper, he realizes that the black residents of LaCrosse had so little in life they didn’t threaten whites. And the larger point—that, in comparison to the Deep South, the Ozarks was relatively free of racial tensions—is moot, because the region was/is almost entirely white. That historical whiteness becomes all the more stark when you consider the lynchings in Springfield and Joplin.
I can remember walking home from school in Cabool, Missouri, and seeing a black man sitting in a construction truck outside a restaurant. I was five years old and had never seen a black person. He smiled and somehow I worked up the courage to ask him why he was sitting there. “Oh, they’ll bring me somethin’,” he said. He couldn’t eat inside—nor could he spend the night, because of a sundown law.
Giving a nod to the migrant Spruills of John Grisham’s A PAINTED HOUSE, Blevins explains how generations of poor Ozarkers, from the 1930s through the 1950s, left their worn-out farms to pick cotton in the Delta and fruit in Washington State and Michigan.
My family did this for two years, traveling to Grand Junction, Colorado for peaches and Wenatchee, Washington for cherries, until my mother refused to travel anymore and we settled on a little farm near Mountain Grove, Missouri. Our transportation rivaled the Joads of Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH: a 1950 Chevy pickup with Dad’s home-made camper shell on the back. I slept on the front seat, frightened by all the lights and noises at truck stops, where we parked to avoid motel bills.
But migrant labor, or anyhow white Ozarker labor, is no longer a way to think of the Ozarks. Nowadays, the migrants are Central Americans and, in the case of Tyson workers in Noel, Missouri, Somalis.
My favorite of these engaging essays is “The Ordinary Days of Extraordinary Minnie: Diaries of a Life on the Margins,” Blevins’ touching tribute to a stubborn old hill woman from near Marshall, Arkansas. Minnie kept a diary for most of her poverty-stricken life—writing, with her strange literary bent, in third person.
As Blevins notes, “Minnie was married twice and endured three near-fatal births, two failed marriages, and the death of both her parents and subsequent scattering of her siblings.” As a young woman, she traveled from her native Illinois, following a Disciples of Christ minister who claimed that Armageddon was imminent and that the faithful, or anyhow HIS faithful, needed to hide in remote mountain enclaves.
Minnie married another follower and stayed in Arkansas the rest of her life, recording in minute detail everything that happened. More precisely, everything that didn’t happen. Hers is a chronicle of endless hardship, without much levity or triumph. She lived with her son, Lawrence, an obsessive junk collector who hoped to fashion something extraordinary out of all that rusty farm machinery. Nonetheless, the pair survived, Minnie dying in 1974, Lawrence in 1992.
Minnie read books and met every day with vigor and resolve, but even her account of killing a rattler that crawled behind her cook stove, while certainly vivid, is not unusual in farm life. In any case, Blevins’ reverential account breathes life into this forgotten woman, whose tenacity and stubbornness might symbolize a tenacious, stubborn, mostly ignored region. If you want to define the Ozarks, the old Ozarks at least, look no farther than Minnie Atteberry.
Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins, by Brooks Blevins (2022)
Brooks Blevins is the author of the three-volume A HISTORY OF THE OZARKS. In UP SOUTH, he collects thirteen essays that strive to define an undefinable region.
Agriculture certainly survives but those remote, self-sustaining, hard-scrabble hill farms are in short supply. They lie fallow, or abandoned, or have been subsumed by corporate operations.
The region is no longer known for moonshine. It never was; they made moonshine in Tennessee, too.
Even the notion that Ozarkers are of Scots-Irish descent is questionable, though you wouldn’t know it from all the festivals with their dulcimers and folk music.
Blevins is sometimes quite personal, reflecting on his life in education with a commendable humility. He recalls his undergraduate days at Lyons College, where he wrote an upstart paper claiming that black and white relations were better in the “upland south” he grew up in than in the Deep South of Alabama or Mississippi. His thesis portrayed LaCrosse, a little Arkansas town where, anecdotally at least, whites and blacks got along quite well.
But as Blevins reconsiders his student paper, he realizes that the black residents of LaCrosse had so little in life they didn’t threaten whites. And the larger point—that, in comparison to the Deep South, the Ozarks was relatively free of racial tensions—is moot, because the region was/is almost entirely white. That historical whiteness becomes all the more stark when you consider the lynchings in Springfield and Joplin.
I can remember walking home from school in Cabool, Missouri, and seeing a black man sitting in a construction truck outside a restaurant. I was five years old and had never seen a black person. He smiled and somehow I worked up the courage to ask him why he was sitting there. “Oh, they’ll bring me somethin’,” he said. He couldn’t eat inside—nor could he spend the night, because of a sundown law.
Giving a nod to the migrant Spruills of John Grisham’s A PAINTED HOUSE, Blevins explains how generations of poor Ozarkers, from the 1930s through the 1950s, left their worn-out farms to pick cotton in the Delta and fruit in Washington State and Michigan.
My family did this for two years, traveling to Grand Junction, Colorado for peaches and Wenatchee, Washington for cherries, until my mother refused to travel anymore and we settled on a little farm near Mountain Grove, Missouri. Our transportation rivaled the Joads of Steinbeck’s THE GRAPES OF WRATH: a 1950 Chevy pickup with Dad’s home-made camper shell on the back. I slept on the front seat, frightened by all the lights and noises at truck stops, where we parked to avoid motel bills.
But migrant labor, or anyhow white Ozarker labor, is no longer a way to think of the Ozarks. Nowadays, the migrants are Central Americans and, in the case of Tyson workers in Noel, Missouri, Somalis.
My favorite of these engaging essays is “The Ordinary Days of Extraordinary Minnie: Diaries of a Life on the Margins,” Blevins’ touching tribute to a stubborn old hillwoman from near Marshall, Arkansas. Minnie kept a diary for most of her poverty-stricken life—writing, with her strange literary bent, in third person.
As Blevins notes, “Minnie was married twice and endured three near-fatal births, two failed marriages, and the death of both her parents and subsequent scattering of her siblings.” As a young woman, she traveled from her native Illinois, following a Disciples of Christ minister who claimed that Armageddon was imminent and that the faithful, or anyhow HIS faithful, needed to hide in remote mountain enclaves.
Minnie married another follower and stayed in Arkansas the rest of her life, recording in minute detail everything that happened. More precisely, everything that didn’t happen. Hers is a chronicle of endless hardship, without much levity or triumph. She lived with her son, Lawrence, an obsessive junk collector who hoped to fashion something extraordinary out of all that rusty farm machinery. Nonetheless, the pair survived, Minnie dying in 1974, Lawrence in 1992.
Minnie read books and met every day with vigor and resolve, but even her account of killing a rattler that crawled behind her cook stove, while certainly vivid, is not unusual in farm life. However, Blevins’ reverential account breathes life into this forgotten woman, whose tenacity and stubbornness might symbolize a tenacious, stubborn, mostly ignored region. If you want to define the Ozarks, the old Ozarks at least, look no farther than Minnie Atteberry.
First published in 1933, THE WOODS COLT is one of a few Ozarks classic novels, praised highly at the time and taken as representative of the region in centers of publishing and academia. As a small measure of the novel’s staying power, my second collection of stories, THE WALNUT KING, was published in 1990 by a small press in Kansas City called Woods Colt. Woods colt is Ozarks talk for bastard, thus Woods Colt Press traded on an underground image—a rejected, against-all-odds, faintly obscene, perhaps in bad taste, bastard image. THE WOODS COLT became a cult favorite over the years, generally with male writers who fancied themselves to be in the tradition of Hemingway and Erskine Caldwell, with a dash of Henry Miller thrown in just for scandal’s sake. In this manner of thinking, THE WOODS COLT is romantic. To bring the influence up-to-date, you might think of Jim Harrison and Daniel Woodrell.
First things first: Arkansas has done a splendid job of recreating the original text, even including the dark woodcuts of Raymond Bishop. I don’t know a thing about Raymond Bishop, but his illustrations are so wonderful that it’s doubtful the novel would have succeeded without them.
Here’s the story: Clint Morgan, a mule-headed and ignorant hillbilly/bush ape/hill person, is in love/lust with Tillie Starbuck. He has a rival, Ed Prather. Tillie may or may not be entirely faithful to Clint, but she’s certainly more levelheaded. Filled with rage, Clint corners Ed at the post office, where Ed works. This might seem like an ordinary scuffle between two hotheaded young men, but the post office setting makes the fight and the property damage a federal crime. Ed eagerly pursues the case, mainly to defeat Clint in the pursuit of Tillie. Clint walks right into Ed’s trap, wounding a federal officer, and later committing murder. The fates begin to close in on Clint but the reader follows him, fascinated, in his flight to the remotest hills.
Clint isn’t likable. He’s quick-tempered and stupid. He’s also real—we all knew people like him in our teen-aged years. Men still go crazy over women, one hopes, and Clint is a victim of Ed Prather’s cunning. And the reader never pulls back from the page because of the long, gripping chase scene in which Clint does, at last, seem sympathetic. Williamson brings the suspense up slowly, with little respites as Clint seeks food in the wilderness. Also, there’s a new love interest, a sad teenager named Nancy. That she’s fourteen adds to the novel’s slightly prurient edge. Maybe prurient is not the right word. Lurid–and compelling.
In his introduction, Ozarks scholar Phillip Howerton praises Williamson for his knowledge of folklore and Ozarks flora and fauna. He faults the novel for its stereotypical characterizations and for its inexact reproduction of Ozarks speech.
My quick test of Ozarks dialect is “allus” for “always,” which I discovered reading Vance Randolph and then listening to people talk. Allus is still widely used. Williamson, however, uses always for always. With that small measure, I judge Williamson’s dialect to be somewhat inaccurate, and certainly there’s too much of it.
With the towering example of Huck Finn not far in the past, novels written in dialect were popular in Williamson’s time. Faulkner, Caldwell, and especially Zora Neale Hurston were skilled practitioners. They all wrote about a region they grew up in, however, while Williamson seems to have been a quick study, and perhaps an opportunist. Anything for a book, so who could blame him? His seeking out, and obtaining, Vance Randolph’s endorsement shows a certain self-consciousness—and shrewdness.
As for the stereotypical characters, they rang true to me, much truer than the Arcadian hillfolk in THE SHEPHERD OF THE HILLS. The characters talk funny and make a lot of moonshine, but mostly they hate and love and scheme. The grannies are perhaps the most obvious stereotypes. The two young women, while narrowly drawn, ring true, and so does violent Clint.
None of these faults, if faults they are, matter much. The novel holds up because of the powerful story. To cite movies, it’s the plot of HIGH SIERRA, FIRST BLOOD, and dozens of Westerns and adventure stories. A man alone, a man on the run, a man whose time has run out. Thank you, Phillip Howerton, and thank you, Arkansas, for bringing this great old yarn back to us.
If you should come down with shingles, kill a black chicken and drain its blood. Then lie down on some newspapers (to soak up the mess) and find someone to pour the blood over your suppurations. Works every time.
That’s nonsense, of course, but here’s some folk wisdom that isn’t: Plant your corn when oak leaves are the size of a squirrel’s ear. This piece of Ozarks lore, also Native American lore, is quite correct. For Midwestern farmers, the rule-of-thumb time to plant corn is April 15, but often that’s a mite early. Oaks are about the last trees to bud out in the spring, and the ground and the air will have warmed by then. So the best time to plant corn truly is whenever oak leaves reveal themselves.
May Kennedy McCord wrote about all kinds of Ozarks superstitions in her long-running columns, mostly in Springfield, Missouri papers, but superstitions were only one of her subjects. The editors ably segment her columns and fugitive pieces into a number of categories: “Crime and the Law;” “Ghost Stories,” which McCord didn’t put much stock in; “Politics and Religion,” which, folksy as it is, contains a vivid and penetrating description of Penecostalism; “Death and Burial;” “Music of the Ozarks,” featuring the lyrics to songs McCord collected and sang; “Critters in the Hills;” “Superstitions and Granny Cures;” and “Time for School,” in which McCord described the fascinating “blab schools.” These were schools where all learning was through recitation. They were also called “loud schools.”
Rather as Harold Bell Wright did, McCord celebrated the Old Ozarks as an Arcadian paradise:
“There are no words to describe my feelings as I go over these still, dark, cool, woodsy little paths—smelling of cedar and moss and the loamy earth.”
She fiercely defended her idea of the true Ozarks of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, and disliked it when that heritage was, in her view, corrupted by outside influences. Thomas Hart Benton came from Neosho, Missouri, but his undulating style of painting irritated McCord as a distortion of Ozarkers as they actually were. This muleheaded argument was seconded by many of McCord’s loyal readers—who wrote constantly to McCord on all manner of things, much enriching her columns.
Time and again, the Queen tried to get a handle on the notion of “hillbilly,” a vexed term even in the 1930s. It was all right for an Ozarker to call himself a hillbilly, but watch out if you were an outsider. “We are a peculiar people in the Ozarks,” she wrote. “This storied land which is a Pandora’s box of strange tales, unfathomable superstitions, shouldering hatreds, fierce loyalties, simple religions and unshakable faiths.”
McCord was born in Carthage, Missouri in 1880. Her parents were teachers and not truly hillfolk, nor were they poor. Nonetheless, hardships visited the family; McCord’s father died when she was twelve. Galena became McCord’s hometown, the place where her infinite knowledge of the hills came from. She had a good singing voice and often sang ballads out of the hills, accompanying herself on the guitar. Like Vance Randolph, she collected ballads, seeking out lonely oldtimers to play and sing with them. When visitors came to McCord’s house, they’d be entertained with song—and a lot of good food.
Her husband’s job forced McCord to move from her beloved Galena, on the pristine James River, to the big city of Springfield. However, the move made the Queen’s career. Though she wrote for other publications and had a radio show in St. Louis, her home base was the Springfield NEWS AND LEADER with a column called “Ozarks Heartbeats.” It ran from the 1920s into the war years.
Properly for a good Ozarks raconteur. McCord was often funny. Many times, it was guffaw humor, though even then it was sly, an inescapable part of her style. Sometimes, it was wonderfully wry, as when she recounted the final moments of outlaw Alf Bolin, who, with the co-operation of law enforcement, was done in by his wife:
“After dinner, as he leaned over the fireplace to light his pipe, the other guest knocked him in the head with the poker. She herself dragged him to a lean-to room and cut off his head from his body. Women used to do a lot for ‘their men,’ didn’t they?”
Almost as often as she was funny, McCord was poignant:
“Crazy people were about all we used jails for—poor souls. We had so little in the way of treatment then for mental cases. We did nothing but chain them and take them over hard roads in rough bumpy wagons, and they were wild, poor things, when after about three hard days the sheriff and other men got them to the state institution. These things break my heart yet!”
. Colleagues Otto Rayburn and Vance Randoph, as well as personages far removed from the region such as Pete Seeger and Carl Sandburg, celebrated McCord for her colorful homages to Ozarks culture, being lost even in McCord’s time. However, her writings have been pretty much forgotten. That’s partly because McCord didn’t take herself all that seriously and never wrote a book. Hopefully, Queen of the Hillbillies will go a ways to restore McCord to her proper place in Ozarks history and lore.
Fowler, a literature professor at the University of Central Arkansas, Conway, sets his stories in the mid-South of Texas, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The title story is a road story featuring a bright twelve-year-old named Reed, who, because his mom and dad have split up, and because he’s physically threatened at school, steals his dad’s car and heads north. Reed wants some attention. He wants his distracted father to talk to him. He’d never get away with his adventure—there’s a comic almost-encounter with a state trooper in Arkansas—but for the quick thinking of Raylene, a dauntless young ne’er-do-well who pretends to be Reed’s mother. The two sally forth into Missouri, both of them straightening things out a little, with Reed getting the parenting he yearns for, and Raylene finding someone to mother.
Reed’s a middle-class kid and mostly the ordinary middle-class is Fowler’s subject. But “the ordinary is exhausting when really looked into,” as the character in “Undertow” notes. After two miscarriages, she’s having a hard time finding the sanity zone. Her husband worries she’s suicidal. Drifting through her day, listless but attentive to news stories of child abductions, she at last finds herself on a quiet beach. Like an angel of mercy, a lost child wanders her way, and it’s surprising, Fowler seems to argue, how deeply compassion is imprinted in the consciousness even of a disassociated, profoundly depressed woman.
There are thirteen stories in Fowler’s collection, gathered from years of work. Several portray how ordinary people—a factory worker, in “Flight,” and an up-and-coming family, in “Season of the Witch”—dealt with the Great Recession, when jobs disappeared, stores boarded up, and the American Dream turned into a sullen nightmare.
One story, “The Town,” is not a story in the conventional sense, but the satirical account of a high school project to model a town. “Our town” is as middle class as Thornton Wilder, but it’s not utopia and eventually gets corrupted by small-mindedness, or smug smalltownedness, and can only be purified with fire. Out of fire, the boosterish narrator claims, will come something better, but that better thing seems a lot like the old thing, sharply constricted by the Chamber of Commerce.
Fowler’s darkest story, and most disturbing critique of the middle class, is “Curb Appeal,” in which a young man, Trent, embraces a sort of madness after his father is sent to prison for embezzlement and his mother runs off with a rich guy. As a science experiment, Trent gradually turns his parents’ fancy house into an indoor garden, burning up wood work and knocking out skylights to allow his jungle to grow. Still, he’s careful to maintain the house’s presentation to the street, so no one will interfere. Though Trent doesn’t seem angry, his indoor garden is an almost nihilistic repudiation of his parents’ hyypocisy. He’s an accelerant to the ruin, a mad scientist tooling up for the apocalypse.
To my mind, Fowler’s most perfectly formed story is “Natchez,” featuring a middle-class woman, Peggy, married to a kindly perfectionist, an engineer who plans their activities in minute detail. Sometimes, in sheer frustration, Peggy makes alternative plans, but her husband’s plans always turn out to be more thoughtful, taking into account Peggy’s desires more than she herself would have. Peggy bargained for this very thing, but it has grown wearisome:
What kind of life did Peggy Lane Culp, never the belle of the ball, foresee with such a man? She knows she wasn’t a girl of any special talent or interest. Was it only vanity to think exciting and new things would somehow come as her due? And if she can’t call her years with Don unhappy ones, why is she gradually growing desperate?
Don and Peggy tour the antebellum homes of Natchez, a bland, middle-class thing to do. Somehow Peggy ends up on a riverboat, pushing quarters into slot machines, and misses various cues to disembark. In a beautifully-crafted ending, Peggy waves at hapless Don as the boat heads downriver—they’ll meet again, of course, but the scene shows the precariousness of settled, middle-class life, which without warning can sail away into the unknown. The story is reminiscent of Raymond Carver’s “The Compartment,” in which an American on a French train suddenly realizes he doesn’t know where he’s going, except that it won’t be good. Peggy is like that man, but there’s a wry optimism to Fowler, too. Maybe, somewhere downriver, Peggy will find her “exciting and new things,” after all. Her hope, to wring meaning out of the fearsome nothingness, is universal.
My first memory of a library is from the summer of 1951, when I was four. My parents had bought a small farm south of Cabool, Missouri. The farm would hardly have supported a family in good times, but we scraped by with Dad’s earnings as an electrician.
In 1952, we sold out at auction. The famous five-year drought was well underway. Ponds dried up and cattle were so hungry they tried to eat the leaves off of oak trees—also dried up.
A gravel road ran in front of our house, and to the west it connected with what is now State Highway 181. A Texas County bookmobile parked at that corner, and I remember walking down there with my mother. The distance might have been a quarter-mile but seemed to go on forever into scary, dry country. I was so small I could hardly negotiate the steps up into the truck, but there I was greeted with rows and rows of multi-colored books.
When I learned that I could check out anything I wanted, it seemed impossible. It didn’t seem as if I should be allowed into this rare kingdom of books. The world started to open up for me.
Schmidt and House spent three years on their crusade to celebrate such magic, visiting twenty-one small libraries in all regions of Arkansas. They visited what is apparently the smallest “freestanding library” in the United States, in Norman. It’s 14’ by 12’, but packed with ideas and dedicated people. It even offers Internet access, a chief attraction deep in the Arkansas woods.
Some libraries, though certainly not large, are rather grand. For instance, there’s the sprawling Eureka Springs Library, a Carnegie building built into a stony hill and, over the years, expanding into nearby buildings to accommodate heavy use and Internet access. The Charleston library, with its stonework entryway and arches, and the expansive rooms within, seems like a poor man’s cathedral.
Most of the libraries, however, are quite modest, operating out of trailers or defunct schools, adjacent to the police station or in a row of closed stores. These seem like the last outposts of civilization for their dying towns, and the keepers of the flame are often poorly-paid part-timers or retirees, as much social workers as guardians of the book. Some are not librarians but simply good citizens, like the Chief of Police, Gary Ricker, in Greenland. Ricker engineered a pedestrian bridge between a housing complex and city services, bringing unity to disarray.
The format for each of the twenty-one chapters is always the same: Schmidt does her color photos of the libraries, inside and out, as well as representative sights or buildings around the town. She interweaves an essay packed with the history of the place: when freed slaves came to the area, or when all the timber was cut. Where the railroad used to run. The road where people uprooted by the Indian Removal Act trudged through on their forced march to Oklahoma.
House works in black and white to photograph the librarians and random customers. The subjects are uber-ordinary: old and young, proud and tired and confused. They seem poor, for the most part, and nice. Some faces are etched in sorrow. Kids yuck it up.
His essays are more impressionistic than Schmidt’s. He tells of the people he meets, such as an addled woman trying to hitchhike some sixty miles to Fayetteville, or the old, old woman who knows everything, such as why and where the pharmacist hanged himself. Sometimes, Schmidt lifts his voice in outrage, as when he observes a driver who deliberately swerves to kill a dog.
Altogether, the reader is left with a vivid portrait not only of these libraries, but the places where they reside. And with something else not so easily defined. In his fine introduction, Robert Cochran compares the photographers’ work to that of James Agee and Margaret Bourke-White, who documented the Depression-era South with their haunting prose and photographs, respectively. Schmidt and House’s people are joyous as well as sorrowful, and hunger doesn’t seem to be a problem, but these rural patrons are hanging on to life in bad times, and the libraries, and the tireless librarians, offer hope and respite for besieged souls.
To take another view, these little libraries are often filled with junk. They operate on small book budgets and tend to buy romances and bestsellers. There are often more DVDs than books because, if there is no Internet in your house, you can’t stream anything. Even if Internet is available, it’s expensive. Of course, nowadays, public libraries are only somewhat about books. They’re gathering places. Focal points.
And I’m confident—I’m thinking now of a small library I’m well-acquainted with, the Dade County Library in Greenfield, Missouri—that all of these libraries provide serendipity. That matters a lot.
I remember eighth grade in Mountain Grove, where we read John Steinbeck’s “The Red Pony” bound into the textbook. For convenience, I checked out the standalone copy from the public library, and the teacher said, “Does your mother know you’re reading this?”
As if my mother would have cared.
It seems the school version had been censored, cutting out details about the death of one colt, the delivery of another going all wrong as the mare dies. That realism is probably why I’ve always loved Steinbeck, but anyhow obtaining the true version of the story from the public library alerted me to the fact there are moralists everywhere, trying to keep the truth from you, trying to decide what you should see or read. That little eighth grade event made me a lifelong enemy of censorship, and began to turn me into a writer.
REMOTE ACCESS is a fine book. With so many beautiful photographs, it’s hard to imagine how Arkansas can sell it, an art book, for $45. Buy it, and visit these wonderful little libraries one at a time, as you might read a story in a collection. You’ll end up planning some road trips.
Kersen, who spent much of his childhood in the Arkansas Ozarks, examines the “liminal” quality of life there. Here’s a definition of liminal I grabbed off the Internet: “1. relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process. 2. occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.” We all know that the Ozarks are much like the rest of America, or at least the rest of rural America. But their relative isolation, their difficult geography, have also turned them into an experimental place, where alternative lifestyles, cults, and general kookiness can find a place to breathe. Where misfits fit.
Kersen has a good time portraying Eureka Springs, headquarters for that first America Firster and wannabe Nazi, Gerald L. K. Smith, but it’s a looney sort of town that hosts both an annual UFO convention and a passion play, and it appears to be where all the hippies went. Kersen’s solid history of the town shows it to be zany from the start, and most of all, how changeable it has been, always on the threshold of becoming something else.
The founding myths of the Ozarks are captured, and invented, by the long-running cartoon strip, L’l Abner. The strip itself is long gone, but in its day was as powerful as any novel or movie. L’l Abner himself was a trickster, a wise buffoon—the foolish thing that confounds the wise. The strip was always almost-ribald and almost out-of-bounds, but since it was ostensibly about hillbillies (and space aliens) mainstream America could just chuckle and move on.
Here’s where Kersen introduces the delightful, penetrating notion of anemoia. Anemoia “means being nostalgic for an imagined past.” That’s L’l Abner in a nutshell, as well The Shepherd of the Hills.
Kersen is perhaps at his most engaging in discussions of back-to-the-land efforts of the 1970s and 1980s in both Missouri and Arkansas. His own family moved from Texas to a sort of homestead near Fallsville, Arkansas—deep inside one of Arkansas’s wildest areas. His family had it hard at first, then did a little better, and that would seem to encapsulate most back-to-the-land experiments, though some did succeed and survive to this day. Several characteristics stand out: 1) back-to-the-land was a hard thing to do alone, so you needed an appetite for communal living (communitas); 2) the popular conception of communal living as Bacchanalia is silly, because of how physically hard such a life is; and 3) old-time Ozarkers (unlike conservative retirees from Chicago) will help you, because they know instinctively what you are experiencing for the first time.
Kersen rounds out his nine essays with an affectionate, somewhat bemused account of Ozarks rock groups such as the Dan Blocker Singers, Black Oak Arkansas, and the Ozark Mountain Daredevils. Black Oak and OMD produced a liminal sort of music—evolved from folk, not quite rockabilly, not exactly mainstream rock. He brings some personal encounters to this history and ties it into his accounts of communal living; music was a relief valve, and sometimes brought in much-needed cash.
Where Misfits Fit takes the reader into the 21st Century in its understanding of the liminal Ozarks. Because it remains such an imaginary place, one is left wondering what will happen next there. Perhaps it will turn out that white supremacists are imaginary, and that flying saucers and little green men really do exist.
Kinder’s edgy title story is about a 76-year old woman, Maggie, who posts on Facebook that “maybe someone will shoot him before he takes office”—meaning Trump, of course, in 2016. Immediately, Maggie thinks better of the post and deletes it, but it seems nothing ever truly disappears from the amorphous Internet. Sure enough, men in suits come calling, and Maggie is detained overnight.
The episode is quietly terrifying but the government people are all polite and Maggie is released in the morning. The story might end there as a cautionary tale against the intrusive state, but it seems that the polite government people have seized Maggie’s guns. Because she didn’t really do anything subversive, she demands them back, beginning a struggle that might take the rest of her life.
Maggie is clearly a bit daft—but common, no question. And maybe normal in these Kafkaesque times, in which a visit from the FBI seems rather like having your credit card denied or being threatened by a bill collector. Just part of everyday life.
Common does seem the same as normal in “Everyday Sky,” in which a lonely immigrant boy, Milosh, befriends a lonely hound dog. Not an abused dog, just a neglected one, rather like Milosh himself. Kinder isn’t afraid of happy endings, though Milosh has to work pretty hard for his. Kinder likes dogs, and “Brute” is really a reprise of “Everyday Sky” that also ends happily, though the protagonist is a complicated fellow with an elaborate scheme to rescue his own unwanted dog. A word about Kinder’s dogs, which must appear in at least half of these stories: they are characters, just as dogs are kind of like people in real life.
A COMMON PERSON is real life, that’s the thing. Real people live in her Missouri neighborhoods, which aren’t fancy or affluent but not poor or deprived, either. The houses were built a while ago and have had more than one set of occupants. Families are not exactly nuclear but take a wobbly aim in that direction. It’s the American Dream with some subtractions, but hanging on.
If people come to resemble their names, as Faulkner said, then maybe another common denominator of Kinder’s stories is kindness. There’s cruelty here, as shown by the boyfriend of a girl who needs an abortion, in “Tradition.” But the girl’s sweetness and acknowledgement of reality—the kindness she shows her worthless boyfriend, the kindness of everyone besides the boyfriend—leaves the reader thinking the girl will be all right.
The saddest of Kinder’s stories may be “The Stuff of Ballads,” about a woman who’s hopelessly in love with an itinerant banjo player. He loves her, too, but not as much as his life on the road. Other lovers enter the picture, move on, and the woman loses some of her style, moves on herself, conquers alcoholism and even cancer. But, as Kinder puts it: “Like it or not, she was wholesome and honest and true.” She finds a qualified happiness in late life. It’s a happy ending shot through with regrets—but happy enough, given the kindness and good wishes of everyone around her. What a common person, being reasonable, might reasonably expect.
A COMMON PERSON is the 13th Richard Sullivan Prize winner for short fiction. The series began in 1996 and is published by the University of Notre Dame. The award is more rigorous than some of its kind in that writers must have published at least one other collection of stories in order to qualify. A COMMON PERSON is Kinder’s third collection; she’s also published two novels, AN ABSOLUTE GENTLEMAN and THE UNIVERSE PLAYING STRINGS.
My first girlfriend was an Adventist who implored me to take a short course on the history of the faith. Nothing remarkable about that, other than how desperately shy I was, and how I almost got myself married at age 19. (Instead, I was drafted.) Anyhow, I explored the Adventists a little more and discovered how they developed out of a group called the Millerites, who gathered on a mountain in Massachusetts in 1844 to await the return of Jesus. When he failed to arrive, the event came to be known as the “Great Disappointment.”
Which is my long winded way of saying that I identified with Wiegenstein’s wonderful story, “Signs and Wonders,” in which a hapless, though likable couple join a small town crank’s pilgrimage to an Ozarks campground, where they await the Rapture. Typically, Wiegenstein avoids satire here; satire would be too easy for such a subtle writer. His characters are sad, but you sympathize with the two misfits who have somehow found love with their only possible matches.
In a kindred story that bookends the collection, “The End of the World,” Larry “works at the Dixie Food Mart,” where he runs the produce department with great pride. He befriends a co-worker, a pretty high school girl named Tami, against a co-worker who’s a lout, and for the blink of an eye you think there might be some hope for loveless Larry. But Larry is a fundamentalist who can’t resist handing out tracts, which becomes so much of a public nuisance he nearly loses his job. The end of the world isn’t really at hand, but it seems to be for Larry, and it would greatly improve things for him. Again, Wiegenstein doesn’t condemn Larry; his handing out tracts is similar, really, to an overly-zealous environmentalist handing out an entirely different kind of literature. The point isn’t Larry’s hopeless religion. Rather, it’s his hopeless life, for which the tracts are only a symptom.
Other stories range widely. There’s “The Fair,” a fine, ironic tale of a carnival worker, by most any measurement a loser, who despite himself becomes a hero, and even finds a nice girl to settle down with, though whether he’ll manage it is another question. “Why Miss Elizabeth Never Joined the Shakespeare Club” treats those small-town ladies’ clubs that grew up late in the 19th Century to stake their thin claims on culture. Somehow they still survive, though in this story they teeter on complete irrelevance.
Weigenstein takes an otherworldly turn in “Unexplained Aerial Phenomena,” about a young academic’s exploration of Ozarks UFOs, and, in a bit of a surprise, he explores the dating world in the comic “The Trouble with Women,” which might as well be about hand-to-hand combat.
Lovely collection, and with nary a miss. Everything is set in the south-central Ozarks, though the stories are perfectly universal. That is, if Eudora Welty and William Faulkner are universal.
After you’ve read this collection, you might want to try Wiegenstein’s highly entertaining historical novels, also set in southeastern Missouri. They follow the travails of a utopian colony from the Civil War onward: Slant of Light (2012), This Old World (2014), and The Language of Trees (2017).
Down along the Piney 