Yonder Mountain is a sort of sequel, or companion to Ozark, Ozark: A Hillside Reader (1985), edited by Miller Williams, the poet and creative writer teacher at the University of Arkansas. The older book was published by the University of Missouri; the newer one comes from the University of Arkansas.
Priest gathers several writers who seem like old friends: Donald Harington, with a previously unpublished, Stay More tale, “Telling Time;” William Harrison, with his hilarious take on a good old boy encountering the absurd modern world of air travel, “Tickets to Nowhere;” and Miller Williams himself, with two of his philosophical, rueful poems.
Perhaps because of Williams’s influence, or because he’s a poet himself, Priest includes a large sampling of poetry, from his own meditation on Ozarks origins, “Aux Arcs,” to a good selection from Michael Burns, the late, much-missed creative writer instructor at Missouri State University in Springfield. Other poets include James Whitehead, Sara Burge, Walter Bargen, Marcus Cafagña, Jim Hamilton, Andrea Hollander, Jane Hoogestraat, Phillip Howerton, Dave Malone, Jan Peterson Roddy, and Pattiann Rogers. Almost all of these poets wax nostalgic over rural life when they were kids. Or they offer up their close observations of the natural world.
Fiction writers include the well-known Daniel Woodrell and Steve Yates, represented by excerpts from their books. Jo Van Arkel’s story, “Swimming at Flat Bridge, 1963,” is a lilting portrait of country life on a summer day long ago. Katie’s Estill’s startling “The Three Beauties,” tells a story more common than you might think: a Filipino girl becomes a mail order bride to a lonely man in Wyoming, then hitchhikes east, ending up penniless, without papers, but somehow triumphant deep in the Ozarks.
Priest gathers nonfiction as well. In an excerpt from his book, Arkansas/Arkansaw, “Jethro and Abner: An Arkansaw Counterculture,” Brooks Blevins gives the amusing, woeful, irresistible histories of both The Beverly Hillbillies and Dogpatch, USA. There’s a meditation on nature from the late conservationist, Charles J. Farmer; and a lyrical account from Bonnie Stepenoff, framed as journal entries, on the history of CCC work at Big Spring, drawn from her book, Big Spring Autumn. And there’s a marvelous account of the difficult birth and tough childhood of Arkansas’s most famous hillbilly, Orval Faubus, excerpted from Roy Reed’s book, The Life and Times of an American Prodigal.
It’s a revealing gathering of work, quite the equal of its parent. But if one had to point out a difference, the Ozarks as a distinct region with a distinct population was still a real thing in Ozark, Ozark, while the Ozarks of Yonder Mountain is filled with the relics of how things used to be. The small towns are often ghost towns. People still struggle mightily, the region is still poor and isolated, and once in a while you hear that old hillbilly drawl. But these are the folks you meet at the strip mall, as modern, as universal, as cell phones.
Down along the Piney 