After some thirty years of marriage, Hubbell’s husband left Hubbell and their bee-keeping operation in southern Missouri. She casts no blame but you feel her loneliness, her buried grief, on every page, even though her short chapters are often levied with bemusement over, for instance, the war between a blacksnake and chickenhouse mice. Hubbell makes … Continue reading A Country Year: Living the Questions (1984), by Sue Hubbell Country Year: A Journal of the Seasons at Possum Trot Farm (1957), by Leonard Hall

Howerton, a professor at Missouri State University—West Plains, surveys Ozarks literature from the travel journal of the unofficial founder of Ozarks writing, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft,  through the contemporary scene. He opens the collection with a wonderful, very foreign Osage creation story, put into English by the Omaha Indian scholar, Francis La Flesche. Otherwise, while the … Continue reading The Literature of the Ozarks (2019), edited by Phillip Douglas Howerton