Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, was more famous than her mother until after World War II. She wrote biographies of Herbert Hoover and Jack London and quite a lot of fiction, as well as a number of nonfiction pieces for magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post. She was an unscrupulous writer, essentially a … Continue reading Old Home Town (1935), by Rose Wilder Lane

Jim Hamilton published these short essays, 109 of them, in small town newspapers such as the Buffalo Reflex and the Bolivar Herald Free-Press, where he was the editor.  Hamilton lovingly describes fishing on the Pomme de Terre River before it was dammed, folding in memories of his hard-working father. He describes beagles, who apparently never … Continue reading Ozarks RFD: Selected Essays, 2010-2015 (2020), by Jim Hamilton, and Hard Road Toward Home (2016), by C.D. Albin

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

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 … Continue reading Up South in the Ozarks: Dispatches from the Margins, by Brooks Blevins (2022)

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 … Continue reading QUEEN OF THE HILLBILLIES: Writings of May Kennedy McCord, edited by Patti McCord and Kristine Sutliff

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 … Continue reading Field Trip (2022), by James Fowler

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 … Continue reading Where Misfits Fit: Counterculture and Influence in the Ozarks, by Thomas Michael Kersen (2021)

In a way, Back Yonder is a standard story of growing up in the backwoods of the Ozarks before the roads were good and the REA brought electricity. It covers what you’d expect: the crops for a subsistence lifestyle, home life in simple log or clapboard structures, what passed for schooling,  courtship rituals, wild goings-on … Continue reading Back Yonder: An Ozark Chronicle, by Wayman Hogue (1932, 2016)

Reviewers often compare Daniel Woodrell to William Faulkner (easy to see), Flannery O’Connor (not really; she was a devout Catholic and much funnier), and Cormac McCarthy (again, because of the Faulknerian prose, the violence, the testosterone). One might also add Jim Harrison (Harrison was better with plots), Thomas McGuane (more absurd), and here’s an odd … Continue reading The Maid’s Version (2013), by Daniel Woodrell

Mort, John (author). Sept. 2018. 210p. Univ. of Notre Dame, paper, $20 (9780268104061). REVIEW. First published August, 2018 (Booklist). In his return to the short form, Vietnam veteran Mort (Soldier in Paradise​, 2013) delivers 13 stories about everyday Americans looking for love, acceptance, and a place to call home. The tales are set all over North America, but … Continue reading First review of DOWN ALONG THE PINEY