~ News, announcements, events, and ruminations about my books, including Slant of Light, This Old World, The Language of Trees, Land of Joys, and Scattered Lights, and about creativity, fiction, Missouri, the Ozarks, and anything else that strikes my fancy
It’s been a whirlwind couple of days as I’ve been celebrating the launch of my new novel, LAND OF JOYS, at two of my favorite bookstores…..Skylark Bookshop in Columbia and Subterranean Books in St. Louis! We had great turnouts at both launch events. Thanks so much to these wonderful local institutions for hosting me! And if you prefer to do your shopping online, check them out on bookshop.org!
At the Ozark Studies Conference in West Plains this weekend, I heard about the marvelous effort of local folks to restore the historic Sadie Brown Cemetery, which had fallen into disrepair.
Sadie Brown Cemetery is the historic Black cemetery of West Plains, located a couple of miles north of town, where inhabitants of the area had been given their final resting place for more than a century. Two recipients of the Bronze Star are buried there, along with many other citizens both well-known and obscure. But in recent years the cemetery had lost many of its grave markers, and these resting places were in danger of becoming lost.
But a group of local citizens took action. They joined with geophysical scientists from Missouri State University, obtained funding from the Community Foundation and other sources, and took on the job of re-identifying and re-marking the graves. The presentation at this weekend’s conference showed the remarkable use of technology such as ground-penetrating radar to locate previously unknown gravesites. Where the occupant of the grave could not be identified, the grave was marked with a simple stone and a Bible verse, such as this:
A cemetery is the most permanent of all signifiers of a community. When the post office is gone, when the school is gone, when the church is gone, the cemetery remains. Many locations across the rural United States are now known only by the name of a cemetery on a map, sitting at a seemingly random crossroads or out in the middle of a cornfield. But that cemetery contains a multitude of stories: tragedies, dramas, farces, and just the simple stories of people trying to live their lives as best they can. It was heartwarming to hear the story of people banding together and enlisting the support of local institutions to keep those stories alive. It would be wonderful if a more organized effort could be generated across rural areas to preserve and document those nearly-forgotten cemeteries. There are some organizations that have funds available for these efforts, such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, but often what a neglected cemetery needs is energy, leadership, and guidance.
As the release date for my new novel Land of Joysapproaches, I am getting the inevitable question. Why choose the St. Louis World’s Fair for the setting of much of the action? What is it about the Fair that interests me?
The answer to this kind of question is never easy, and to be honest it shifts from day to day. Readers of my earlier books know that I am interested in major historical events, but also that I tend to come at them obliquely. Slant of Light, for example, can be called a “Civil War book,” but the war itself barely makes an appearance. A skirmish on the riverbank. But of course the war is felt everywhere, in the overwhelming sense of dread at its approach, the confusion and reordering of priorities upon its arrival, and the extremes to which people are forced during its prosecution. The war interests me, not for its own sake, but for what it reveals about people. Similarly, This Old World looks at the war’s aftermath, and The Language of Trees looks at the timber boom of the century’s end, with an eye toward how they were experienced by regular folks who are just trying to make it through the day.
The same is true for the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, more formally known as the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition. If you were to imagine an event that summed up the American experience at the turn of the 20th Century, you’d probably come up with something like the World’s Fair.
It was oversized and over-ambitious. It was determined to impress, and impress it did. It was a celebration of American ascendancy in technology and applied science. It was educational, with lofty-sounding conferences on all sorts of subjects, and it was a garish tourist extravaganza, with elaborate entertainment venues created to suit every taste (though the St. Louis Fair’s Pike, overall, was not as salacious as the Midway of Chicago’s Fair, ten years earlier).
It was bold, and loud, and full of self-promotion. But it also had a lining of regional envy, with the desire to outdo Chicago on everyone’s mind. For the good folks of St. Louis knew that Chicago was passing them economically, culturally, and in political power, and the Fair was an effort to reverse that perception in the wider world.
And the Fair was, let’s face it, an explicit celebration of the concept of white supremacy. A full third of the official Fair space was given over to the Philippine exhibit, through which visitors could stroll in comfortable complacency and observe the selected inhabitants of America’s first truly imperial conquest, congratulating themselves on their superiority to the “savages” that America had supposedly saved from Spain. The scientific congresses reinforced the idea of white superiority, and even the “first modern Olympics,” put together as a further slap to Chicago, had deep racial overtones. Everywhere you turned there was an affirmation of white supremacy, down to the sad figure of Geronimo selling autographed pictures to make ends meet.
In short, the Louisiana Purchase Exhibition demonstrated practically everything good, horrible, powerful, and revealing about America, and especially about the Midwest and St. Louis. So . . . why the Fair? Perhaps I should say, “How could I not choose the Fair?” In writing a book that tries to express a comprehensive and unflinching look at who we are as Americans, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going, and to do so in such a way that fits in with the overarching story of the first three novels, the St. Louis World’s Fair seems pretty much inescapable.
Am I excited? Yes! I’ve got some bookstore appearances already set up and am hoping to set up more. Also intending to get some library appearances set up too, in the near future I hope. The book is set for a September 26 release.
I wrote about Mina Sauk Falls a long time ago, but recently had the opportunity to revisit that beautiful landscape with my friend Randy Hyman. It was a memorable experience to hike to the falls, something I hadn’t done in perhaps three or four decades.
Although the falls are now in the state park system, part of Taum Sauk Mountain State Park, they’re still pretty hard to get to. I had forgotten just how rugged the trail down to the falls is (or perhaps it didn’t seem so rugged when I was in my twenties), But we made it down and back without incident, enjoying the immense profusion of spring wildflowers along the way.
Sand phlox along the Mina Sauk Falls trail
Mina Sauk Falls is notoriously hard to photograph, first because it descends in a series of small cascades at first, before it reaches the main falls, and second because photographing the main falls from below requires you to scramble down a perilous heap of boulders to reach a vantage point from which you can see them. I didn’t make that effort, but here’s a photo by Skye Marthaler, available from Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons license:
Falling water draws us, whether it’s the massive flow of one of the world’s great waterfalls or a wet-weather tumble like this one. I think their appeal comes from two things. First, there’s the elemental quality, water flowing over rock. How much simpler does it get? All that force, all that power, laid out before us in a simple display of nature’s magnitude. Then there’s the timelessness of it. Watching a waterfall you sense that other people from other centuries, other millennia, have likely done the same thing. That may be why waterfalls tend to attract mythology so strongly. Leland and Crystal Payton have written an entire book, Lover’s Leap Legends, about how practically every high place in North America has generated a story about an Indian maiden leaping to her death, sometimes in mourning over her lost love and sometimes accompanied by him, and how all of these stories are essentially fictional. Mina Sauk Falls is no exception to that tendency, with an early ethnologist gently describing the existence of Mina Sauk and the origin of the fall’s name as a “romancer’s creation.”
But even if you’re not tempted to jump off the overlook, you have to admit that it offers some magnificent views. Even if you can’t see the entire waterfall in one easy sweep, you can see for miles down the valley of Taum Sauk Creek, with a glimpse of the Proffitt Mountain reservoir from a few points along the way.
Thanks to a recent blog post on the Iron County Historical Society’s webpage, I’ve been reading the Federal Writers’ Project’s compilation of Missouri slave narratives, available through the Library of Congress, for the last couple of days. I’ve referred to this collection before, but reading them again is always supremely worthwhile.
With all the current hullaballoo going on in the Missouri Legislature about what can and can’t be taught in our schools, I’d like to recommend that all legislators be required to read these narratives, start to finish, and then write an analytical summary about what they teach us about Missouri’s history. No cheating by making your staff do it! Frankly, I think they should be required reading in the high schools.
One of the real great pleasures in writing books is getting out and talking to people, and for years I’ve been doing speaking engagements in a wide variety of places (this is me at the Ozarks Studies Conference in West Plains a few years ago).
But my favorite venue is a library. Whenever I speak at a library, I always come away having learned something new myself. Library-goers are a varied and curious bunch, knowledgeable about many things, and eager to share that knowledge.
So I’m excited to rejoin the Missouri Humanities Council and State Historical Society of Missouri’s joint project, the Missouri Speakers Bureau. This project provide a wide range of speakers to libraries and other nonprofit organizations around the state: civic groups, historical societies, you name it. And if your organization is located in a rural area (defined as any county outside Jackson, Greene, Boone, or St. Louis City/County), the speakers are totally free! As a kid who grew up in small-town libraries myself, I love the experience of visiting a library and meeting new people who have a love of learning and history similar to mine.
The link to my page on the Speakers Bureau website is here. I’ve put together a presentation on Missouri utopian communities that should be interesting, and am adding new material to the presentation all the time. If you have a group that needs a speaker, get in touch!
Folk music fans will likely remember “The Farmer Is the Man,” the rather scathing song from the 1880s that described the plight of the farmer:
The farmer is the man, the farmer is the man,
Lives on credit till the fall;
Then they take him by the hand and they lead him from the land,
And the middle man’s the one that gets it all.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, as the saying goes. Today’s headline: “State lawmakers approve $40M in tax breaks for farmers.” In the story: “The measure includes tax credits to benefit companies involved in meat processing, biodiesel, ethanol fuel and urban farms. It also expands government loan programs for farmers.”
So the headline might better have read, “State lawmakers approve benefits for lenders and agribusiness corporations.” Whether actual farmers get any of those benefits is anyone’s guess. And by directing the tax breaks to certain industries, such as biodiesel and ethanol, the state is supporting a monoculture model of agriculture based on massive investment in corn acreage, intensive fertilizing and irrigation, and industrial scale of operation that turns the act of farming into something much closer to factory work.
Accepting the Missouri Author Award at last night’s Missouri Library Association annual conference. That’s Kaite Stover, the Author Awards Committee vice chair, behind me.
The Missouri Library Association is the umbrella organization of all the libraries in Missouri – public, private, academic, and otherwise. They’re a great organization, and they speak out strongly in favor of information access and freedom of expression.
They also give out two Missouri Author Awards each year, one for fiction and one for nonfiction. This year, I was honored to have Scattered Lights win the fiction award.
Receiving this award from the MLA is extra special for me. For one thing, the books that have won it before are really terrific, and I’m honored to be in their company.
But additionally, libraries have always been special places to me, even sacred. My mom worked in the Fredericktown library, and when we moved to Annapolis, she was instrumental in establishing the Annapolis branch library, which today is named in her honor. At the dedication of the newest building that houses the Annapolis branch, my brother and sister-in-law had buttons made celebrating Mom’s commitment, and that button is what you see on my lapel. Here’s a closeup.
What she saw in libraries was their immense potential for improving people’s lives, without regard to wealth or background. When you walk into a library, you are equal to everyone else there, and the knowledge of all the planet is available to you. She loved to cultivate that curiosity. Whenever a kid came into the library, she made careful note of what that kid was interested in. And the next time that kid came in, there would be a new book pulled from the revolving collection, just waiting, to satisfy that curiosity and perhaps nudge it along a little.
A library represents the potential in us all. The existence of free public libraries is one of the great advancements of civilization. So receiving an award from the state library association is, well, pretty much the best thing I can imagine.
I’d like to comment particularly on my co-winner this year, The Last Children of Mill Creek by Vivian Gibson. I’ve been reading it over the past few days, and it’s a marvelous book. It’s a memoir of growing up in the Mill Creek Valley of St. Louis, a large Black district that was demolished and emptied out in the name of “urban renewal.” The story of Mill Creek is one of the tragic chapters of Missouri history, and it’s not well enough known. This memoir is beautiful and heartbreaking, and you should get a copy. Or tell your library to buy one!
I’ve been reading the new book of poems by Dave Malone in bits and pieces over the last month. Like most books of poetry, it rewards dipping in and out.
I suppose you could say it’s not technically an “Ozarks” book, since there are sizable sections of it that are set elsewhere, when a place is specified, and many of the themes are not Ozarks-specific. But there are a lot of Ozarks poems in here, and a lot of Ozark sensibility, too. In one of my favorite poems from this collection, “Pentecostal Ladies,” he writes: “Their skirts bloom sunflowers, / a decade or two out of favor. / I wave from my front porch / though I know one day they’ll sidle up / in their ballet flats and tell me what for.” And it’s that “what for” that slaps down so delightfully true.
A few things I note about Malone’s work: first, it’s very precise. This is poet who does not just throw in the expected word. Often he leads us into a phrase then turns it ninety degrees, shifting the mood of the poem unexpectedly. The poems are best read slowly, because you never know when that turn is going to happen.
Second, Malone’s poems do two things that I don’t always see in contemporary poetry. For one thing, they are sometimes unabashedly emotional. So many contemporary poets feel restrained by some sort of unwritten rule of decorum to be clinical in their presentation of situations, but these poems don’t shy away from their feelings. But also, these poems can be funny. Sometimes the wit is verbal, sometimes situational. In either case, it’s nice to read a book in which every poem does not feel compelled to be Serious. There are plenty of serious poems in here too, poems of grief, loss, and longing. But seriousness is not the only key this instrument plays in.
Dave Malone lives in West Plains and has published a number of books of poems, each with its own tonal register (or key signature, if I want to push that musical metaphor). If you haven’t run across his work yet, I highly recommend checking it out.