The Lure of the Ozarks

Tags

Conflict in the Ozarks, David Benac, Elder Mountain, fishing, literature, lumber, mining, Ozarks, Ozarks Symposium, Phil Howerton, tourism, West Plains

In 2016, I was honored to be asked to give the keynote at the annual Ozarks Studies Conference in West Plains. The theme of the conference that year was “The Lure of the Ozarks,” so I decided to play on that theme for my talk. My title was “The Lure of the Ozarks: What’s the Bait and Who’s the Fish?”

The good folks at Elder Mountain took my talk, tweaked it a little, and published it in their most recent issue. As editor Phil Howerton aptly describes the issue, it’s a whopper . . . a double issue of 290 pages.

I’m reprinting a passage from near the opening of my talk below. Literary journals need all the help they can get, so if you’d like to read the whole thing, I encourage you to take a look at the issue’s impressive table of contents here and then use the purchase link here. You won’t regret it!

To speak of the lure of the Ozarks, appropriately enough, is to use the language of the fisherman, and prompts the metaphorical question of who is the fisher and who is the caught. Nowadays our talk about the lure of the Ozarks typically involves tourism, and rightly so, as it has become a mainstay of the Ozarks economy. Certainly tourism is a pretty benign sort of catchery . . . I suppose we could extend the metaphor and call tourism the “catch and release” version of the Ozarks’ lure.

But from the earliest times, people have come to the Ozarks to take away something more tangible. From Pierre Renaud down to the Doe Run Lead Company, the Ozarks have been a source of minerals and ore. The Missouri Lumber and Mining Company and its fellow timber harvesting enterprises did the same thing from the 1880s through the early twentieth century. In a general way, I think you’d have to describe the Ozarks as a kind of internal colony of the United States, a place from which to extract value at the lowest possible cost while returning as little as possible. As David Benac observes in his book Conflict in the Ozarks, a significant component of the Ozarks timber boom consisted of companies seeking to “tame” their workers, to bring them into compliance with the needs of an industrial-age enterprise concerning punctuality, sobriety, and adherence to the concept of “working hours” instead of living their lives by the clock of the seasons. What drew these entrepreneurs and companies to the Ozarks was what they could extract from it, and that’s a facet of this landscape that will never go away. I recall during the years of my childhood that every town in the area had its factory – shoe factories, shirt factories, hat factories, that sort of thing – each one staffed mainly by women paid on a piecework basis, overseen by men. It wasn’t until the advent of the global marketplace that these companies discovered they could find workers elsewhere who were even more impoverished and who had even fewer options than the Ozarkers, and relocated their factories elsewhere. For an industry that needed unskilled workers to perform repetitious tasks, the Ozarks must have seemed like a little slice of heaven for a time.

And then there’s escape, that time-honored lure of the Ozarks. Dad Howitt, the Shepherd of the Hills, came to the Ozarks to escape the noise of the city and the memories of his past, and ever since then one of the dominant themes of Ozarks culture has been that of the mountains as a place of refuge. Trappist monks came here, and the Harmonial Vegetarian Society, and so did Bonnie and Clyde. The hollows overflow with people who have come to the Ozarks for one sort of escape or another, whether it’s from the traffic jams of the city or the long arm of the law. My own experience with these transplants has been overwhelmingly positive. People drawn to the Ozarks from elsewhere bring energy, new ideas, and often a fresh infusion of money to communities that need all three. Unfortunately, the Ozarks’ mind-our-own-business reputation also draws the occasional Frazier Glenn Miller among the retired ad executives seeking a quiet place to meditate beside a stream.

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A Good Year in Ozarks Writing – Already

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books, Brooks Blevins, history, literature, Ozarks, Phil Howerton, University of Arkansas Press, University of Illinois Press

2019 has barely begun, and I can already tell that it’s going to be a banner year for writing about the Ozarks.

I’ve been working my way through the first volume of Brooks Blevins’ A History of the Ozarks, entitled The Old Ozarks, and it’s a grand piece of work. Richly sourced, comprehensive, and adroitly written, it is the history we’ve all been waiting for. I’m eagerly waiting for the second and third volumes to appear so I can snatch them up, too. If you are interested in the Ozarks, or interested in history, you must get this book – or at least make sure your library has a copy.

And then next month, another landmark book will hit the shelves: The Literature of the Ozarks, a comprehensive anthology edited by Phil Howerton of Missouri State – West Plains. It’s been a long time since anyone attempted an Ozarks literary anthology, and I can’t remember if anyone has ever put together one of this magnitude, stretching from the early 19th century to the present day. It’s being published by the University of Arkansas Press, and although I haven’t seen a physical copy yet, I’ve seen the table of contents, and it’s magnificent. I say this with a blush, since a selection from one of my books is included. I’m thrilled to be among the company.

Two days into the new year, and already a memorable one. I’m eager to see what other reading treats await.

Thoreau

Tags

American literature, biography, books, literature, nature, Thoreau, Walden

Henry David Thoreau was my first literary hero. We had a hammock in our yard, and in summers I would lie in the hammock and read my ninety-five-cent copy of Walden and Other Writings (yes, that’s an image of it, now some forty-plus years old, complete with duct tape holding it together). In the winters I would move inside and read it while I perched over the furnace grate, the waves of superheated air wafting up around me as I readied myself for the inevitable farmhouse chill once we had shut our bedroom doors.

I only got about half of it, of course. A kid of fifteen will miss most of the dry humor, skip through much of the close and precise description, and fail to appreciate the vast range of references that are dropped into every paragraph with such ease. But I did get Thoreau’s immense and uncompromising individualism and his insistence on the primacy of his own conscience. Over the years, I’ve returned to Thoreau again and again, understanding him a little bit more each time, appreciating his formidable intellect and powers of observation. People look at me in disbelief when I say Thoreau is a funny author, but honestly, I always get a laugh when I read Walden.

So I was eager to read Laura Dassow Walls’ new biography of Thoreau, and it did not disappoint. Walls’ biography is subtitled “A Life,” and it does indeed focus on the life of Thoreau, rather than his philosophy or literary work, although those intellectual matters do figure into the book since they were central to Thoreau’s life. But we are constantly reminded of Thoreau as a living person, an individual with friends, detractors, passions, and faults, and reminded that far from being the solitary hermit of Walden Pond familiar from popular myth, Thoreau lived a vibrant and engaged life, full of aspiration and struggle. He loved many people and was loved by many.

Thoreau remains one of my literary heroes. The bicentennial of his birth was last month, and it’s hard to think of many other American writers who remain so essential and relevant, or who will remain so two hundred years after their birth.

The Rural Poor

Tags

American literature, Chronicle of Higher Education, Kennett, literature, poverty, rural life

A friend of mine recently called my attention to this excellent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, not usually the sort of publication that one associates with societal analysis. But it’s comprehensive, it’s long, and it’s well worth the time.

The subject is the interconnection between poverty, education, and health in a rural Missouri town – Kennett, a town in the Bootheel, the seat of Dunklin County. I don’t remember much about Kennett from my childhood except that I think we drove through it once; it also had an excellent newspaper, the Daily Dunklin Democrat, locally owned, that we read and admired when I was working for the Journal-Banner. (It’s now just the Dunklin Democrat, published three days a week, and kinda-sorta locally owned.)

But Kennett is not the story here; Kennett is merely the example of a story which can be repeated a thousand times across the country. Rural poverty, rural despair, forgotten people whose sense of futility leads to addictive behaviors and self-harm.

What’s remarkable to me is that this story could have been written a hundred years ago. Read Hamlin Garland, read Sarah Orne Jewett, read Sherwood Anderson, and you’ll read these same stories from a different era, with only the superficial details changed. The intractability of rural poverty is a continuing theme in America.

In Sinclair Lewis‘ novels, the warping power of rural despair is portrayed as malevolent, and the smug inhabitants of Gopher Prairie are portrayed as co-conspirators in their own limitation. In the work of someone like Frank Norris, by contrast, the rural folk are helpless victims of larger forces, cruel fate or wicked industrialists.

I think it’s possible to be both villain and victim in one’s own story, as we see in the Chronicle article: people who know the self-destructive consequences of their actions but who do them anyway. The great dilemma of rural poverty is its self-perpetuating quality. Poor folks can’t pay much in taxes, so they are unable to finance the kinds of improvements that would attract industry or a wealthier strata of people; thus the roads grow ever more pitted, the hospitals scratch along with the barest of talent, the educational system strains for the minimum. Putting a dent in rural poverty requires outside intervention. That’s why the state legislators in Missouri (and elsewhere) who turned down the expansion of Medicaid for partisan reasons were so foolish: they were essentially condemning themselves and their own constituents to a cycle of degradation. As we watch the lights of rural hospitals blink out across the state and nation, making those impoverished areas even less desirable to live in (an inevitable consequence of the refusal to expand Medicaid), we can see the future of towns like Kennett. And it’s not pretty.

 

 

A Great Year for Reading

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C.D. Albin, criticism, Daniel Green, literature, short stories

Hard Toward Home

Beyond the Blurb

Looking back over the past year, I realize what a great year I had for reading. (I know, it’s already the end of February, but I’m still digesting work from 2016.) Two books that I read toward the end of the year were C.D. Albin’s excellent collection of short stories Hard Toward Home and Daniel Green’s literary critical essays in Beyond the Blurb.

The stories in Hard Toward Home are brief and rather jaggedly structured, with characters we often find mid-crisis and for whom the crisis remains unresolved at the end of the story. They’re mainly set in the Arkansas Ozarks, in the contemporary era, with a few excursions out. The stories are beautifully written, but what I like best about them is that they take characters often overlooked or stereotyped in rural fiction–the angry middle-aged male, the frustrated professional man’s wife, for example–and find depth and humanity in those people.

Many of the characters in Hard Toward Home are poor, or nearly so. Even those who are not poor are pushed by economic necessity. I appreciate this element of the stories; the contemporary short story has so often been taken over by characters whose concerns are more ethereal, and (in my view) thus often less interesting. Albin’s stories explore and humanize overlooked people, and to me that’s a great thing.

Daniel Green’s book does a wonderful job of surveying the current landscape in literary criticism and evaluating those who practice it. It’s not a book for the general reader (I confess, I don’t consider myself qualified to evaluate the book entirely, as I’m not familiar with some of the critics he discusses), but for the literary scholar it’s a valuable addition. Green writes with great precision, and in a  time when much literary analysis seems more interested in advancing a theoretical perspective than actually engaging with the work, it’s refreshing to read a book that returns the focus squarely onto the workings of the literary work. I read it in little bits, as it consists largely of a sequence of essays, and I tend to take my literary criticism in small doses.

Both are well worth reading!

 

Favorite Ozarks People – 12

Tags

Arcadia, art, books, Frenzel, Ironton, libraries, literature

Stained glass window by Milton Frenzel

When I was a cub reporter, fresh out of college, many years ago in southern Missouri, I was looking for something to keep my mind active. I started attending a Great Books Club at the Ozarks Regional Library in Ironton, about an hour away.

And although I was a college graduate who had aced a couple of literature courses, and a working writer, Milton and Virginia Frenzel, who led the book discussions, were so deeply engaged with what we read, and on such a different level than most of my college professors, that they changed the way I thought about books for good. They didn’t just study them. They looked at them as living things, argued with them, demanded more from them. And by changing the way I thought about literature, they changed the way I thought about myself. And they weren’t even trying to do that. They were just being themselves, authentically and unselfconsciously, and in doing so opened up a new way of defining myself.

Milton and Virginia were an unlikely pair of Ozarkers: intellectual and urbane, they were among several artists who had emigrated from the St. Louis area to the Arcadia Valley, (others included Robert Harmon and Michael Chomyk). Milton and Bob Harmon designed stained glass windows for the Emil Frei Company of St. Louis, and Milton also painted. As I recall, Milton taught some art classes at the high school, although I don’t remember if he taught there full-time. I think they were largely in retirement by then. Virginia later served on the AV School Board.

That book group attracted some remarkable people, both natives and transplants. I may write about more of that group later. But for now, I’ll content myself by observing that if I ever dare to call myself an educated person, it’s a term that first began to become clear to me in a monthly book group at the Ironton library.

— Another Frenzel window.

 

Loving Your Library

Tags

libraries, literature, speaking

This piece first appeared in the “Where Writers Win” blog:

Like most writers, I’m a fan of my local library. It’s a great place for quiet research, leisure reading, and serendipitous discovery. But over the years, I’ve learned ways to use the library that aren’t as well-known, and I’d like to share them here.

Programming

Libraries are always in search of programming. But as you may have learned, a program described as “So-and-so will read from his new book” doesn’t always draw a crowd. I always search for a topic of broader interest than my own writing. As a historical novelist, I draw from whatever era my current book is about for topics of interest to the audience in that city or region. But even non-historical novelists can find a speaking topic with a little ingenuity. Is your main character a concert pianist? Talk about “The Four Most Famous Concerts in Literature.” Setting the story in the Mississippi Delta? Tell the patrons about the Great Flood of 1927.

Promotion

Librarians are like the rest of us. They’re pressed for time, and they juggle conflicting demands. So although they will promote your speaking date, it’s not fair to expect them to carry the entire load. And librarians talk to each other—they know who helps them put on a successful program and who doesn’t. So help out your librarian with a few simple steps:

• Prepare a brief news release about your talk, with an opening paragraph you can switch out for the particulars of time and place. In PR, they call these an “eighty-percenter”—the release is eighty percent done in advance, with only a couple of sentences that need to be written to localize. For extra brownie points, prepare three releases, one to be sent out three weeks in advance, one for two weeks in advance, and one for a week in advance. State press associations will typically have a directory of media you can use to find e-mail addresses for news releases.
• Most towns of any size will have a community radio station that specializes in local news and conversation. Like libraries, these stations also have a constant demand for programming, and they often respond well to author contacts when there’s an event coming up at their local library. But they usually schedule their guests long in advance, so contact them as soon as you know the date of your event. Anything less than a month ahead of time is unlikely to produce a positive response.
• Don’t just tell the librarian where to find reviews, publicity information, and photos on your web site; send them the material. They’re much more likely to put together a good poster or web event notice if they have the promotional items already in hand.

Partnering

Perhaps the best use I’ve ever made of libraries, though, is developing a partnership with them. My home state has both a statewide humanities council and a state arts council, both of which maintain a speakers’ and performers’ bureau. The humanities council, in particular, has advantages for a writer. Once my talk is registered with the council, any nonprofit organization in the state can book it for a minimal fee (libraries get an even more special rate). In turn, the humanities council pays me an honorarium plus travel expenses. So I no longer have to rely on book sales to offset the cost of travel to an out-of-area library. As a result, I’ve been able to give presentations at many rural libraries across the state, which are always grateful for the opportunity to have an author speak. It’s the proverbial win-win.

Check to see if your state has statewide or regional arts and humanities organizations. These groups are marvelous ways to promote your own work and to join in the cultural life of your region.

And one final note: whenever I visit a library, I always take a signed copy of my latest book to donate, and I send a thank-you note (the old-fashioned way) when I get home. And I’ve never been turned down for a repeat visit.

 

Living with Loss

Tags

art, change, childhood, creativity, Crystal Payton, fiction, historical fiction, history, lakes, Leland Payton, literature, memory, Osage, Quincy, writing

A while back I shared a guest post from Dean Robertson about “home” – her recollections of her childhood home, leaving it, and returning years later. Since then that meditation has returned to me on occasion as I work on my next book.

The third book that I have set in the same river valley takes place about twenty years after This Old World‘s end. Some of the characters are still there, some are gone, and new ones have arrived. I’ve been thinking about the complicated emotions we experience when we see a place – our place – occupied by someone else.

Whenever I travel to Quincy, I like to drive by our old house on North 22nd Street, the house my daughter grew up in. For a while it was an unpleasant experience, as the house fell into disrepair (seeing its occupant appear in the police report was the low point). But now it has a new owner, bright shutters, newly planted flowers. So the drive-by is a cheerful one once again.

Still, it’s not my house any more. And even the most dutiful of owners is not me. So even positive change involves loss.

These thoughts were prompted today by the folks over at Damming the Osage, who posted a poem written by a gentleman not of my acquaintance, Rod Cameron of Raytown, Mo. It’s a lovely poem, followed by a reminiscence, of himself and his neighbors losing their land to the building of a reservoir. It’s a darn fine poem. Take a read.

What can we do with loss? Loss is built into our existence. Some losses are inevitable, but others (like the loss in the poem) are not, and we fight like devils to prevent them. In G.B. Shaw’s Major Barbara, a character says, “You have learnt something. That always feels at first as if you have lost something.” Perhaps that aphorism can be reversed as well. When we lose something, we owe it to ourselves to learn from it – or at least to make it into a poem worth reading.

And so I return to the last few chapters of my novel-in-progress, thinking about my characters and their losses and their learning.

Faulkner’s Advice

Tags

art, books, creativity, Faulkner, fiction, literature, novels, writing

This is a terrific summary of William Faulkner’s advice to writing students at various times during his period as writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia in 1957 and 1958.

I agree with every single one of his recommendations! Now to put them into practice….