Myths and Mythmakers

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ghost stories, legends, monsters, Springfield, Steve Yates, storytelling, The Legend of the Albino Farm

The Legend of the Albino Farm, by Steve Yates

I finished Steve Yates’ intriguing and inventive The Legend of the Albino Farm yesterday and have been pondering it since. Like all of Steve’s books, it brims with sentences that surprise and descriptions that engage. Its central character, Hettienne Sheehy, compels our attention with her multi-edged personality and lapses into premonitory trance. But at its heart, I think it’s a book about our propensity for mythmaking.

I’ve heard Steve describe this book as a horror story turned inside out, and that’s an apt description. Imagine a horror story in which the focus is on the presumed monster, and in which the “monster” turns out to be nothing of the sort. That’s the situation of the “Albino Farm,” which I am told is a long-standing Springfield ghost story/urban legend about a farm on the northern outskirts of the city. The only monsters in The Legend of the Albino Farm are the townsfolk and rowdies, snoopers and idle curious, who trespass on the farm to get a look at its inhabitants, deface its buildings, and terrorize the old folks.

We make up stories to entertain ourselves, and as a storyteller I honor that impulse. But there’s a dark side to this tendency, which we see in people’s stunning willingness to believe all sorts of wild nonsense without evidence (my Facebook news feed testifies to this) and to construct the worst possible explanation for something we don’t understand. Our love for story is also a love for gossip and ugliness sometimes, unfortunately, and we warp toward the tawdry all too often.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 8

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Arkansas, books, Sandy and Wayne, Springfield, Steve Yates

I had the pleasure of attending the Ozarks Studies Symposium in September, where I talked about the language we use to describe some Ozarks conflicts. I also bought three books that I’ve been reading, two new and one old, and I want to talk about them in the coming weeks.

I just finished Steve Yates’ novella this morning, and it left me with that sense of sad pleasure one often feels after finishing a touching and beautifully written book. It’s a slender volume, 155 pages, but it feels like a longer one (in a good way).

Although the title says “Sandy and Wayne,” it’s really Sandy’s book: Sandy Coker, a smart, vulnerable, determined, hard-shelled, aching-for-love lead inspector for the Arkansas Highway Department. The complications of her character grow so naturally out of her actions as she interacts with Wayne Sheridan, the dirt foreman for a Missouri-based contractor that has won the bid to build a section of highway in Sandy’s district, that by the midpoint of the book I felt not only that I knew Sandy, but that she would know me as well. Of course, one never actually gets to meet a fictional character, but such was the richness of her portrayal.

Sandy and Wayne circle each other, bounce off, and come together in unexpected ways, but this is no simple romance. Human longing and loss beat through every page, not just in the title characters, but in the minor characters and incidents, in the landscape itself as it resculpted to let the interstate roar through. Sandy and Wayne has sweetness and sadness in near-equal measures, and in that respect it’s a lot like life itself. It’s available from Dock Street Press or your local bookstore.

Steve Yates is a Springfield native who spent summers of his youth working for the Arkansas Highway Department. You can tell he was an observant summer employee by the wealth of detail, and that’s part of the enjoyment of this novella. He now works for the University Press of Mississippi, but you can tell he still has Ozarks blood in his veins by the things he writes. His next novel is coming out from Unbridled Books next spring, and I can’t wait to read it.

Favorite Ozarks Books – 5

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Arkansas, books, Current River, history, Missouri, Ozarks, Schoolcraft, Springfield, Steve Yates, writing

The image above is the frontispiece to Henry Rowe Schoolcraft’s Scenes and Adventures in the Semi-Alpine Region of the Ozarks Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas, published in 1853 and taken from Schoolcraft’s earlier journals from 1818 and 1819. People generally count Schoolcraft’s journals as the first piece of descriptive writing about the Ozarks.

As an explorer, Schoolcraft comes off as a klutz in his journals. His horse is constantly getting away from him, tumbling down a bank or trying to swim a river in a bad place. He and his companion employ local hunters to guide them or bring them provisions, but their guides regularly disappear with their goods or meat. He consistently chooses the wrong stream fork and has to backtrack.

But he’s not really a klutz – he’s a twenty-five-year-old Easterner with a fine education, a keen eye for geology, and a good deal to learn about the frontier. He and his companion spend the three months of their expedition in near-constant fear of the Osage Indians who roamed the Ozarks at the time, and their fear is justifiable. Had they met a band of Osage warriors that deep in their countryside, they would likely have been robbed at the least.

You can read Schoolcraft’s journal at Project Gutenberg, but a better experience is the 1996 edition published by the University of Arkansas Press. The dedicated Ozark geographer Milton D. Rafferty edited this version, and it’s nicely annotated, with Schoolcraft’s route mapped out as best Rafferty could decipher. My friend Steve Yates has written about Schoolcraft here.

Here’s the cover image of the Rafferty-edited version of Schoolcraft’s journal.

 

Schoolcraft

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books, history, Missouri, Ozarks, Steve Yates, writing

Any discussion of Ozarks literature has to begin with Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, whose travel journals make up the first substantial pieces of writing about the Ozarks. Here’s an interesting blog post from my friend Steve Yates about Ozarks literature and Schoolcraft.

Where Does Ozarks Literature Begin?