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How research fires writing: wills, inventories, archives, photographs, and what I learned in Howard Bahr’s Research and Writing class
The conductor went back to his paperwork, and Artemus looked past him out the window where the woods, the moss, the houses—some of them on stilts now—passed in winter array, made soft and ephemeral in a light the color of old pearls. That sublime passage is Howard Bahr from his extraordinarily beautiful novel, Pelican Road.…
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Why the villain?
Why are the villains often so much more fun to write and so much more enjoyable to read about than our angels? Consider John Milton’s dilemma—the most exciting parts of his great epic poem, Paradise Lost, all involve Satan, the Fallen Angel. Look at Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. When the Duke of Bilgewater…
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What it has meant to be one of Curiosity’s Cats: a Yowl from St. Paul
I would love to quote feline jazz philosopher/poet Thomas O’Malley here, but I know how jealously his parent company guards his lyrics and wisdom, even though I doubt that alley cat was much of a company man at heart. At a sales reps’ meeting in New York City, the last of the December meetings I…
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Embracing what you are stuck with: the legacy of The Shepherd of the Hills
BOOK 1 I DREAM YOU In the story, it all happened in the Ozark Mountain country, many miles from what we of the city call civilization. In life, it has all happened many, many times before, in many, many places. The two trails lead afar. The story, so very old, is still in the telling.…
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Circle back: The joy of rejoining a Springfield friend and attempting a little art
This is the front cover to The Teeth of the Souls, sequel to Morkan’s Quarry and forthcoming from Moon City Press in March 2015. The front cover art comes from a photographer I have long watched and admired, Springfield, Missouri’s Jeffrey Sweet. The cover is a detail from a really spectacular photograph Jeff took one…
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Maybe the next thing, a novel about the last living heir to Springfield’s Albino Farm, starts like this
THE LEGEND OF THE ALBINO FARM 1 On the northern border of Springfield, Missouri, there once was a great house surrounded by emerald woods, lake, and meadow, a home place and farm that, to the lasting sorrow of its owners and heirs, acquired a nonsensical legend marring all memory of its glory days. The estate became…
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Curiosity’s Cats: Writers on Research coming April 15, 2014 from Minnesota Historical Society Press
Curiosity’s Cats: Writers on Research Edited by Bruce Joshua Miller “Each morning I would strike out for this temple of learning in the crisp autumn air . . . with a sense of purpose and the conviction that this was where I belonged.”—Marilyn Stasio from Your Research—or Your Life Inspired partly by Richard…
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Book Festivals: Why authors should spend the money to travel to book festivals
Book festivals are a tradition I’m thinking a lot about lately. By the end of the year I will have taken Some Kinds of Love: Stories to three of them—the Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock, The Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, and the Louisiana Book Festival in Baton Rouge. To the nearly unknown…
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Being away from what you write: what does distance do to fiction’s sense of place?
In Dr. Brooks Blevins’s class in Ozarks Literature and History, the first question a student asked struck at the heart of what I am wondering at now. A longing for the Ozarks, being away from the Ozarks, living in the Deep South, how does this separation affect my writing? Last week, I had two reasons…
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Where does Ozarks Literature begin?
I’m humbled, really quite floored in that tomorrow at 11 a.m. I will stand in Strong Hall on the campus of Missouri State University in Springfield before students in a university course entitled Ozarks Literature and History, and taught by Dr. Brooks Blevins. Thirty students have just finished reading my novel, Morkan’s Quarry. While not…
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Fiction and History 