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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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Your No One is My Everyone: Some Thoughts on Publishing and the Sage Advice of Businessmen
YOUR NO ONE IS MY EVERYONE Thoughts on the scale of regional publishing and the sage advice of businessmen Originally published on University Press of Mississippi’s blog as part of University Press Week 2013 The first time I fully realized the value of what I do for a living, I was stricken with the stomach…
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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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Bill Harrison (1933-2013), unforgettable teacher, novelist, short story writer
Shadows, lies, facsimilies: so much of life was secondhand, weighed down with arguments and explanations. If we stop moving and try to explain anything, he knew, we truly die; if we pause to make maps or poems, if we take our gaze off the shimmering horizon for an instant, we’re surely lost; if we abandon…
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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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A Q&A with the inaugural Knickerbocker Prize Winner Steve Yates and Big Fiction’s Lauren Hohle
In August 2013, Big Fiction, published in hand-set type on a letterpress and dedicated to the long short story, the novella, issued its inaugural Knickerbocker Prize. Chosen by acclaimed novelist and short story writer Lauren Groff, the first prize novella, “Sandy and Wayne,” is a love story set in the Arkansas Ozarks on the interstate…
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Abandoned Mississippi: Port Gibson Oil Works
Originally posted on Preservation in Mississippi: The abandoned plant of the Mississippi Cotton Oil Company wasn’t on the recent Port Gibson Holiday Home Tour, but as I was wandering about before the tours started, I was drawn to the place, just north of downtown, like a moth to the flame. I’ve always been intrigued by…
Fiction and History 