1864 raid into Missouri rightly remains a brutal enigma in Mark Lause’s Price’s Lost Campaign: The 1864 Invasion of Missouri

Even as General Sterling Price’s fall 1864 campaign deep into Missouri proceeded, its participants and victims shifted their conception of it so rapidly as to push the fog of war into a realm of nightmarish unreality.

Call it a raid. Call it a failed invasion. Call it a colossal failure. After reading Mark A. Lause’s new book Price’s Lost Campaign: The 1864 Invasion of Missouri, I doubt that any but the most calcified Lost Causers will call this incursion of 12,000 Confederates into what had been conquered, occupied, if not pacified Union Missouri a “high water mark.”

This book, somewhat unfortunately and a little mysteriously, only follows the history of Price’s running disaster from the emergence of Price’s vast army at the southern border to the shrug at the capitol of Jefferson City along the Missouri river, where that army turned away in the face of a fictional number of soldiers entrenched before it and a phantom army thought to be closing in behind it. It may well be that the editors at University of Missouri Press asked for a shorter book. But knowing the campaign, I was surprised the narrative did not carry on further and end at the Battle of Westport, one of the Civil War’s largest cavalry engagements, and the moment I had always imagined everyone in Price’s army had to have realized all was for naught, the cause was lost.

But that may be another fiction Lause wishes to pierce. General Price, hero of Wilson’s Creek and Lexington, and the focal point of Missouri’s Confederacy, had already made major revisions in his own mind about what was the goal of this huge, ill-fated action. At Pilot Knob, he gave up nearly a whole week’s initiative and surprise. At Pacific and Union, he realized he really could not take Saint Louis. And then at Jefferson City, he gave up everything but his army’s survival. County by county, as his Missouri State Guard reached home territories, his army evaporated.

There is a running clash of fictions from both sides throughout the book. After a long list of Price’s dodges and fabrications, Lause says “These self-serving fictions became history because they jibed nicely with those of Union commanders. Where Price had sought to cover bad decisions, Rosecrans (Union commander of the Missouri theater) needed to obscure the fact he had made so few.”

Not dodged, and stated here in frightening, sorrowful terms are the attrocities committed by Price’s army. Despite the seeming gentility of many of its commanders, this Confederate army unleashed savagery on Unionist civilians, their homes, their property. Especially brutalized and murdered were Germans and African Americans. Lause further brings to the fore the pluck and fortitude of enrolled militiamen on the Union side. Many of the real battles fought in this campaign (there is an entirely fictional Battle of Linn made up by Jo Shelby’s secretary!) were fought between local Union citizenry alongside enrolled militiamen and hardened Confederate veterans alongside their cold-blooded guerilla allies.

I have great admiration for Mark A. Lause for teasing apart all these twists of truth while exposing the motivations for creating such fictions. His prose is on the whole distinct, and approachable, and especially lucid and careful when his subjects are trying not to be. Commanders on both sides, Lause finds, compounded the fog of war with so much posturing, fear, and pomp. Union commanders fearful of committing real troops in a major engagement, thus facing a possible defeat, allowed Price to rampage. And all along its course, the wake of death and destruction following Price’s nearly out-of-control army rivals anything any other Confederate army unleashed. Why lie? Read herein.

Marideth Sisco and Steve Yates at the Ozarks Studies Symposium

Thank you, Dr. McKinney, for that introduction, and I want to thank Craig Albin and Leigh Adams for inviting me here to read. It is a profound honor to address the Fifth Ozarks Studies Symposium. In looking back through the previous programs for this symposium and envying you the current, upcoming schedule, I see two things that inspire me tonight. First, those scholars in attendance tonight will likely agree that many symposia in the academy have frequently evolved so narrowly in focus as to become useful and interesting possibly only to the individual scholar delivering a paper at a given moment in the proceedings! Yet that narrowing is not found at all when surveying the history of this gathering. Combing those past programs and the one upcoming and looking as well at the current and back issues of Elder Mountain, the journal of Missouri State-West Plains, I see an inclusiveness, a sweeping curiosity that brings forth scholarship in folklore, folklife, folk song, folk music, foodways, material culture, history, botany, geology, archaeology, anthropology, biography, creative non-fiction, fiction, and poetry. Something wonderful for the Ozarks is happening here, something inclusive and expansive; it makes me wish very much that I was again working at a publisher whose mission was the curation and dissemination of scholarly and creative output on our Ozarks. This symposium is a university press acquisitions editor’s dream.

I feel both humbled and honored as well to see in those programs many, many names of scholars and historians whose books I had the privilege of promoting and learning from as publicist years ago at University of Arkansas Press. I am certain that without learning from and knowing Lynn Morrow and the wonderful work of S.C. Turnbo that he and James Keefe edited, and without learning thoroughly the journal of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft that Milton D. Rafferty edited and published at Arkansas, my novel, Morkan’s Quarry, wouldn’t exist. Somewhere between these two books I found the voice of my narrator. I wanted the narrator of Morkan’s Quarry to be as smart as Schoolcraft without his snobbishness, but I also wanted the narrator to reflect that raw brainwave, cadence of Ozarks speech preserved in Turnbo, and have Silas Turnbo’s love and curiosity for and about all the activities of his people. To be permitted to address this body and read some of my fiction to you, it is a homecoming and an honor for sure.

Any fiction writer native to the Ozarks scribbles in a holler between two defining mountains, two empowering bodies of work that represent if you will the Tom Sauk and Mount Magazine in the landscape of our literary legacy. Both of these mountains have, as a mountain should, challenged me, marked me, inspired me. And I mean that magical Mount Magazine of creation, the novels of Donald Harington; and the rugged, rawly beautiful and ongoing work of your own Daniel Woodrell. Donald Harington I had the blessing of not only reading but knowing, and his encouragement to me at some of me lowest moments in my struggle to publish and keep writing place me forever in his debt. Daniel Woodrell, our Tom Sauk, I know only through what he has written and interviews he has given, and his recent near-death experience with the television cooking impresario Anthony Bourdain—I tell you my wife and I were off the couch and howling at the television set when that truly dangerous man subjected our literary hero to a near mortal tumble and then blithely went on his New York way through Ozarks cuisine. He must be stopped, this Anthony Bourdain!

In all seriousness, reading Woe to Live On changed my art profoundly, and in every subsequent book Woodrell has shown me my people, many at their noir worst, and some, those who by fierce trial earn it, at their dead-level best.

Let us tonight, then, pay homage to these two mountains of Ozarks literature. These two short excerpts I’ll read would never exist without them. Some housekeeping: Let’s turn cellphones to null and void. And since I note some very youthful members of the audience, parents and guardians, be forewarned. In what follows there are up to five four-letter words involving bodily functions, a five-letter word in which a female dog is the vehicle for a metaphor, and one very despicable human takes the Lord’s name in vain. Remove your charges now if you deem them too tender.

Tom Sauk
First, in this part of Morkan’s Quarry, which was published by Moon City Press, Leighton Morkan, the son in the novel, has met a Yankee officer who ferries prisoners between the Ozarks and Gratiot Prison in St. Louis and Alton Prison in Illinois. And the officer takes pity on Leighton, who is getting by as a Federal Home Guard in Springfield. The Union officer agrees to help him appeal for parole for his father, Michael Morkan, mortally ill in Gratiot. The year is 1864 and while in garrisoned towns such as Springfield there was an iron if not always welcome and rarely if ever merciful Federal order, outside, in our Ozarks was a savagery unparalleled in American history, according to William Garrett Piston and everything you can read in Turnbo’s White River Chronicles. Let’s scale Tom Sauk and see where we get.

~ ~ ~

With a lime-flecked stone wagon to haul his dying father back from prison, if the Yankees would yield him up, two outriders and a teamster left from Springfield—Leighton Morkan, the quarry owner’s son, Elijah Correy once a drill foreman, and Cyrus Browning, a Federal Officer who served the Union by ferrying captives. Telegraph Road was awash with mud, and the dark skies poured on the wagon and its two escorts. At night, they bedded under the wagon and even when the rain stilled, only Correy and Leighton whispered together. Cyrus Browning, the Federal Officer who had taken pity on Leighton, lay on his saddle blanket snoring with his back to them.

“Is he really doing what he says, Correy? Restitution?” Leighton asked, staring at the spot where Cyrus’s snore ground away, rising and falling.

“We both are. Him and me.”

Leighton surveyed the pitch black of the woods around him, the maddening downpour of rain against the wagon bed above them. He risked lighting a cigar. “I want you to do this only because you think it’s right.”

Correy pulled the horseblanket close. “Just let me do it. Who cares for the why?”

When Leighton said nothing more, Correy settled the blanket around himself as if to sleep. After a long time he asked, “What would you do if the war was over, Leighton?”

“Get restitution for every dime Browning’s army took from my father and me.” He smoked. “Keep the rest of his kind the Hell away from me, I guess.”

“If you get your pa back, will you run the quarry?”

“I’d give anything to have just half a day of him bossing me on that stone.”

When the clouds broke, the sun made the forest and road steam. In the heat, they rode with their coats stowed and their tunics undone.

Cyrus brought his horse with Leighton and the wagon. His eyes scoured the woods ahead. “If guerillas find us, you let me do the talking. I bluffed my way out of many a tight one.” Cyrus rode with his back straight, a gloved hand planted on his fat thigh.

“If you get us killed,” Leighton asked, “How’m I to get this restitution from you?”

Scowling, Cyrus nudged his mount ahead of the wagon.

That afternoon they were fording a creek when a dozen horsemen came stepping down the creekbed. They wore Federal coats, but their hair was long and ragged, their beards unkempt. They bristled with pistols and knives.

Leighton halted the wagon and Correy and Cyrus moved their horses next to him.

One of the horsemen edged his mount forward and peered into the wagon bed. Leighton noticed two bullet holes in the chest of the horesman’s Federal coat, shots that would have killed him. He wore captain’s bars.

“What you been hauling?” The captain’s eyes were gray and so level and lifeless they might have been ingots of solder.

“Lime, Captain,” Leighton said.

The captain glanced at Cyrus, then at Correy. “What for?”

Cyrus was about to speak, but Leighton spoke first. “For the dead, sir.”

The captain ran his thumb along his bottom lip. Behind him, his men shifted in their saddles. “Which dead?”

“We buried both, sir.”

Sitting back, the captain looked to his cohorts. “What about them?”
He nodded at Leighton and Correy and Cyrus.

The shortest of the riders spat brown tobacco juice in a drop so quick, Leighton almost missed it. “Skelp them.”

“Aw, shit,” said another.

The captain held up a hand. “You’re a Federal Home Guard, ain’t you?”

Cyrus Browning moved in the saddle, its leather creaking. Correy, too, shifted. Along the horsemen’s tack were draped hemp necklaces bearing tufts of hair and grayed flesh, a Negro’s thumb, a small ear, still pale, on which there hung a delicate golden hoop and the blue flash of its diamond singlet.

“I am a Federal Home Guard because I had to be. My father is Michael Morkan, the man who gave General Price black powder from his quarry.” Leighton pictured in his mind a gar moving through the darkest hole of water.

The captain stroked his chin. “And where you going now with an empty wagon?”

Cyrus sat up straight in the saddle, placed his gloved hand on his thigh. “We two captured this wagon and him as a teamster and are going to find Captain William Clarke and his unit.”

The woods were so quiet that when the wind stirred it blew a heavy drop down from the oaks, popping the leaves as if a bullet were skipping through them. A few of the horsemen jumped at this, then steadied. They turned their eyes on Cyrus.

“We wear these uniforms only as a safeguard against Yankees,” Cyrus said.

The captain scanned the faces of his men, faces that gave no hint of their intentions. Grimy skin, unblinking eyes. “Captain Clarke requested a wagon?”

“Anything for the Cause,” Cyrus said.

Leighton saw Correy shiver.

Parting his coat at the waist, the captain casually drew a knife, and stepped his horse over to Cyrus Browning. The knife shimmered blue, but the captain kept his eyes on Leighton. “Master Morkan, why is this here fellow lying to me?” He put the knife beneath Cyrus’s chin. When his horse stamped, the blade’s tip lifted the fat beneath Cyrus’s beard.

“How can you tell he is?” Leighton asked.

A few of the horsemen narrowed their eyes at Leighton. One grinned, his teeth as brown and filthy as an old hound’s. From the tip of the captain’s knife, a streak of blood scurried down the blade. Cyrus’s eyes danced.

The captain paid this no attention, his gray eyes glimmering for a moment on Leighton. “You tell me how lucky it would be for a fat fool like this to swipe a pair of pants that fits him just right.”

“Am I lying to you?” Leighton asked.

The slightest grin broke the captain’s face, and he removed the knife from Cyrus’s neck. In a flash, his horsemen in the front rank all had revolvers drawn and cocked. Their attentions seemed focused on Cyrus.

The captain moved his horse until he was within inches of Leighton. He looked down on him. “Where are you going with a empty, lime-flecked wagon? And two trembling Yankee cowards for company?”

“I’m going to bargain to get my father out of Gratiot before he dies of consumption.”

The captain regarded Leighton for a bit, then raised his eyebrows at his men. Their faces showed no hint of any leaning.

“For the true word of an honorable man bravely given in the face of sure death and disaster”—He paused and methodically wiped his blade against his britches—“I normally wouldn’t give a squirt of piss in a hand sieve.” He replaced his knife in its scabbard.

His men began to grin. The short one bounced in the saddle as if something delightful were about to begin.

“But this afternoon, I am filled with a spirit akin with the afflicted, with the put upon,” the captain said. He swung his horse to move in rank with his men. “Gentlemen.” He bowed in the saddle. “I give you your lives.”

“Aw, shit,” one of his men said.

They turned their horses and proceeded down the stream.

Cyrus turned stiffly in the saddle, the water dancing yellow bands of light across his sweat-soaked back. He watched the riders disappear, his chest jerking and falling. At his collar, sweat and blood made a chain of red.

“Mr. Browning, you all right?” Leighton asked.

Blinking, Cyrus nodded.

“Can I trust that you will be a better performer when we reach Gratiot?”

Cyrus’s face fell and reddened.

“I don’t mean to shame you,” Leighton said. “I just want to know.”

“I’ll be fine. I swear it.”

And now for the Mount Magazine part.

Mount Magazine

This next portion is excerpted from what was just published in the wonderful journal edited right here in West Plains, Elder Mountain. This is part of what I’m working on now, the sequel to Morkan’s Quarry. In it the war is over, but the hard times are not. Leighton’s struggling quarry has opened itself to employing freed slaves, freedmen, and paying them in scrip owed to a company store, a very common practice if a quarry didn’t have the use of a large body of prison labor. Let me be frank: I may write about quarries and quarrymen, but I’m under no illusions. A nineteenth-century quarry was no place to whistle while you work.

In this part Leighton has his mind but not his heart set on an acquisition, a tremendous limestone shelf under land owned by a German-American neighbor, a Dutchman. Only the land comes with a daughter in the deed; he’ll have to marry this unhappy codicil. She is Patricia Grünhaagen Weitzer. She knows she is no catch. And she is not so sure this loud lout of an Irishmen named Leighton Morkan is any catch either. Nevertheless they have courted, first and second banns have posted. And tonight, chaperoned by old Claus Weitzer, her father, Leighton is driving her home in a rented surrey. And, at her request, Leighton has just told her a story that turns out to be crass and shocking and involving mostly money. Leighton can be a rather focused fellow. And she has just about had it with him. Sounds like just the right moment to join them, hmm?

~ ~ ~

Patricia stared at Leighton, then looked away to the road where her father halted, letting his horse drink from the creek. Her lips were curved in a sour expression. And Leighton felt for an instant that there was no one in the surrey with him, and out there were only the unfathomable lights of his town and the wind and the yawn of the surrey’s springs.

She leveled her eyes on him as if some judgment locked into place in the cogs of her mind. “I do not understand you, Leighton Morkan,” she said, very slowly. “You are not of my people. You speak the tongue of crass commerce and hard living.” She readjusted her posture, folded her long hands in her lap. “How shall I benefit you? Why do you want this match?”

When he didn’t answer immediately, she looked away from him. In the set of her gray eyes, she appeared focused on some point hundreds of miles down the road, or hundreds of miles inside her.

“Well, I tell you,” he said. “I broke a deathbed promise to my old man, my Da. And I’m figuring in the life I got to lead, with freedmen in a quarry owing their lives to a company store, it’s going to take a ramrod bitch of an earnest woman, an unassailable Yankee Dutch priss to save my soul in this town.”

She regarded him a moment. Then she reared back her fist and pounded him so hard in the arm he dropped the reins. As he sat rubbing his arm, she sneered and seemed poised to deliver another blow.

“I had brothers, you know,” she said, waving to Claus. “I’ll whup you daily. You may ruin my life, you stupid Mick. But never have I felt so good about having proper posture and iron will, if that is what you are meaning.” She touched his arm, and then she smiled. “I hope that raises a knot, you bet.”

“I be damned,” he said. “You tell me a story, then. You saw the war, or some of it in St. Louis. Tell me about that.”

“I was no warrior,” she said.

“We were all in it, gal.”

When the wind rattled the canvas, she looked up beyond the horses to the east as if her St. Louis were shining right past the twilit sycamores. “That much is true,” she said. She took a deep breath and let the air out slowly through her nose, closed her eyes and became suddenly very serene.

“There was an advertisement entered in Anzeiger des Westens just after the Camp Jackson riots about a daughter missing of a German family, the Evertzs, owners of a butcher paper company and makers of the stoves you are familiar with. You own one. In Anzeiger, it was supposed that she had been kidnapped in revenge by Southern sympathizers, who singled her out as one who had aided the Federals in stopping a steamboat from being stolen. Her parents longed for her back, their cherished one.”

She untied her bonnet, let it slip to her shoulders. Her hair was plain and brown, but so well combed and ordered, as if she had washed it just for this evening. In the November twilight it held a luster of red and copper.

“Edith Catherine Evertz was a beautiful girl, a true rarity among German girls, not plump like a muffin, but strung hard like an Osage girl, yet with unblemished skin, white, Baltic white like new meerschaum. And she could swim. I myself saw her swim across the Mississippi from the old quarry to Illinois. A gang of girls from the Lutheran school stood on our side of the water, and she plunged in swimming. Very soon she was gone. There was no seeing her, and we began to weep. We stood there for a long time crying among the stones.

“And then from across the water in Illinois, we saw Edith Catherine Evertz stand and walk from the river. She did not crawl. She did not struggle. She strode, and turned to us, naked and so lovely, with both arms raised. We were little girls then, but we could not swim in the nude without reprimand. After that day I remember being glad that I was made to cover my body whenever I swam. Considering her in her glory, we all were humbled and happy to be modest after that, I think.”

Her accent thickened and grew more German as she became comfortable. The wind stretched the canvas again and stirred Patricia’s hair, and for a moment, with her chin jutting east, her hair tussled, her gray-green eyes bright, she seemed very Bohemian to him, and, for the first time, beautiful. Claus had dismounted and stood staring across the creek as if dismayed by something in the eastern sky.

“Previous to the war,” Patricia went on, “Edith Catherine fell in love with a Scots-Irish boy up from the Ozarks, a gambler and shootist. If this were not perilous enough, the boy was in league with Southern sympathizers in town, and was the first wounded when the Southerners stormed McDowell’s School, which sadly became Gratiot, as you know.

“As a nurse, which I was then—I was so tall, Leighton, even then no one knew my real age—I treated the gambler from the Ozarks, McConnell was his name. McConnell was handsome in the extreme and told me stories of his people, who were kings in Ireland, chieftains who provided mercenaries called Gallowglasses, invincible terrors. And he told me of his love for Edith, and I was won over with the terrible romance of it all. I shuttled messages between them. I was the one that kept their love afire, no easy task. You may not know, but after the riots, after Camp Jackson, St. Louis became a dangerous place for a German girl and Federal nurse. I was spit on in the streets, and once I was hit over the head by a peg lamp, and had to be carried home by one of Franz Sigel’s men.”

With her long fingers, she parted her brown hair, and there at the roots was a fat pink scar against her bluish scalp. Leighton clicked at the horses and without a sound they resumed.

“McConnell’s wound was grave, along the third and fourth rib, and it had gone putrid. In his fever he entrusted to me that on a boat at the landing there was a power-doctor from his home place. You know, a spirit doctor, a root conjurer, one whose specialty was the laying on of hands for wounds gone foul like his. If Edith could convince the power-doctor to steal into the hospital and visit him, McConnell would be saved. Delirious hillbilly palaver, I thought, but he persisted with an intelligence and a faith. Eventually so convinced was I, and so convincing to Edith, that she determined to board the boat and entreat the power-doctor by whatever means, for she knew from McConnell that a power-doctor will take no money, but will demand instead a great gift for his intervention.”

Her brow furrowed and she paused for a moment. “Here my story must rely on what came from the power-doctor himself in a last confession, which I received of him in the hospital where he died from his burns. Edith swam toward the boat, which that night would be taken under steam south by its pilot, who was a traitor and Confederate sympathizer, stolen to be fitted with armor in Memphis. On board she found the power-doctor drinking whiskey in his berth, and she told him of McConnell and his wound.

“The power-doctor was a grimy, bearded old hundswort, a fireman for the boilers. He told her he needn’t go ashore, that by a phrase alone, a power phrase, an incantation known only in your hills, he could send her to McConnell with the spirit force to save him. But that phrase would cost her dearly.”

Slowing the horses, Leighton rested the reins in his hands and watched her. Her face was aglow as if she ran a fever.

“He took Edith Catherine Evertz’s virginity right there in the stink of his cabin.”

With care, Patricia fastened her bonnet back on her head. Far ahead of them, Claus’s horse pawed the ground.

“Just then, when he had finished his business and sat in a stupor, the boat lurched and began huffing at full steam down the river. Edith struggled up. ‘Quickly,’ she said. ‘You must tell me the power phrase.’

“The power-doctor motioned her close, closer. Then he took her cheek in his sooty hands, pressed his wiry beard to her ear.

“‘You,’ he said, ‘are a goddamn Dutch fool.’”

Beneath the surrey wheels, the gravel sizzled.

“Edith was distraught, but she could not cry out—she was a stowaway. She wandered the deck and at last stood by the great paddlewheel, which purled and slammed the water. Watching the glow of her city recede, she knew the boat was steaming South, where no Federal boat had gone since Sumter. The boat, she realized, was being stolen.

“The power-doctor had followed her and held in his mind a word that when spoken in her ear would make her sink like a stone in the river. And at the back of the boat, he waited for his chance, watching the beautiful Edith, the swimmer, stare at the wheel and her city vanishing and her lover, McConnell, dying. Beneath him, the power-doctor could hear the boiler greatly overtaxed and thumping, and his confidence soared.

“When the power-doctor took his last step forward, Edith heard him move. She straightened her shoulders and said, ‘I know your name. I know your name and the truth about you. And I will take your name to St. Peter’s gate, and I will speak your name and your deeds even into the ear of the Almighty.’

“At this, the power-doctor froze with feet that were bolted to the deck. Edith Catherine turned to him, and her lips formed his name but the only sound from them was the gnashing of the paddles and of the pistons and the flames crackling round the boiler.

“Then she leapt from the rail and into the wheel, lodging herself to jam the mechanism to a halt. The boiler blew and the boat was kept from Rebel hands and the burned survivors were brought to the hospital, where I worked, and where I learned the truth about the lonely advertisement which the bereaved Evertz’s ran in Anzeiger des Westens every day for the remainder of the war.”

She sat back and then, trembling, touched her lips as if telling the story had scalded them. Over a hillock made icy blue by the risen moon, the wind pushed black snakes of motion through hissing winter wheat, rapid S shapes rushing uphill then dissipating.

“You never told Evertz?”

She glanced sidelong at him, her lips pursed. “How could I? Their precious daughter, the beauty of German St. Louis, in love with a Rebel hillbilly gambler, defiled and humiliated by a rube from the hinterlands?” She snorted. “Better to let them believe in a miracle for the cost of an advert in Anzeiger.”

Leighton removed the cigar from his mouth. He didn’t believe the half of it—a slip of a girl jamming a sternwheeler; swimming the Mississippi!—but she told it damn well. “You are quite a woman, Patricia Weitzer.”

He raised the reins and was about to start the horses, but he stopped himself and scrutinized her very closely.

As never before she felt her heart pummeled, like a body in the blades of a paddlewheel that was whirling, unstoppable. “My God, Leighton,” she said. She touched his shoulder, rested her head there. “There are times you break my heart with your kindness. And there are many more times I want to knock you over the head.”

His coat was slick against her hair, his shoulder warm and firm. It was a new coat, she realized, smooth along its shoulders, without the gray revenant of quarry dust. And yet still that stink of lime, hardening and chilling the air around him. But rather than being repelled, leaning against him now, she felt stilled, as if some loose part of her had been staked into solid soil that clutched it, drew it home. After a moment, he clucked to the horses, which nodded and pulled them on.

Thank you all very much for listening. If you have questions, I’d be delighted.

What in On Collective Memory might help distinguish between the literary novel and the historical novel? Halbwach’s says in his opening chapter, Dreams and Memory Images, “The dream is based only upon itself, whereas our recollections depend on those of all our fellows, and on the great frameworks of the memory of society.” Recalling how many times good fiction is referred to as a seamless dream, I like better my mistaken paraphrase, “the dream depends only upon itself.” The literary novel—set in the past and written about middling characters, ordinary people—operates much like Halbwachs’ statement about dreams. The work of epic historical fiction—set in the past, but written about renowned historical characters—operates under frameworks often like those Halbwachs’ assigns to recollections. Much other historical fiction such as military, or historical romance (see definitions) operates within more rigidly accepted frameworks and operates like recollection as well.

What is epic historical fiction? Let’s distinguish between it and the literary novel set in the past. An epic historical novel is one in which all main characters are outsized, Achilles-scale, major players of history, as Georg Lukács calls them “world historical figures.” Most often there is no reader’s ambassador here, no single protagonist to focus upon. Our narrator can range from the sweep of continents to the creases beside Robert E. Lee’s tired eyes. Historical accuracy is lifeblood, the course of the narrative follows history closely, and closely adheres to the social frameworks of our expectations, of established judgment on the great men of history. The purpose is to give some feeling and emotional flicker to the actions of the great makers of history while at the same time affirming legend held dear in a people’s collective memory. Especially for an American market that hungers for nonfiction learning and strongly prefers prose to poetry, these creations seem attempts at national epics. See Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels, and any of the franchise of Civil War novels by his son, and even historical novels about Gettysburg by Newt Gingrich.

The dream is based only upon itself… How often we are warned as writers against breaking the seamless dream, and that breaking it forces the reader outside of the intense and pleasurable immersion that is great literary fiction! In its opening paragraph or paragraphs, great literary fiction establishes a mutually accepted and understood universe, the parameters and limits of the dream let’s say. And these contracts, if accepted by the reader and fulfilled by the writer, are integral to the dream that depends only upon itself. What do I mean by contract? Take the first paragraph of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Remember that great literary work and all it accomplishes and encompasses as a seamless dream. Then consider the contract and parameters established in its exemplary first paragraph:

“The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting. As the landscape changed from brown to green, the army awakened, and began to tremble with eagerness at the noise of rumors. It cast its eyes upon the roads, which were growing from long troughs of liquid mud to proper thoroughfares. A river, amber-tinted in the shadow of its banks, purled at the army’s feet; and at night, when the stream had become of a sorrowful blackness, one could see across it the red, eyelike gleam of hostile camp-fires set in the low brows of distant hills.”—Crane, Stephen (2009-10-04). The Red Badge of Courage (Kindle Locations 18-20). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

This first paragraph establishes the omniscience of the narrator, the narrator’s third person relationship to the story, the pace of revelation, the naturalistic stance and distance, and the naturalistic view of a human collective (the army) as an organism with many eyes, and the enemy’s eyelike fires gleaming back. Crane sets out his twin themes: the opposition of the human enemy and the indifference and sometimes seemingly cruel atemporal beauty of the natural world. 107 words… even the word choice, tremble, shows Crane’s mastery of contract. We comprehend and accept the limits of the dream we are about to enter, and in 107 words we have a road map and a promise.

In considering the many and various forms of the historical novel, I can’t help but think that the literary novel (almost by its nature set in the past) is more dreamlike than say a novel by Michael or Jeff Shaara. In Killer Angels, the details the author arranges depend more completely on those recollections “of all our fellows, and on the great frameworks of the memory of society,” as Halbwach’s says. In an epic historical novel one cannot write much outside of what we hold in our collective memory on the idea (the image and arrangement in Halbwachs) of Robert E. Lee or James Longstreet, or whatever renowned historical figure the author of the epic historical novel animates.

In the literary novel, the dream depends only upon itself. There are intervening frameworks from society—the accepted forms of the novel, the contract with the reader, and the reader’s overall (and we hope not abused) willingness to suspend disbelief. But these frameworks are not so paramount as to intervene and even govern as Halbwachs argues in the way that societal frameworks do in human recollection. While coherence and arrangement of a recollection “belongs only to ourselves,” society and its frameworks (language, and/or good or bad or glad or sad and widely accepted judgments upon general actions and events and outcomes) intervene “to allow us to understand and call to mind this arrangement of objects that constitutes a complete picture or an event in its totality….” His argument that society collectively intervenes in any and all recollection is made nearly irrefutable when Halbwachs overlays the notion that our language in itself is a societal framework, one in which we agree on specific words and symbols to stand in for actual objects, emotions, states of mind, events, and so on. So critics can say, and in deconstruction they gleefully do say, that the author, being a product of middle class bourgeoisie society, can only pound out a defense of his or her socioeconomic class, because the mode of expression, language, the words of the novel, you see, are an inescapable societal construct. For the sake of retaining some joy and the hope of creativity among humankind, let’s move beyond that smug and not very helpful perspective.

The dream depends only upon itself. Halbwachs says “the frameworks of the dream have nothing in common with those of the waking state” and, “We should… renounce the idea that the past is in itself preserved within individual memories as if from these memories there had been gathered as many distinct proofs as there are individuals.” I don’t think I can entirely join him in these two absolutes. First “the frameworks of the dream have nothing in common with those of the waking state….” I’m not sure that is true in all cases, but then maybe I am a mundane dreamer. And, suffering powerfully troubling nightmares as a child, I learned to be a lucid dreamer, capable of changing or ending abruptly the narrative course of a dream, in essence writing my own dream or waking myself up from one gone awry. So the frameworks of a dream, for me at least, do have much to do with those of waking life. Even the childhood nightmare terrors of ghosts or aliens or criminals were certainly imported from if not governed by frameworks from waking life. And I would have to say the frameworks in the dream that is the novel very often have much to do with those governing our waking state and real life or historical recollections. Even such novels of magical realism as One Hundred Years of Solitude or The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks open with contracts that establish a framework and announce how the dream will proceed askance, in opposition to waking life and more conventionally realistic narratives. So maybe my metaphor of novel as dream that depends only upon itself is better stated as The dream depends mostly upon itself.

Second, Halbwachs insists “We should… renounce the idea that the past is in itself preserved within individual memories as if from these memories there had been gathered as many distinct proofs as there are individuals….” He says this about recollections, the opposite of dreams. As it has evolved the novel is in many ways an individual cry, a proof that there are “as many distinct proofs as there are individuals.” We find the universal in the particular, yes, but it is the uniquely detailed expression of that particular that makes a novel a work of lasting memory and literary value. War and Peace has many universal human truths throughout, but what stays in my memory? The uncle playing guitar, the niece, assumed to be too urbane for such, dancing an old Russian folk dance, the peasants stopping in their work to watch youthful, human beauty expressed, and the whole scene forever creating from particulars a quasi-universal empathy. I understood, in that moment of Natasha dancing and the uncle playing and the peasants beholding her, what it meant to be Russian and to be sincerely, authentically proud of being Russian. This from individual particulars I otherwise would never have had access to, particulars that lead to a kind of universal but specific national folk pride otherwise inaccessible to me.

Yet, like recollections and unlike dreams, the epic historical novel and many other historical novel forms operate not with distinct proofs from previously unknown individuals and their particular experiences, but from affirmation of widely accepted frameworks of our collective judgment on renowned figures experiencing a larger event. And of course, in a novel such as Killer Angels, an event, the Battle of Gettysburg, is treated with more importance than the individuals experiencing it, even those characters who believe they are affecting the course of the battle. This makes such a novel decidedly undreamlike in its purpose and composition. (And let me remind, in my post of the types of historical novels, I spoke of the importance of choosing what you want to write first. The same liberty exists for the reader. I do not mean to disparage, but I do mean to distinguish.) Halbwachs finds in dreams that one state of consciousness in which we can “understand and call to mind the images of objects (or of their qualities and details) in isolation, but which would not allow us to understand or call to mind the arrangement of images that correspond to a complete picture or event.” How very much like the modern literary novels of war! Consider The Red Badge of Courage , or All Quiet on the Western Front, or Isaac Babel’s The Red Cavalry Stories, or many of the short stories in Tim O’Brien’s great The Things They Carried. In these seamless dreams we do not, nor should we seek to, recollect and understand the complete picture or historical event. The individual soldiers do not and cannot have such perception, and it is their vessel of consciousness we rely upon. We do not choose these books to understand a battle or campaign or even a great leader. We choose them to understand the emotional truth of the human heart at conflict and in conflict.

Of course, War and Peace certainly transcends and blends both these genres, the literary novel filled with individuals, who cannot perceive the totality of the events, and arranged and narrated in a seamless dream, and the epic historical novel that overarches the individual, illuminates (or, for the snarky, decorates) the interiors of great leaders such as Napoleon and General Kutuzov. The reader can choose War and Peace to understand Russia’s travail and triumph or can choose War and Peace to understand what it was to live in those times, both functions of the epic historical novel. Or the reader can choose War and Peace to understand what it is to live, period, to be human, a function of the literary novel. And in framing the story with a question about the distribution of happiness and the fate of Pierre, a middling character about to succeed to nobility, Tolstoy arguably has what we have come to know as the literary novel in mind. Hooray for the great works that defy category and any and all thesis making!

So was I dreaming or recollecting in writing Morkan’s Quarry? Decidedly if somewhat lucidly, dreaming. Several times in the book characters express an inability to explain the war to one another honestly or with any real hope of understanding the totality of the American Civil War in the Ozarks. No, I had not yet read Halbwachs. This instinct though came from what I knew of the Civil War in the Ozarks, and in the ways we study it or skim over it with the phrase: “a place bitterly divided similar to many border states.” We study, unfortunately, all blue and gray, when the story in the Ozarks, to my mind, was really of a devoured and now forgotten middle ground.

A book very dear to me, in that I had a hand in promoting it as publicist at University of Arkansas Press, is The White River Chronicles of S.C. Turnbo. More than any other I think it gives voice to the Ozark civilian, those in the countryside who suffered years of fear and predation. Again and again in The White River Chronicles of S. C. Turnbo you will find beleaguered Ozarkers, regardless of pre-war sympathies, fleeing to Springfield, Missouri, after nightmarish, life-threatening visits from brigands of unknown allegiance. And you find many of the refugee men, then, joining local Federal militias, not out of conscience, but so as to have work and sustenance. Women at best labored hard to serve the armies here—diaries record countryside women toiling away to make flat cakes and baked goods to sell to Union soldiers even while guerilla brigands circled the city like vultures to rob the poor refugees of what they earned. Other diaries report unfortunates of both sexes wandering depraved and becoming alienados. Reason stayed long enough for them to flee the hills to Springfield. But they had seen brothers, sons, and fathers killed before them, and sisters and mothers tortured and beaten. In the seeming safety of Springfield, reason at last shattered and departed. Possibly a mercy considering what they had to remember.

Not knowing another’s allegiance and not being able to predict the behavior of those you encountered became a constant theme and a major cause of fear, flight, despair, and in some cases depravity and madness for civilians. Imagine you are in your yard carrying water from the spring house, your mother on the porch pounding dust from a throw rug, brother and father are one hill over cutting timber. Out of the mist come seven riders, all with Federal blue coats, but long hair, grimy faces, and when they approach you notice scalps trailing from their tack, holes in their tunics where a ball has passed that would have surely killed the man wearing it. What comes next?

Just the story titles in White River Chronicles of S.C. Turnbo are enough to understand—Hardships and Starvation in the Days of War; Saving Her House Through Tears and Prayer; Visiting the Grave of Her Affiance; Reading the Bible by the Reflection of Light from a Burning Town.

For those not in the middle, the progress of guerilla war and its uncertainties actually intensified one’s sympathies. So Union families became more vocally and even violently pro-Union. Secessionist families became more radically and, when necessary, more violently pro-rebellion. All of this devoured the middle ground. Why? We all want to live in predictable, and preferably non-threatening relationships with those around us, as Michael Fellman points out in his great book, Inside War: The Guerilla Conflict in Missouri During the American Civil War. Those who are unpredictable, whose loyalties and intentions and motivations remain unknown, are a greater source of anxiety than those whose actions and attitudes come from declared or discernible character and disposition.

This devouring and constant, violent uncertainty resulted in two psychological characteristics that Fellman points out in Inside War: 1) survival lying and 2) psychic numbness. Fellman found within the reams of testimony and diaries he digests that a great majority of Ozark civilians, regardless of their true sympathies, were not willing martyrs and stalwart heroes. To survive when under Union captivity or duress from guerillas, we lied. We were coerced into doing what irked our captors, forced by the other side, and had always been good and loyal whatever you need us to have been good and loyal to, sir.

Psychic numbness is quite possibly the most awful manifestation Fellman evokes. It is a state in which Missouri civilians, subjected to recurring, unpredictable violence from former neighbors and from both guerillas and undisciplined Union occupiers, unsure of the allegiances of others and finally even of their own allegiances, found life “emptied of any inner meaning,” found greed for money and food an overpowering instinct, and found violence to be the accepted and new norm of many social transactions.

I do think this period caused some serious creases in the Ozark character, and certainly in the way that we related to history and whether or not true recollections ought be aired. Reticence, distrust of outsiders, and that vanguard western desire to light out for the territory and be free of things civilized were all parts of our hillbilly psyche. Surely you can imagine how the war described by Fellman and Turnbo severely hardened hearts. Among those who experienced it firsthand, who would want to remember the real war on civilians or subject a child who had not seen it to tales of so much hate and destruction?

In fact, for those who experienced it firsthand, I think there was a willful silence and a determined forgetting about the war in the Ozarks. That’s why Morkan’s Quarry starts with the sentence: “When the war was finally won and the Morkans reclaimed their quarry after a fashion they did their best to forget the armies, the battles, and the occupations.”

Now imagine Ozarkers of that day sitting around listening to recollections of glorious battles fought elsewhere. That might be a short visit! Or it may be a welcome one, in that stories of towering heroes with clear allegiances, noble intentions, and unwavering honor might have been the history we longed for but never experienced. In the presence of a true war story, as Tim O’Brien says, a war story with “an uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” one can see where Missourians and outsiders to the Ozarks would gladly take up the romantic story of the noble bushwhacker, a Robin Hood underdog fighting for a lost and chivalrous South that never really existed here. To understand what inspired me to write Morkan’s Quarry and to make it a dream, an attempt at a literary novel rather than an epic historical novel about renowned leaders of the blue and gray, I’m going to leave you with a true war story from the White River Chronicles of S. C. Turnbo. and then add my own projection as a sample process. Mrs. Baker and her fight are Turnbo’s recording in The White River Chronicles of S.C. Turnbo. The aftermath is mine. And warning, this isn’t going to be easy, but then dreams are not easy all the time.

“One night while Mr. Baker and Jim was away from home, the band of heartless men rode up to the yard gate and dismounted and walked into the house and with threats and oaths they attempted to compel Mrs. Baker and Calvin to tell of the whereabouts of their money and other valuables which they refused to do. They then proceeded to whip the faithful woman with a drawing chain and hung Calvin by the toes to a joist in the house [Calvin is described only as ‘small,’ in Turnbo’s record. So he’s maybe 8-11 years old]. Mrs. Baker was beaten almost to death with the chains before the brutes let up and Calvin suffered intensely before they let him down…. The bandits did not stop at this but finally killed Mr. Baker and his son Jim in a cruel manner. Mrs. Baker who had partially recovered from the terrible ordeal of being whipped with the chain had her husband and son buried under a large apple tree that stood in the corner of the orchard. After the close of the war she had the two graves and the apple tree enclosed with paling. Mrs. Baker bore ugly scars on her body, head and limbs to the day of her death and was subject to spasms that attacked her after she had underwent the brutal treatment inflicted on her by the bushwhackers and cutthroats. Mrs. Baker when her death occurred received interment in a graveyard on the bank of Bear Creek.”

Think of Mrs. Baker after the war. It’s Sunday, church is over, and there’s a little picnic and some music there in the holler south of Lebanon. She’s with Calvin, who is alone, unmarried. He has trouble walking and is not much of a marriageable prospect. But Mrs. Nan Baker is glad to be with her people, she sure likes the music and company, and she hopes very much that someone from around here will love her Calvin one day, there’s many girls without men. And everything is fine until there’s a change in the breeze, some clouds darken the sycamores by Bear Creek. Nan begins shaking; she feels her lips and face clench up; she knows she can’t stop it. And so she rises and excuses herself and leaves Calvin and her people. She walks home and sits in her cabin, her body in full disobedience now; she’s all alone, and she’s remembering crawling from the cabin to see the terrible scene in her yard. The whole world at an end. She’s remembering the apple tree and that white fence and those two graves. And she’s remembering Calvin screaming. And she is trembling.

Hard as they may seem, those are the stories of my Ozarks that inspired me to make a dream called Morkan’s Quarry.

A quick post to show the Morkan’s Quarry reading at the Missouri Literary Festival. My favorite comment comes at the end, when a listener says she was present at the Brentwood Library lecture in April and has since read the novel and gone on a tear of reading through histories and researching the Civil War in the Ozarks! Thanks to Bucky Bowman, Andrew Baird, Stephanie Stenger Montgomery, and all those who aided and volunteered at the Creamery to make this happen.

5th annual Ozarks Studies Symposium set for Sept. 22-24

WEST PLAINS, Mo. – “Internal Conflict and Civil Wars: 1861-2011” is the theme of the fifth annual Ozarks Studies Symposium set for Sept. 22-24 at the West Plains Civic Center.

The event celebrates the unique culture of the Ozarks by providing presentations and performances by representatives of the academic world and the public sector that address various aspects of life in the Ozarks. It is being sponsored by the Missouri State University-West Plains academic affairs office and the West Plains Council on the Arts. The event is made possible with generous funding from the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency; the Missouri Humanities Council; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Admission is free and open to all.

Dr. Ed McKinney, professor of history at Missouri State-West Plains and one of the event organizers, said this year’s theme was chosen for several reasons. “The Civil War left an indelible impression on the Ozark region, and had and continues to have an impact on story, world view, heritage, and the arts, from Civil War memorabilia to historical recreations. Presentations will encompass overlapping and multiple topics that reflect on the general theme from social, economic, environmental and religious perspectives.”

The symposium will begin with an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 22, in the Magnolia Room at the West Plains Civic Center, 110 St. Louis Street. Sponsored by the West Plains Council on the Arts, the reception will feature guest speaker Steve Yates, author of the 2010 novel Morkan’s Quarry. The novel is set in 1861, during which the Civil War severs Michael Morkan from everything he loves and all that defines him – from his son, Leighton, from his love, Cora Slade, and from the quarry he owns in Springfield, Mo. Copies of will be available for purchase.

The keynote address will be given at 3:50 p.m. Friday, Sept. 23, by Dr. David Benac, a history professor at Southeastern Louisiana University. McKinney said Dr. Benac’s keynote will be a synopsis of the major points in his recent book calledConflict in the Ozarks: Hill Folk, Industrialists, and Government in the Missouri’s Courtois Hills. At the end of the nineteenth century, the rugged landscape of the Courtois Hills in the Missouri Ozarks was host to an isolated society of tenacious inhabitants, who subsisted almost entirely on the resources of its rich forests. It was this same valuable timber that drew the Missouri Lumber and Mining Company to the area, and sparked an enduring cultural and environmental struggle. Benac examines the struggle between residents and outsiders through government documents, company records, local newspapers, and oral histories. He reviews more than sixty years of major social and economic changes for the hill folk and for the forest itself. In less than a century, the Courtois Hills saw the end of a near hunter-gatherer existence, the rise and fall of the profitable, but devastating timber industry, and the beginning of a new era of conservation and environmental awareness.

Several other scheduled presentations may be of particular interest to area residents, McKinney said. They include the following:

• “Unlike Mountains: Ozark Strange in Kevin C. Stewart’s Margot” by Dr. Craig Albin, professor of English at Missouri State-West Plains. In 1999, Appalachian-born author Kevin C. Stewart won the Texas Review Novella Prize with a spare, fast-paced narrative entitled Margot. The book is set in the northwest Arkansas hamlet of Jasper, and its characters include, among others, a man who vents his outrage at “the government” by killing elk transplanted from the Rockies, an ex-con and meth-cook who spends his days re-modeling cabins along the Buffalo River, a lone, laconic woman who may or may not be running from the law, and a neighborhood watchman who names his horses after characters in John Wayne movies. Through protagonist Frank Powell’s interactions with such characters, Stewart offers a portrait of an Ozark population uneasy with change and wrestling with conflicting attempts at preservation.

• “Hand-to-Mouth Fishing in the Missouri Ozarks: Culture or Crime?” by Dr. Mark Morgan, department of parks, recreation and tourism, University of Missouri. Noodling is the hand capture of large catfish, primarily flatheads, in turbid waters across many mid-western and southern states. The object is to locate and forcibly remove one from its den without using any modern equipment. This presentation examines the motives and internal conflict associated with hand fishing in Missouri.

•“Pre and Post Civil War Jewish Migration to the Ozarks” by Rachel Gholson, associate professor of English at Missouri State University, and Mara Cohen-Ionnides, senior instructor at Missouri State University. This presentation will examine the history of Jewish migration to the Ozarks just before the Civil War. Key characteristics of the community’s migration include mercantile founding and expansion by single men. A small contingent of the first founders of mercantiles were not previous residents, but rather Civil War veterans or their sons who came to explore the opportunities available in the growing, rural region. The presentation reveals the ties between large Jewish mercantile communities and key Ozarks mercantile families like the Cohns, the Marxs and the Levys, who resided in several Ozark communities. It will cover the early history of these merchants and their families, the impact of these merchants on the communities and what happened to them in the long term.

•“William Monks” by John Bradbury, manuscript curator and historian at the State Historical Society of Missouri’s Research Center-Rolla (formerly the University of Missouri Western Historical Manuscript Collection-Rolla), and Lou Wehmer, retired chief telecommunications engineer, having served 33 years in the Missouri Highway Patrol at Troop G, Willow Springs, Mo. Wehmer is Chairman of the South Central Missouri-North Central Arkansas Civil War Roundtable headquartered in West Plains, Mo. The presentation will exam the life of William Monks, author of A History of Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas. A turbulent man in a violent time and chaotic place, Monks was a man to be reckoned with in the central Ozarks for two decades, beginning with the Civil War. As a result of editing Monks’ 1907 reminiscent memoir for re-publication, Bradbury and Wehmer looked into local, state and national sources looking for both sides of the story of conflict in south-central Missouri, wherein Monks was a central figure to create a biographical sketch of the man. They found that folks either loved or hated Monks, a local legend in Howell County, Mo. Monks was a staunch Unionist, a refugee, a federal scout, and anti-guerilla fighter, a county official, a state representative, and an officer in both Missouri and Arkansas post-war militias. Utilizing guerrilla-style tactics, Monks’ activities in his heyday led Bradbury and Wehmer to classify him as a “Unionist Guerrilla,” and they found feelings of support or distain remain strong for or against Monks to this day. His story is representative of the war and aftermath in south-central Missouri and north-central Arkansas. It is not a tale of marching armies, or set piece battles and clearly established lines of fair conduct in battle. It is a tale of ambush from the brush, arson and vengeance that had its impact upon and has conflicted every inhabitant of the region for generations.

Other presentations include:

•“Civil War in Howell County and the Battle of West Plains” by Dorotha Reavis, Civil War historian from West Plains. According to Reavis, “Today, there is no better place to live than in Howell County, Missouri; however, during the four long years between 1861 and 1865, Howell County was totally devastated by the Civil War. The public buildings and dwelling places were destroyed and most of the residents were forced to leave the county, join the Confederate Army or be killed. The history of the Civil War in Howell is composed of stories about the hardships experienced and endured due to hunger, danger, loss of family, friends and personal property.”

•“Why I Participate in Civil War Reenacting” by Lieutenant Mike White, Houston, Mo.

•“In Search of General Nathaniel Lyon” by Alex Primm, historian from Mountain View, Mo.

•“Marmaduke’s Hornpipe and the Battle of Boonville” by Dr. Howard Marshall, professor emeritus, art history, University of Missouri

•“Oral Tradition Narratives of the Civil War in the Missouri Ozarks as Indicators of Historical Memory and Cultural Identity” by Marideth Sisco and Kathleen Morrissey, community scholars, West Plains, Mo.

•“Bob Holt and His Impact on Ozark Cultural and Musical Tradition” by Julie Henigan, folklorist and traditional musician, Springfield, Mo.

•“Ozark Towns as Tribes: The Impact of Cultural and Geographic Isolation on Regional Conflicts and Boundaries” by Dr. Christopher Dyer, dean of academic affairs, Missouri State-West Plains

•“The Illinois Ozarks? Some Folkloric and Musical Perspectives” by Matt Meacham, folklorist, adjunct instructor, Missouri State -West Plains

•“Twenty-first Century Problems, Nineteenth Century Strategies: How Steve Yates’ Morkan’s Quarry offers Counsel Today” by Jeff Smithpeters, assistant professor department of language and literature, Delta State University, Cleveland, Ms.

•“Civil War in the Ozarks” by Matt McNair, PhD student, University of Oklahoma

•“Why We Belong to This Band: The Appeal of Sacred Harp Singers to Ozarkers” by Matt Shomaker, Missouri State University graduate, 2011

In addition to the presentations, there will be a panel discussion about Civil War art and artifacts found in the region and a “story circle” where local folks are invited to come and share their own family and community stories about the symposium theme.

For more information about the symposium, including a full schedule of presentations, visit the website, http://ozarksymposium.wp.missouristate.edu/.

The Ozarks Studies Symposium is made possible by a grant from the Missouri Humanities Council.

This last trip to New York City brought many currents into collision, many strains that I wonder about sparking as they crossed.

When I was a child in the Ozarks, there were only two television stations on early Saturday morning. One carried agricultural news—large men in western-style sport coats, plaid or denim shirts, string ties, and great big cowboy hats like people from Texas wore. Dusty Rhoades and Randy Iberia were the two newsmen, and they told about hog and cattle futures and river stages. Futures and stages, up and down, all with undercurrents of triumph and tragedy, boom, bust, the unexpected, earthy and antique to a suburban kid whose father and grandparents had lived off such news not too long back.

The second television station carried church programming from Koshkonong, Missouri, which to me was a magical, mountainous name (Koshkonong, like Crna Gora!), and proved I was from a rugged province of recalcitrant mystics. From a bare, yellowing studio, emanated a short, heavyset man with curly hair and a pleasant, round face. He looked Welsh, like Dylan Thomas, but sober and with a sensible haircut. He wore, every Saturday dawn, a terrible green suit, attrocious lapels, pink or powder blue shirts with tremendous collars, and a tie wide as a napkin. Whatever was happening in Koshkonong?! This getup was beyond the pale of what any of my father’s law partners and clients wore—sober blacks, and grays, wingtips, unwavering business styles that fit as readily in Packards as they now did now in Cadillacs. Even the rare ones who flew in from California and wore pink socks above immaculate topsiders did not look so ferociously peculiar.

Yet it was what the strangely-dressed Koshkonongian discussed that troubled me most. End times… the world ending, not just in fires and earthquakes, but in a whole host of science fiction troubles. Terrifying machine-like grasshoppers with punishing tails like a scorpion’s leaping from smoking holes to torment mankind! Great battles foretold, surely between us and the Soviet Union in Israel somewhere! Many current government and world agencies and collective activities struck the pleasant, sweet-faced man from Koshkonong as matching metaphors for the multi-headed dragon, the Antichrist. The Book of Revelations was the only book in the Bible that mattered in this skip-to-the-end gospel. Once he even took out his checkbook and mournfully showed viewers that his new bank account number ended in 666, and alas, he, too, might already bear the mark of the Beast.

This was more rousing, high stakes television than what the agricultural show had to offer. His was the clearest and most urgent end times message, far more potently and sincerely distilled than the very similar world-ending mesages that came from far slicker televangelicals later on Sunday. Even now I do not find the sweet man from Koshkonong an object of comedy. He believed, and spoke his belief with unalloyed conviction.

End times. The book industry, where I make my living, has been addled with end times messages since I joined it in 1994. I recall at Book Expo America, a trade show we no longer attend, in 2000, there was a massive influx of soothsayers in sorry suits, like shoe salesmen and struggling car salesmen wear. All of them, in little microfiber polyester wolfpacks, would buttonhole victims and chant, “print is dead, the electronic book is here.” It struck me that none of them had really read a book lately, electronic or not. They ALL disappeared after the 2001 recession, all their startup tech companies vanishing like a flash of powder in a flame.

And yet some of their prophecies bore credence if not timeliness. The great coming of the electronic book truly manifested in the recession of 2008 and powerfully during Christmases 2009 and 2010. By then it was clear time to adapt or die. The aftershocks are still being apacolyptically felt. Borders (while not killed by the ebook; see my post on Springfield’s store closing) cannot sell itself out from bankruptcy. And Barnes and Noble, lest we forget, while not in bankruptcy has also tried to sell itself to private equity firms, who smelled the Kool-Aid but did not drink. Today’s $17.00 per share offer from Liberty Media for a 70% stake in the company is the first serious uptake since the hunt for an investor began in August 2010.

I was in New York in part to make one of our Press’s twice yearly visits to the buyers at Barnes & Noble’s headquarters. This process has many motions to it that a techie outsider would sneer at—quaint and antiquated as hot lead type. We prepare buy sheets, and we used to do so by handwriting, taking nearly a whole week’s labor. These corporate, descriptive forms are joined with book covers, sheets of selling points, and a photocopy of the catalog. And in a very humane, sometimes erudite and heady, but always practical fifteen to thirty minute discussion, sales representative (that’s me) and subject buyer arrive at a number that will cover the first 30 to 60 days demand in a book’s life. This commerce is based in experience, in a mutual understanding of the publisher’s brand and abilities, and in light of numbers from similar books. And in good old human trust. The buyer trusts my Press and my representation of Mississippi; and I trust the buyer to know customers across America.

Like the sales calls I make to independent bookstores all over Mississippi, these visits are one of the last great privileges of our industry. However brief, with a cadre of buyers who until recently rarely departed or were let go, this is one of the last human moments in the selling of books, an act which is changing to all spreadsheets and lawyers and “world class portals.”

End times. Maybe I read too much Joseph Roth. But it is hard not to feel very akin to District Captain von Trotta when he looks up into the reeling starry sky above his son’s border garrison, and looks across the glittering banquet table set in his honor, and realizes the Austro-Hungarian empire is over, the Emperor has already lost it all. The world may already have ended, but in his country’s magnificent and peculiar decay, no one will yet admit it. O, The Radetzky March is something we all ought to read, if just for the coping mechanisms therein!

There is much that is ending in our industry. But something very valuable remains, and we will and ought to cling to it. The humane interchange at Barnes & Noble twice yearly proves that to me. And my recent face-to-face visits with Yankee Book Peddler and Diamond Comics have proven to me that in frank discussion and one-on-one exchanges, people can hone and improve commerce so much more quickly than can the lifeless green of an excel chart.

Any day at Barnes & Noble, those of us from university presses awaiting appointments in what is called the bull pen join together at lunch somewhere. We share stories of the road, of current practice, hijinks, nonsense, troubles and joys. And this round, with a May day that was to die for, three of us, now fully middle-aged men sat in the sun in Union Square Park, and shared this. All around people, rather normal looking citizens of the empire, carried placards and handed out pamphlets. Apparently they were in the sincere belief that this Saturday, May 21, will be the end of the world. There were so many doomsayers that the regulars in the bull pen declared this coming week’s dress code to be all black, doom’s color.

Homeless men on benches gladly took the brochures, and read them with real concern. The woman I nodded to and thanked for my copy looked no more delusional than the average housewife in from Cranford, New Jersey. End times. We three salesmen shared the horrors and rumors and amazements after a reasonable lunch. We looked, in our suits, the same as salesmen after lunching in so many other spring days in Manhattan. So long as we kept our cellphones in our pockets, and smiled at the sun, or stared in wonderment at the placards, or in sadness at our aging hands, we were like businessmen lounging in so many other decades in America’s brief imperial tableau….

This is the stuff and these are the times for great fiction, such as the body of work that is Joseph Roth’s. Late in Empires, when end fears run rampant, that is when the light is best, the moment is most poignant. Why fiction? It compresses emotion and narrative and polishes aside the temporal to shine the universal, what we lovest well and what we loath, and what must remain, like it or not.

Even at those companies that worship at the altars of spreadsheets and try to communicate only through the screen of world class portals, I am finding that when a crisis becomes acute enough… there is no salvation like human contact. Somehow men and women, friends and colleagues such as we three that day before Armageddon will wait and gossip on those benches in the spring sun. We will await our appointments. And after rest and reflection, we will return to the task of putting the great work of authors in the hands of readers some way. World without end…. Amen.

Voices of Conflict: The American Civil War from Steven B Yates on Vimeo.

Brentwood Public Library, Monday, April 18: Steve Yates, Dr. William Garrett Piston, and Dr. Randall Fuller talk about the genesis of their books. This vimeo link at http://www.vimeo.com/22632952 will take you to the full lecture and Q&A from Monday night.

I want to thank Marilyn Prosser, Kathleen O’Dell, and Lorraine Sandstrom for inviting me here to the Brentwood Library. And I want to say what an honor it is to be on a panel with two excellent scholars with such fine books. Of books, I think I have a rather specialized sense of the value of a good one. In the daylight, I am the assistant director and marketing director at the University Press of Mississippi, a publishing house where over 200 author creations each year are acquired, edited, designed, and disseminated in hardback, paperback, print-on-demand, and/or electronic form. And these two books by my fellow panelists are superb examples of what university press books are at their very best. I envy my friends at Oxford University Press and my many close friends at University of North Carolina Press the joy of bringing these two books to market.

Books are not just stored in libraries. Books start in libraries. And this library, Brentwood, was my home library. All the more sweet then to be welcomed back to it in that I was once banned from it. Yes, banned.

I tell you this story because the statute of limitations has surely passed for me and for the story’s heroine, my mother. Let’s hearken back to Springfield of the mid and late 1970s. We did not then have 24/7 news networks. We were not so strident and frightened a people. Parents did not worry about the lurking menaces of sexual predators or drug dealers or wild-eyed, wealth re-distributing lerbrals. It was to our perception a simpler, safer time. And so if one were blessed with a bookish and intense but usually benign child, one could turn said charge loose in a library and proceed to such chores as grocery shopping at nearby Consumers, banking, posting the mail, gassing the Buick, and so forth, secure that the young scholar, I was nine or ten, would be about his business, which was even then books. My library card was perpetually maxed out. And so guiding me to a carrel, and learning what I intended to study my mother would slip away, and accomplish tasks for which I did not make a tolerant companion. Then she would return to fetch me and take us home where, wanted or not, she would receive a report about yellow diamonds in Arkansas, or the Children’s Crusades, or the moons of Saturn, or lampreys and their gruesome rituals.

For my chums, my contemporaries this would have been a gruelingly boring punishment. For social workers and parents of today maybe it would be considered reckless child abandonment. For me, it meant unmolested hours of free reign in Heaven.

There was, my mother and I discovered, a policy against this, but it was no where posted back then. And my mother for all her savvy and necessary conformity, has never been one to let conventional reason or the supposed wisdom of the masses get in the way of a clearly superior arrangement. She taught all of us children to be confident in our productive idiosyncrasies. The daughter of St. Louis German bankers and paper manufacturers, she defended the right to perceive and secure the best possible deals in life, even if how you got them made you seem odd or ran you afoul of local customs.

Through this very creative temporary daycare, I came to know this library thoroughly from 000 Generalities to 900 Geography and History. The card catalog laid the place bare to me, and I had no need to trouble the busy Swiss Guards of this Vatican, the librarians. A maxed out library card became no obstacle, because here I could plan my treasure hunts for those books that did not need to come home. I marveled at bindings and adjudged printing qualities of various publishers. I learned that books speak to one another on shelves, that a book on Peter the Great lived in a fascinating neighborhood where there were also residents of the Crimean War and veterans of exotic excursions into Turkey and the Balkans, that the company of Tyco Brahe traveled with the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire and led to Copernicus. I took home fiction, The Collected Tales of Edgar Allan Poe, The Red Badge of Courage, and an Ozark favorite Where the Red Fern Grows. Books saluted other books in carrying within amazing lists called bibliographies, and some books revealed themselves best from the last pages in a thing called an index. I was weird, I was enthralled, and I mark this abandonment in the Brentwood Library among the greatest gifts my mother gave me.

Already the librarians here are seething, I’m sure. There may be en loco parentis in our schools but there never has been en liber parentis. I came to hold a proprietary feeling about the books and these shelves. And I found it quite troublesome when a particularly juicy book about space aliens abducting a husband and wife or about crypto zoologists chasing the Loch Ness monster was missing from its assigned spot, lost into the hands of persons unknown who might never properly appreciate the diary of Napoleon Bonaparte or the Adventures of Young Millard Fillmore. I found it an affront to my purposes that these books would disappear and reappear. And then it came to me that others, astonishingly, might use the Dewey decimal system as well, might check out and thereby detain these books. An outrage, a hostage crisis if ever there was one!

It was then that I struck upon a logical way to keep my books from the hands of these clawing, Dewey decimal-wielding interlopers. Mother was soon to arrive I knew, yet I had not finished my investigation of Joel Arem’s superb book Rocks & Minerals. And so I determined to place it secreted in 147 Pantheism and Related Systems where I alone could return to the stone and mine it. Take that, prying patrons. The magic of selective reshelving.

Alas, I did not know the limits of this magic. Upon my return to Pantheism later that week, I found nowhere in evidence my stashed copy of Rocks & Minerals, nor did I find it in its proper place. Gone, in the hands of some disappointed and misguided fan of the gods of ancient Egypt. I saw no recourse but to consult with one of the vaunted angels of this Heaven, a librarian. And, confident in my resourceful idiosyncrasy, I proceeded to the checkout counter. There, on tip-toe and with no small passion, I described to the bearded, spectacled, kindly librarian my quite reasonable and natural method of retaining books for later use, my particular needs for Joel Arem’s Rocks & Minerals, Dewey decimal 549.1 for your reference, sir, and my offense at it not being where I so wisely placed it. Since the idolatrous seeker in ancient religions could not possibly so need Rocks & Minerals, I demanded to be put immediately in touch with this hapless patron and so relieve him of his unwanted mystery, my book. Undaunted by the librarian’s expression, which had steeled by several ingots during my petition, I demanded the use of a telephone and this poor patron’s phone number.

To lift a phrase from Dr. Fuller’s beautifully written book, with glum satisfaction the librarian asked me plainly, “Where is your mother?”

Now as a lad I was often in my own world, but I was not so insensible as to miss a harbinger of trouble. I answered him with equal plainness: “She is nearby.”

This did not amuse. A policy was explained to me. I was not to be unsupervised here while my mother was grocery shopping. It was of no avail explaining to this librarian how little I benefitted from retail experiences nor how great an asset the library was to me. I was made to sit in a tiny wooden chair in a room where to my horror books freed of their shelves waited on triage wagons. Twice I had to be told not to bother this backroom system for Rocks & Minerals or any other gem trapped therein.

Upon her arrival my mother found me detained there. “What is the matter?” she asked. “Are you ill? Why are you not with your books?”

Sensing our arrangement in jeopardy I told her only that the librarian with the beard and glasses and steely blue eyes desired a word with her. A long pause came over my mother, an assessment, a readying for combat that I had witnessed many times. She secured me in the Buick, ordered that I stay, and composed herself. Then she returned to meet our librarian. Oh, the Teutonic fury I knew I was to miss, and the poor librarian! A man righteously backing a good and sound policy was about to face the fire of German St. Louis against which reason would win him no peace. These brown brick walls must fairly have shaken. Her scholar was thwarted! An outrage!

After a long while, she returned to the Buick unharmed, but I could sense the smolder of sulfur and cordite in the way she gripped the steering wheel. “We will not be returning to the library for a time,” she reported. “You have books at home to suffice?”

“Yes, but we will eventually have to return them,” I said.

She nodded. “We most certainly will be back to return them. And to get you more. You may have to tolerate my waiting with you while you study,” she said. “And you will no longer be assisting the librarians in the shelving of books. Agreed?”

“Indeed.”

And that is how I was banned from, and by my mother, who waited with me from then on, redeemed at the Brentwood Library. Mother, would you please stand and receive either a terrific library fine or some applause.

Thank you. Parents, be like my mother, abandon your children, within the bounds of existing policy, of course, to the wonder of this place, a place that made me and nurtured the curiosity that created this novel Morkan’s Quarry. And whatever the storm or the politics in vogue, fight for your children and fight for their libraries.

Thank you.

If you are going to write a metaphor into historical fiction and make it reveal character, you need to do some thinking along the timeline. Your own life metaphors are enriched or polluted by all kinds of contemporary gadgetry, some new knowledge and theory, and, of course, your own moment’s contemporary bullcrap and huggermugger.

Your characters are just as rooted in their timeframe. Here’s an example. This is in the sequel to Morkan’s Quarry. The time is about 1872, a time when there is a recovery beginning, and our main character, Leighton Shea Morkan, is sensing the blessings of peace. I wanted to get in his exhausted head after a day at the quarry.

Now, Leighton’s very smart, but I have to think in timelines. Leighton knows a lot about calcium, and a lot about where it is and how it acts in nature, and a lot about calcium carbonate, limestone, the stuff upon which he makes his living, CaCO3. But guess what? He won’t know the periodic table or that symbol. That table we all memorized (well, we should have) was created by a Russian chemist in 1869. Leighton’s formal schooling was by Jesuits in St. Louis before the Civil War. So the way I use the metaphor of calcium is going to have to be natural, elemental (pun-pun), and stripped of some of what I know about it. Did you know that it makes up 5% of the earth’s crust, behaves so like a metal that it has long been classified as such, and yet a primary way this dead stuff comes to be and moves around in nature is through some secretion, production, effusion, interaction by living creatures, me, you, shellfish, plankton. You have bone cells that divide and when they were still growing made compounds in your body that were astonishingly, chemically akin to CaCO3. Your teeth, less their amazing enamel, are very near this compound, too.

Now I need to block some of that metaphor. Leighton is smart, but he won’t know all that in any academic way. It has to be organic, and frankly the book won’t need this unless the metaphor opens the character’s heart to the reader.

Let’s try it, mindful of our timeline, mindful of what he knows and what we know. And one contextual hint, he’s sitting in the mudroom to his house—we don’t have many of those in suburbia, though I grew up with the linoleum equivalent. In the adjoining kitchen are his wife, Patricia, and an African American former slave and servant, Judith. Beneath him are stones he and his deceased father mined and set for the floor. His father, upon returning from imprisonment in Gratiot Prison during the war, kept the unnerving habit of sleeping on the floor in the mudroom. He could not sleep in a bed after his sleeping on the floor so long in prison.

Maybe I have the metaphor blocked and timeline just right. And above all, we need to keep the metaphor drilling down into Leighton’s heart. Here goes:

On the stone at my feet, an agony, five comets scratched across a gray firmament. Da’s fingernails there driven by nightmare that could burn limestone to marble. Patricia’s milk was gray. Judith’s milk, I can still see it, hovering and thin at Gustasson’s lips, gray. In the kitchen, warm warbling of two women roasting oxtail… they do not fight any longer? Our milk, our bone, gray. Five white comets drawn by bone just harder than the calcium in the gray stone. A clanging mishap—the women laugh. The sorrowful passion of him clawing there desperate in the dead of night. White comets, white metal, ever seeking. A gasp of happy exasperation, and Patricia calls my name, Leighton Shea Moorken, the Devil with you! Asleep with eyes open! Komm! Whatever did I do to justify bounty and peace?

There is a tumult in my heart about the Wednesday (2.16.2011) announcement that Borders will be closing 200 stores, including the location in Springfield, Missouri, the store in which Moon City Press first launched my novel Morkan’s Quarry.

The characters in my novel, the Morkans, owners of a limestone quarry in Civil War-era Springfield, would likely take a cold-hearted line on all this. Michael Morkan could easily see why a Borders at that Glenstone location would be one of 200 stores losing $2 million each day for the retailer. 25,000+ square feet of books right across the street from a Barnes & Noble store of equal square footage, that’s 50,000 square feet and surely lots of duplication. In those 50,000 sq. ft., think how many shelves HAVE to carry specific books that frequently sell—Harry Potter, The Twilight Series, the Da Vinci Code, and the like.

But walk-in, foot traffic markets have limits, capacities to absorb and demand any given product. In the heyday of giant retailers, back when Montgomery Ward still existed, and book buyers had few choices and no internet, such side-by-side offerings might have been sustainable. But this Starbucks-gone-wild passion for expassion came on after Montgomery Ward and lots of other retailers had already died and left fossils and empty shells.

The minute Morkan learned the space at Borders was leased, and the staff had to be paid an established minimum wage, and there would be no hope of free county prison labor… he would opt that every book in the place, every ISBN or SKU in retail parlance, be one that tears out of there faster than an opium and alcohol-saturated tonic (see energy drink) from a traveling medicine show.

There’s one source of the tumult: it is very hard to be unique and become a costumer’s favorite local bookstore when you have to carry what a corporate supervisor in Michigan chooses, items that can be sold to everybody. Giant scale, which can seem to the untrained eye a wowing advantage, becomes a deathtrap. And carrying all those hotcake items as your mainstay becomes unsustainable when your customer has already picked up The Chronicles of Narnia at Kroger or Sam’s or Wal-Mart at an humungous discount.

You have to finance all that space, and eventually pay some wholesaler or publisher for all those pretty books. And while Mindy from Koshkonong came in and bought the whole House of Night series, she won’t be back till next December. And Derrick who lives on Eureka Avenue in Southern Hills so very near your store… he can’t find a compelling reason to walk in when your store has nothing different on the shelf than what he finds discounted and shipped free at Amazon.com.

And yet, in honoring and working with Moon City Press, a small publisher at Missouri State University, and inviting me, one of its authors, in to sign books, that is exactly what Gary and the good people who worked at that Borders location aimed to do: Be a better local bookstore by offering something that spoke to Springfield. That is forward thinking; that is to my mind the only way bricks-and-mortar bookstores can get by. They have to offer their local markets special discoveries—items you would never seek on Amazon but now desire having seen them—and local stories. Plus they have to offer their local markets the chance to get a signed book or better yet to interact with the author, local or outworlder. Otherwise why pay the premium, the MSRP for the book?

Bookstores are recognizing that challenge right now all over America. Follow my favorite local bookstore, Lemuria, and its blog, and you will see.

Reading the articles in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, I find it equally distressing the large percentage, five out of six members of Borders senior, high-dollar executive management came not from the book industry (either from other bookstores or publishers), but instead from grocery stores and manufacturers and financial services industries. That CEO shine, that executive swagger, must really be seductive! I think you can read the late news of Borders and see a case history arguing against the allure of “outside, executive talent” for an industry that started cottage and in the future will likely be more cottage and niche than ever.

That really makes me sad for good booksellers such as Gary. Harried and hardworking, he made things happen or made sure that things happened in that Glenstone store. He was trying to make his bookstore local. But he had to face huge challenges and truly spastic corporate control. I’ll give you an example: Gary sold through every copy he could get his hands on of Morkan’s Quarry. And wisely before I left town that first week I was home to promote the book, he called me in to sign a bunch of new stock brought in to last him the summer.

Well, corporate strictures caused Borders to flush those from the floor and back to a wholesaler in order to pay bills. How do I know? Not long after working with Gary—him holding open each book while I signed and signed and signed on a sunny April Friday—those same signed, dated books bearing the Borders “signed by the author” red sticker showed up on a shelf at a small independent store, in McMinnville, Oregon! So all Gary’s hard, smart work to be local, all his thoughtfulness and sweat, was largely squandered for his store by the very company he was loyal to. Of course, Springfield’s loss was McMinnville and Third Street Books’ weird gain—here was a signed book ready on the shelf the day I appeared on the radio and in the Salem, Oregon, paper!

I am grateful that Springfield does have a bookstore of wise scale and one that has booksellers who recognized immediately the value of Morkan’s Quarry and of stocking it and having me sign copies. That’s Half-Price Books of the Ozarks also on Glenstone, but nearer Sunshine in the shopping center where the old Cat and the Fiddle used to be.

So while I am in tumult that good book people are being hurt and losing their livelihoods, I know that the act of sharing and selling an author’s work and local flavor goes on. You can walk in Half-Price Books of the Ozarks right now and see exactly what I mean by defined niche and cottage industry and proper scale. For the sake of books, readers, and authors, in the wake of another sad mess, I encourage you to find yourself a local bookstore, and then love it regularly.

***

(2.18.2011) I was moved to tears when I received this from the bookseller, Gary, the one I wrote about above. I quote it in full with his permission as response, and I am even more inspired at his bookselling spirit in the close of his note:

“Steven,

Thank you for the kind words. Yes, it is tough time around here and will be until we close the doors for good. We have a great store here with a great team..We got caught up in something that started years ago with poor decisions made at the top. Too bad we are the ones who pay the ultimate price. The big heads in the big house still have their jobs and livelihood while the rest of us pay for their blunders.. Jobs are tough right now and with no help or assistance from Borders we are on our own. This company is a huge dissapointment for myself and my team and the many other stores that are closing. We were literally kicked out. I have never heard of a company with so little passion and so much cruelty as this one. I do however cherish the fond memories of the customers, authors, and employees that I have had the pleasure of working with. That is what I take going forward. There will be better days ahead.

Take care,

Gary Selby”