Been Thinkin' About

Join editor-in-chief Joshua Heston along with Ethan as they welcome guests Matt and Jessica Farmer of Vintage Paris Coffee Shop to talk community, coffee, art and even how Matt and Jess met!

Following the art.

It’s time I came to terms with the truth: StateoftheOzarks is an “arts organization” and I’m an “events coordinator.” Both statements make me cringe just a little.

I suppose it is all true, but it’s only a small portion of the truth.

So let me tell you the real story.

Art has always led the way for StateoftheOzarks. The #SOTOLIFE creative community was designed for artists first and then opened up to entrepreneurs, businesses, and non-profits.

And the best way to showcase the arts is through events, be that Writers Artists Night, or StateoftheOzarks (SOTO) Fest, or Art Walk or well… you get the idea.

I’ve always been remarkably open in how much I didn’t know about coordinating events but — when push has come to shove — I’ll be damned before I do a bad job at something, and thus the aforementioned events have proven successful (with many humble and gracious thanks to the amazing people who have rallied to each cause).

And so, we continue to follow the art. As more #SOTOLIFE members come aboard, more ideas proliferate. More events come along. And that’s a good thing.

So I suppose “arts organization” and “events coordinator” aren’t bad terms. Especially when you realize the arts aren’t a sideline / elective / hobby / nice-thing-over-there-that-you-odd-people-are-doing but rather HOW a community expresses itself.

And THAT is how culture is made.

Just the same, I’d rather you call me “Editor-in-Chieftain.” Not only does it have a nicer ring to it, but the title goes remarkably better with my kilt.

Corbyn Snodgrass joins editor-in-chief Joshua Heston and co-host Ethan Grubaugh to discuss the nuances of local Ozarks.

A thousand moments — childhood moments — of mud and sun and rain, warm in the afternoon. Of a million greens in the timber behind the barn (and you thought there was just one green in the crayon box…) —

Of ice tea super sweet and homemade angel food cake with seven-minute frosting.

Of a thousand hoped-for futures, of a bright tomorrow.

Of cinnamon-sugar donuts to help the local rescue chapter — and glazed sugar donuts in the freezer case ‘cause we stayed up all night to watch for Halley’s comet.

We didn’t see the comet but we found the donuts.

The sun, setting, is higher up on the trees. There are no wrens this summer. Like the wrens, there was a soul here — the soul, really — which has winged elsewhere.

And I am sad, but no longer hopeless.

There are futures yet. Bright tomorrows again. A somber freight train thunders in the distance, echoing sound of my childhood. And a crow calls, startled, angry wings pushing into the distance.

The moon brightens. It’s only half-past ‘till home.

Join Editor-in-Chief Joshua Heston, Ethan Grubaugh and Dale Grubaugh explore the “gloriously messy middles” of provocative artwork, offensive fireworks, ideas of boycotting, free speech, and helping people rather than hurting them.

Podcast Partners: Vintage Paris Coffee Shop: Hand-crafted coffees and community; Josh Huxtable, SOTO Patron, Christine Riutzel, Beauty from Light; Shepherd the Musical: Rediscovering America’s Story, Stafford’s Barber Shop & Shave Company: The Place for Men in Downtown Branson, Taney County Health Department: Creating Opportunities for Healthy Lives in Our Community, and Blue Rock Print Company: Upgrade Your Look!

The gloriously messy middle.

Opinion. Freedom. ‘Murica. Polarization. Usually in that order.

First off, StateoftheOzarks isn’t a political magazine, and it’s not going to be. But as editor-in-chief, I oversee our editorial narrative and — as we cover both traditional and contemporary culture — that means I get to decide what articles get published. And which do not.

And I’m not opposed to ruffling a few feathers, if I feel the need is warranted (as the stories from last week attest).

Tradition. History. Community. Culture. Society as it changes. And as it stays the same.

I chose this week’s feature articles for very specific reasons. Summer Firework Art is gloriously bombastic art, disposable, sudden, and often very, very politically incorrect. It would not be hard for self-appointed members of the so-called PC police to find something on a redneck firework display offensive.

And offense-taking seems to be the order of the day here in our glorious new America.

But first, take a look at Harlan Bonar’s art. Behind the immediate colors of a re-envisioned Civil War lies art profusely decorated with hard themes, nudity, and — if you subscribe to Bonar’s “Christmas letter-comic-strip-narrative” by mail — I do, in case you wondered — a heaping helping of profanity.

Sometimes it’s tough stuff. And good folks of a more church-going nature could shy away.

But, that’s the point. On left and right, we have those ready to take offense, to boycott, to declare loudly.

But it’s the in between in which life is lived loudly. Art is painted. It is where there is joy and pain. Honesty. Authenticity. And self-righteous soapboxes are best-left behind.

Here.

In the g

Join Editor-in-Chief Joshua Heston, Ethan Grubaugh and Dale Grubaugh as we dig into the experience of Writers Artists Night, our uncensored works, the difficult themes of Dalton Quick’s Beneath the Willow with art by Freeman, and we also dig apart the hate mail we’ve gotten from Josh’s horror-fiction themed story, Kewpie, inspired by the art of the lovely and provocative Rose O’Neill. Also, Ethan talks about how much he hates Kewpies, and Josh talks about how much he loves them.

Podcast Partners: Vintage Paris Coffee Shop: Hand-crafted coffees and community; Josh Huxtable, SOTO Patron, Christine Riutzel, Beauty from Light; Shepherd the Musical: Rediscovering America’s Story, Stafford’s Barber Shop & Shave Company: The Place for Men in Downtown Branson, Taney County Health Department: Creating Opportunities for Healthy Lives in Our Community, and Blue Rock Print Company: Upgrade Your Look!

Beneath the Willow by Dalton Quick with art by Freeman

Kewpie

…oak leaves in the afternoon. I sit, quietly. Glass in hand. The afternoon light is in the trees. A bug flies by, I know not what kind — entomology was never my strong point, etymology is. The sun sets and with it another day.

The quiet is the sound of loss.

Lost moments. Lost childhood. Lost innocence.

We can never go back.

With the passing sun moves our passing chances. Once gone, our forevers lost in the red-orange sunsets of the past. The forest’s limbs are black silhouettes now. Somehow, mornings never capture the reminding hope — our future is at its most poignant once that future has been lost.

A hundred shades of green muddle the hot air. A soft wind stirs. Even with the heat, there is new growth, small green tendrils of the forest floor. Tendrils reaching for the light.

My mind goes back to another afternoon. In the freshly stirred black earth. A toad cradled in my mother’s weathered hands. Carton of epsom salt for the tomatoes. Young plants, full of hope and life.

When we plant, we plant hope. Hope for another tomorrow. Hope for a bountiful, flourishing future.

I saw that hope, planted young, last Friday night. We gathered beneath a darkening sky. So many moments.

We plant with no guarantees. It is a tenuous thing, this future. A wrong word. A lost moment. All could come crashing down.

But last Friday night, beneath the darkening sky, I saw hope.

Join Editor-in-Chief Joshua Heston and Ethan Grubaugh to talk details of the upcoming Writers Artists Night (one of the biggest nights of the StateoftheOzarks calendar). We also tackle hard issues of real life in Branson and the dark side of local poverty.

Podcast Partners: Vintage Paris Coffee Shop: Hand-crafted coffees and community; Josh Huxtable, SOTO Patron, Christine Riutzel, Beauty from Light; Shepherd the Musical: Rediscovering America’s Story, Stafford’s Barber Shop & Shave Company: The Place for Men in Downtown Branson, Taney County Health Department: Creating Opportunities for Healthy Lives in Our Community, and Blue Rock Print Company: Upgrade Your Look!

Writers Artists Night

Welcome to the Ozarks by Lauren Weinand

Join Editor-in-Chief Joshua Heston and Dale Grubaugh talk about music — particularly the power of hillfolk music, memories of the International Bluegrass Music Association convention in Raleigh, North Carolina in 2013, the beloved hymn Amazing Grace, and much more (all in Ethan’s absence).

Podcast Partners: Vintage Paris Coffee Shop: Hand-crafted coffees and community; Josh Huxtable, SOTO Patron, Christine Riutzel, Beauty from Light; Shepherd the Musical: Rediscovering America’s Story, Stafford’s Barber Shop & Shave Company: The Place for Men in Downtown Branson, Taney County Health Department: Creating Opportunities for Healthy Lives in Our Community, and Blue Rock Print Company: Upgrade Your Look!

The soul of the mountains.

A darkened theater. A family of music makers. Soaring harmonies. The magic of an emotional history. And the reality of tragedy.

Change is the hardest of challenges and the English language is a limited, imperfect medium of clay. A language of the earth that cannot transcend the heart.

Ugly words like “loss,” and “diagnosis,” and “options,” and “time frame,” and “quality of life” do no justice for the drop of the heart, the pit in one’s own stomach, and the sense of disbelief when met with our own shadowed mortality.

And the words of “music theory” and “scales” and “practice” do nothing for the soaring sense of the soul, a spiritual reminder that there is more, though oftentimes more of what we know not.

But we know there is more than this. Surely, there must be?, we ask ourselves.

Life is hard. Life in the mountains often harder than most. But with hardship and tragedy comes certain gifts.

Empathy. Compassion. Tenderness.

Words fail in such times. But the angelic language of music does not, and with that language brings hope. In a world of constant change, music gives me hope. Hope that transcends the mortal clay before us and of us.

I believe music is the true and most precious gift of our mountains. A soul that speaks to us in ways we cannot otherwise express. In a world of constant and terrible change, it is our most beautiful and precious gift.

Remember that.

Join Editor-in-Chief Joshua Heston and Ethan Grubaugh along with Jared Houle to discuss what day First Friday Art Walks are scheduled, our creative community, art work, and what a burgeoning traditionalist/progressive community looks like.

Podcast Partners: Vintage Paris Coffee Shop: Hand-crafted coffees and community; Josh Huxtable, SOTO Patron, Christine Riutzel, Beauty from Light; Shepherd the Musical: Rediscovering America’s Story, Stafford’s Barber Shop & Shave Company: The Place for Men in Downtown Branson, Taney County Health Department: Creating Opportunities for Healthy Lives in Our Community, and Blue Rock Print Company: Upgrade Your Look!

Join Editor-in-Chief Joshua Heston and Ethan Grubaugh along with Josh Ong to talk about rivers, history, riverboats, the Shepherd of the Hills country, Civil War history, Hulston Mill, and more.

Podcast Partners: Vintage Paris Coffee Shop: Hand-crafted coffees and community; Josh Huxtable, SOTO Patron, Christine Riutzel, Beauty from Light; Shepherd the Musical: Rediscovering America’s Story, Stafford’s Barber Shop & Shave Company: The Place for Men in Downtown Branson, Taney County Health Department: Creating Opportunities for Healthy Lives in Our Community, and Blue Rock Print Company: Upgrade Your Look!

Shepherd of the Hills Country (1913-1960) by J. Thomas

Civil Wars Days at Hulston Mill

The history of now.

Last fall I got to go aboard the permanently docked Mississippi IV, a part of the Jesse Brent Lower Mississippi River Museum in Vicksburg. The museum is free and it took several hours to wander through the whole thing, particularly the boat — a magnificently giant paean to post-WWII American industrialism.

The boat was launched in 1961 and retired in 1993. My short time aboard was unsettling, satisfying, warm and eerie, but not necessarily in that order. Here I was, looking at a museum ship. History. All in the modern-day of 2018.

And yet it wasn’t history I was looking at. It was a chunk of my own past.

My own past I hadn’t quite realized had… well… passed.

The overstuffed and shiny beige vinyl couches in the ship’s “lobby” where countless river commission meetings had been held? The furniture I grew up sitting on (and occasionally dismantling to play airplane) was likely made of the same stuff and possibly in the same year!

The shape and feel of the room? Something akin to Star Trek: The Next Generation sets except the windows looked out over historic Vicksburg instead of fictional Vulcan.

Downstairs in the cavernous engine room rested the “two 8-cylinder Nordberg engines, each capable of developing 1,860 horsepower.” The Mississippi IV was called “Big Shaky” for its engine vibrations that could never quite be resolved. The place smelled like oil and looked like Scotty should walk out from behind a bulkhead, muttering, “I’m givin’ her all ah’ got, Captain.”

Can you tell Star Trek featured prominently in my late childhood?

The expansive mess hall featured a bountiful array of tasty-looking display food. Here it was canned corn and fried chicken and apple pie and icebox rolls. This felt like home. Weirdly. Strangely. Again.

Had they checked with my mom on the recipes?

This was a boat built in the Midwest by Midwesterners. For river travel. These were my rivers. My people. I grew up in a small Illinois river town, watching towboats ply the river, barges loaded with grain and coal bound for Chicago and St. Louis and New Orleans.

And, though I never became an engineer like

Join Editor-in-Chief Joshua Heston and Ethan Grubaugh along with guest Joshua Stafford of Staffford’s Barber Shop & Shave Company.

Podcast Partners: Josh Huxtable, SOTO Patron, Christine Riutzel, Beauty from Light; Shepherd the Musical: Rediscovering America’s Story, Stafford’s Barber Shop & Shave Company: The Place for Men in Downtown Branson, Taney County Health Department: Creating Opportunities for Healthy Lives in Our Community, and Blue Rock Print Company: Upgrade Your Look!

Vulnerability, masculinity, tough stuff and cake.

It may sound cliché — and maybe even troubled — in today’s politically charged culture, but the question of what it takes to be a man is real. And sometimes difficult. And, what can I say, being that I am a man, these are questions that concern me.

But in a society increasingly polarized, these are questions that should concern all of us.

As editor-in-chief (and sometimes editor-in-chieftain), whose job it is to give the Ozarks people a real voice in an increasingly loud and incoherent world, I believe this story narrative makes sense.

You can also expect StateoftheOzarks narratives on local food and agriculture (#SustainableOzarks), dark magic and mountain folklore (#ArcaneOzarks), and the hardships of living locally in the Ozarks (#BreakingBransonPoverty).

But for this week — and for this Monday’s podcast — it’s #ManlyOzarks, a story narrative about what it means to be a man.

Consequently, this week we have one of my favorite articles chronicling Terry Sartin, one of the greatest men I’ve had the privilege to meet and train with. And we also have a long article about the dorkiest man I know — myself. Hence the aforementioned vulnerability in the title.

Live — and love — strong, y’all.

Terry Sartin #CancerWarrior

An Ozark Workout

Join Editor-in-Chief Joshua Heston along with Ethan Grubaugh and Dale Grubaugh. Ethan and Josh get preoccupied with their shared love of Mystery Science Theater 3000 before bringing publisher Dale into the studio to talk the many regions of the Ozarks.

Podcast Partners: Josh Huxtable, SOTO Patron, Christine Riutzel, Beauty from Light; Shepherd the Musical: Rediscovering America’s Story, Stafford’s Barber Shop & Shave Company: The Place for Men in Downtown Branson, Taney County Health Department: Creating Opportunities for Healthy Lives in Our Community, and Blue Rock Print Company: Upgrade Your Look!

No surprise there. More specifically, though, I’ve been thinking about just how far the Ozarks region ranges. If you’re not careful, you might end up in the Ozarks without knowing it. And you might up and unintentionally fall out of the Ozarks. Strange, huh?

So, where are the Ozarks (and where are they not)?

Lamar and Liberal, Missouri, are two towns not in the Ozarks.

The hills and rolling meadows of the Springfield Plain give way to a certain windswept flatness associated with Kansas… though the Ozarks are, technically, only 10 miles or so away.

Far to the north, Boonsboro, Missouri, is part of the Ozarks.

The town is within the Outer Ozark Border which stretches north of the Missouri River.

The Illinois bluffs across from Cape Girardeau are included as well.

Sikeston, in the Mississippi River plain, is not in the Ozarks. But a big chunk of the Ozarks includes Oklahoma.

Surprised?

We’ve got great stories below (as well as the Nineteen Regions of the Ozarks).

Eastern Ozarks Rendezvous by Clint Lacy

The Harold Bell Wright Era by J. Thomas

THE 19 REGIONS OF THE OZARKS…

The Nature Conservancy defines the Ozarks into 19 separate regions (regions which pay utterly no attention to state boundaries):

1. The Springfield Plateau stretches across Oklahoma nearly to Tulsa and then snakes eastward all the way across Northwest Arkansas.
2. The Springfield Plain does actually include Springfield, Missouri, and crosses a small corner of Kansas.
3. The White River Hills, along with the Bostons, are what most people think of when they think “Ozarks.” The region includes Branson.
4. The Elk River Hills are over by Noel.
5. The Lower Boston Mountains spread down to the Arkansas River, reaching nearly to Little Rock.
6. The Upper Boston Mountains are a central pocket of the Arkansas Ozarks, including some of the roughest, most beautiful terrain of Madison, Carroll and Newton Counties.
7. The Central Plateau very rudely ignores Missouri and Arkansas boundaries, stretching from the Missouri River all the way down into Sharp County, Arkansas.
8. The Osage River Hills includes the Lake of the Ozarks.
9. The Prairie Ozark Border is over by Sedalia and Marshall.
10. The Gasconade Hills
11. The Meramec River Hills covers Steelville, Keysville and Cuba as well.
12. The Current River Hills
13. The St. Francis Knobs a