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Been thinking about…Twilight men
These are the things we don’t say. The things we can’t say. The things we won’t say. My Basset hound, a friendly, dominating lad of only four, nuzzles into the pillow beside my head. Truth is, my dogs rule the house, which is fine. Truth is, my Basset is a strange boy who barks at ghosts so I like him next to me as I sleep. “Josh is too sensitive. He is an artist. A writer. He won’t fit in with the world.” That’s what my mom said about me years ago. In a world of doctors
Joshua Heston
3 min read
Been thinking about: Fireworks and summer sweat
The rain poured down just beyond the garage doors, dirty cement glistening in the late, dark summertime somewhere between light and dusk. Bare incandescent lightbulb shown over saws and level, hammers, screws, nails, fishing rods, my dad’s red hammer. Old 1960s’ refrigerator, stocked with beer and leftovers, with a freezer desperately in need of defrosting hummed. It was July sometime in the early 1990s. I paused. Perhaps the twilight made this moment profound, though if some
Joshua Heston
5 min read
Been thinking about…this moment between June and May
Saturday morning and the mountain humidity is mounting, fog burning off from river lake below, hot late spring sun peeking through night clouds clearing as the minutes tick by. I’m still bemused by old turn-of-the-century tourist brochures touting the Ozarks’ “cooling summer breezes.” It’s only nine o’clock in the morning and I’ve already sweated through my shirt, confident it won’t be the last time today. Saturday morning markets are a lot of work. Just one year ago, State
Joshua Heston
4 min read
Been thinking about…all the king’s horses
Night falls with the rain but the light in the room is warm and dim, the music moody, calming after an exhausting week. The sound of a baseball game echoes lowly. The dogs are making comfortable noises from rug and couch. As I sit at the kitchen table to write, again, the mind wanders. “I have an idea,” Dustin Burkett is saying. His earnestness is contagious, his talent inspiring. We are sitting at another kitchen table, cold winter light streaming, conversing about the Sta
Joshua Heston
4 min read
Been thinking about…coffee breaks
It is best not to estimate the countless gallons of coffee I’ve drunk in, say, the last 35 years, but just the same, I know it’s a lot.
Joshua Heston
3 min read
Record crowd on opening day at StateoftheOzarks Farmers Market
An interview with Joshua Heston with StateoftheOzarks Farmers Market.
Luanna Fullerton
2 min read
Been thinking about…Brittle willows
Yellow sun and yellow willow catkins sway after the spring thunderstorm. Afternoon sun lights silver rivulets beneath. A burly bumblebee crawls over thick pollen, engrossed in something akin to happiness. Springtime is here in the middle of America, just as it has been uncountable times over. The willows are new and young and ready once more. The silver clouds are wings in the south night sky, clouds barely visible even as the rain clears, even as the rain wings eastward ag
Joshua Heston
3 min read
Been thinkin’ about…Springtime ghosts
A clearing sky. A blackberry winter, again. The moon is a timeless thing cradled in the midnight above. The hubris of the day slowly passes into night, into forgetfulness. The day is done but the night is alive with the dead. Too often the dead of past regrets, of half-remembered thoughts, of memories sweet and bitter all. Ghosts are troublesome things. They don’t exist, of course. Just the result of an overactive imagination. A bit of neuroses with that fragment of potato
Joshua Heston
4 min read
Been thinkin’ about…The power of a blank page
Every day this past week, it seems, I’ve been bombarded by some opinion of “artificial intelligence.”
Joshua Heston
4 min read
Been thinkin’ about…Star Wars junkyards
The old short bed Chevy blocks the way to the weedy gravel in front of the old repair shop. Tires are stacked against the old metal building, rims swimming with mosquito babies. A beat-up side door is blocked open and from inside comes the sound of metal on metal and occasional swearing. The big elms sway in a breeze somewhere between spring and summer. The sound of a Sawyer Brown song lilts from a cassette deck covered in cobwebs. Across America, a thousand-upon-a-thousand s
Joshua Heston
4 min read
Been thinkin’ about…Springtime goblins
Old and worn highway winds next to the creek, a creek now obscured by green leaves and the falling dark. Frogs peep. The old town’s yellow street lamps cast globes of light in the creekside forest, illuminating clouds of flimsy Mayflies. The darkness is close, the water down below running over limestone. Springtime in the Ozarks is here. Heavy traffic whines on the big six lanes. Not long ago, the anachronists of the Ozarks would have stumbled over the idea of big road and
Joshua Heston
3 min read
Been thinkin’ about…Sunday circus
I’m flipping through the magazine, looking at pictures of a traveling circus, documented as it wound its way through the Upper American South sometime in the late 1960s. The photos are in color and a little grainy. The performers magnificent, but a bit worn. The photojournalist had been embedded, traveling with the troupe as they left their warm Florida winter quarters and made another arduous journey north in the spring, battling rain and storms and winding, rocky, mountaino
Joshua Heston
3 min read
Been thinkin’ about…stories found and told
“These are the classic monster movies, like ‘Frankenstein,’ ” Dustin is saying, pointing to several shelves full of DVDs. “Over there, the formation of Western civilization. Here, action films. There, horror. Here, documentaries.” Associate editor Dustin Burkett is giving me a tour of his film room. In the new StateoftheOzarks Magazine, film and book recommendations are a regular segment. Film is now part of my job description. I glance up. On top of the bookshelves are dis
Joshua Heston
3 min read
Been thinkin’ about…Poetry and fists
“Levitt’s swinging right caught him by the cheek-bone and he staggered, driven back by the force of the larger man’s onslaught.” — Louis L’Amour, “Where the Long Grass Blows” L’Amour was “America’s Favorite Storyteller.” I know that because those words are printed on the cover of all his books. This book is small, as pulp Westerns should be, and thus easy to hold, published first in 1976, then 1988 and again in 1997. The dramatic Western cover art is from 1988, about the sa
Joshua Heston
4 min read
Been thinkin’ about…The winter, late
“Do you ever have memories that are not quite your own? Moments in the mind’s eye that feel so real, but have never been a part of your own past?” The house still stands on the hill and it is late winter but the air is strange and warm. Family gathers on the front porch — a wide, old, wrap-around porch — brothers, uncles, fathers, grandfathers, shadows strange in the harsh open glow of the old incandescent bulb screwed in as a porch light. Aluminum siding is cold and white,
Joshua Heston
4 min read
Been thinkin’ about…Water, ink and stone
The early rains came down again, like they always do this time of year. The grass greens. The daffodil blooms, reminder that no matter the crazy outrage of the day, there is solace in new life, again and again. It seems the world begins anew each year with water running over stone. I am playing again in the water at the little culvert under the driveway. The little pool that formed was shaded by watchful black locust trees and friendly honeysuckle and yet still the pool was
Joshua Heston
4 min read
Been thinkin’ about…our daily bread
“Give us this day our daily bread…” The rains were heavy that spring of my 16th year, and the gooseberry brambles plentiful with green fruit. Dark skies blocked out the May sun and I kept my worn-out green flannel shirt close by, wet-tinged breeze still biting as I threw hay to the goats. I was old for my years and far too young, unsure of myself, and staring down the barrel of a world that didn’t quite square with who I was. “Honk, honk, honk!” Our neighbor Cindy was drivi
Joshua Heston
5 min read
Been thinkin’ about…Jabberwock fog
I was assigned the poem by my arts instructor, a harebrained faculty member in tweed who kept changing the rules every time she lost sight of the curriculum.
Joshua Heston
3 min read
Been thinkin’ about…Bleak sun
The sun sets on the just and the unjust alike. I turn up my collar, and turn off the truck ignition.
Joshua Heston
3 min read
Been thinkin’ about…Old French bricks
I remember the summer’s light dappled through the urban tree canopy of maple and birch and ginkgo, the summer sky a patchy blue over St. Louis, the old doors blue, red, green and white, each stoop, each old 19th century doorway, leading to another home, another series of lives and pasts and memories and futures. A mockingbird perched high up, surveying. A rabbit bounded into an overgrown lot where others’ memories once stood, now a jungle of castor bean plants and invasive Ch
Joshua Heston
5 min read
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