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 StateoftheOzarks [print] Magazine project.

StateoftheOzarks has been an online magazine for 19 years but became eclipsed by the events StateoftheOzarks creates — namely, the StateoftheOzarks Fest (since 2017) and the Hollister StateoftheOzarks Farmers Market (since 2020). Out of sight, out of mind, and there’s only so much of “promotion Josh” to go around, only so much bandwidth to produce. The incurious miss so much of the world around them.

Dustin is a recognized tattoo artist, a blue collar philosopher, a cinephile, and a prodigious reader. On that cold winter morning, he proposed a number of additions to the StateoftheOzarks [print] Magazine — all new articles (I was going to use archived articles), an article on modern education, and a new chapter (one of pop culture viewed through an Ozarks values’ lens), allowing us to write book and movie reviews and recommendations. I did pause, that cold winter morning, feeling the weight of creating all-new articles and chapters and templates, and not knowing how much time the new work would take.

“Let’s do it,” I said. And with that, Dustin became associate editor of the StateoftheOzarks [print] Magazine and development began in earnest.

Twenty years ago this month, I typed the words “State of the Ozarks” for the first time and 19 years ago I started the company that would apparently define my life. Online magazine, weekly newsletter, community art events, member community, street festival, farmers market…. Most people know “Joshua Heston” as promoter of whatever current event we’re doing (and it’s irrelevant to the story that I’m a writer, teacher, journalist, graphic designer, overtly sensitive farm boy and picker-upper-of-heavy things, including hundreds of pounds of Ozarks tomatoes over the course of the summer season). If there has been one constant, that constant has been change and the evanescent nature of life — and fleeting nature of time and accomplishment — is haunting.

The permanence and existential challenge of physical print is important. Dustin explained it like this: “When you see something online, you can just scroll away from it. You can just forget it. But once something is physical, the thing exists in the culture and we have to make a decision about it.” Much like vinyl records, print is having a resurgent appeal in a world spinning in over-stimulus. The art of the StateoftheOzarks [print] Magazine is hand-drawn, with additional hand-drawn art throughout the pages. There are online chapters to the magazine as well, so we may add content after the publication date, but the StateoftheOzarks [print] Magazine stands in alignment with StateoftheOzarks’ values and doesn’t require the online content to make sense.

Civil discourse can be lost in the polarization of today’s politics. “Why can’t we just have culture without politics,” one friend opined a year back. The truth is, we can’t. Politics are downstream from culture; both inextricably linked. “We’ll all get along as long as we don’t talk religion or politics,” someone told me three weeks ago beneath a muddy, windblown sky and I did what we all do — nodded to get along. But I disagree. We have lost the ability to discuss, to lose an argument, or to win and still keep a friend.

Start with tattoos, once the domain of bikers and sailors and the ne’er-do-well. Nothing may be more controversial and more permanent than the tattoos on my skin, but nothing is more fragile. “I’ve done the math,” Dustin said once, “and I can tell just about the time when the last of my art will no longer be around.” The personal mortality hits hard. Even the cheap silverware in my kitchen drawer could outlive me, but the permanent ink on my arm will not. Five thousand copies of StateoftheOzarks [print] Magazine will not die with me, or with Dustin.  A blood red winter sun dipped below black ridges that night some four months ago and we went to work in earnest.

Life of the entrepreneur, the writer, the poet, the business owner, is not easy. There have been plenty of moments in the last four months when I thought I might break, especially as deadlines loomed, as more projects appeared, and as I habitually sprained my ankle three times in a row (don’t worry, it’s better now and yes, I’m good at hiding a limp). A terrible misconception is that life should be easy (it’s not) and that things won’t break (they do). But in other ways, the last four months have gone by in the blink of an eye and suddenly —

Monday’s blustery warm May wind is strong in the pines and verdant oak forest as a waxing crescent moon rides high on the night and we quietly launch the StateoftheOzarks [print] Magazine to a small circle of StateoftheOzarks Insiders. “All the king’s horses and all the king’s men….” The current “did you know” moment for our internet age is that the old nursery rhyme’s Humpty Dumpty isn’t really an egg (Lewis Carroll might have disagreed) but the real story — as it goes with old nursery rhymes — is perhaps the more important —

Things break. We break. Over and again. The road is long and hubris always a danger. But the story never ends with brokenness unless we say it does. Twenty years is a long time. Yet for me, the Ozarks have never felt more new or more alive. Despite the risk, despite the brokenness, despite our own deep imperfections, the journey is worth it. Perhaps it’s the reason we’re here after all, all over, again.