Daniel Woodrell

Back when I was much looking for intersections of English and Geography, I took Daniel Woodrell's novel Tomato Red with me one Christmas, and read this tale of Ozark woe by the pool in St. Lucia.  I had some insights into that book (need to go find that now-ancient journal), but delayed sketching anything out until I could at least read Woodrell's currently famous book, Winter's Bone (also now a movie).

Well, I did finally manage to read Winter's Bone last weekend.  The two books are both set in the south-borderlands of Missouri, right down where civilization fades into Arkansas, near Woodrell's residence in West Plains, MO (where I remember passing through when I was 17 on the way to a very rainy float trip--and was it West Plains where we stopped at 2 am or so, and just sat in the middle of the road to see what that felt like?).

The two books are very different.  In WB, the characters are part of a very closed, religiously bound group of families who once would have been moon-shining hillbillies with shotguns, and are now prime meth-cookers, with a lot more weapons.  They have a firm attachment to place, but a larger "geography" than the even-poorer white trash trailer folks in Tomato Red. 

I find two directions I want to explore here--the sense of place in WB, and the extreme limits of the geographic imagination (a consequence of poverty) of folks in TR.

It seems like a false trail to simply try to line up the fictional places with the "real" map.

I also note that I would call esp. WB a kind of fictional community ethnography, though I probably need to be anxious about the definitions of ethnography that Elaine L. is currently using.

I wonder what Larry Brown would make of the "Fist of the Gods" and folk religion of the people in WB--it's very much his territory, though these folks seem not so connected to the wider political/racist ideologies he investigated.

Well, I'll see what I can figure out.

An interesting interview:  Daniel Woodrell: The Ozark daredevil.

later, bob