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Prose, chapbook, 48 pages, from Bottlecap Features.
“My grandpa always used to say, ‘You can take a boy out of the hills and the hollers, but you can’t take the hills and the hollers out of the boy.’ I learned all too well how right he was.”
Ozark Son is a chapbook of short fiction about a boy who grew up in the Ozark Mountains and came of age among the hills and the hill people there. A youth who moved away from the mountains and resisted them. And a man who, through the harsh experiences of life and love, came back to an appreciation of his hillbilly education, who returned to a love of the Ozarks for all their bad and good, for all their hollows and hills.
This chapbook’s lyrical prose puts its fingers on something urgent in a credible way, and in modes that feel confident and thoroughly inviting. These are tales that, calmly and quietly, ask troubling questions, and which leave the reader with mysteries and gentle endings, but not in obviously familiar genres, and they act as an antidote to the terrifying banality of AI writing in both their content and form. McGuire is a writer who does a lot in constrained spaces.
Ethan McGuire is a writer and computer scientist working in healthcare whose essays, poems, short stories, and translations have appeared in Blue Unicorn, The Dispatch, Emerald Coast Review, New Verse News, The South Wales Evening Post, Voegelin View, and other publications. Ethan is an editor at New Verse Review, Tar River Poetry, and Literary Matters and the author of Songs for Christmas and Apocalypse Dance. Ethan grew up in the Missouri Ozarks, lived on the Gulf of Mexico for twelve years, and is currently settled in Fort Wayne, Indiana with his wife and children. You may find Ethan at TheFlummoxed.Substack.com.