Ozarks Studies Symposium Schedule
18th Annual Ozarks Studies Symposium
September 18-20, 2025
Theme: "Conflict and Consensus in the Ozarks"
Entrance to the symposium is free and pre-registration is not required. Those who
attend will be invited to register on site when they arrive.
All presenters are found in the Full Conference Program.
Thursday, September 18, 2025, On the Mezzanine, West Plains Civic Center
5:30 - 7:00 p.m.
West Plains Council on the Arts, Gallery at the Center
Description:
The Harlin Museum will present an exhibit called "War in the Ozarks" featuring artwork,
photos, and artifacts from their collection. The collection includes historical materials
about Ozarkers who served in all the national conflicts as well as stories and artists'
renderings of local skirmishes of the Civil War. The exhibit is sponsored by the WPCA
which receives funding from the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.
The Harlin Museum is a non-profit volunteer-run cultural center in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks.
It hosts art shows, workshops, educational lectures, and kids' art programs throughout
the year while also displaying regional artifact and history exhibits year-round.
Find out more at https://harlinmuseum.com/
Refreshments will be served, and representatives from the Harlin Museum will be available
to discuss the exhibit.
Friday, September 19, 2025, Magnolia Room, West Plains Civic Center
9 a.m.
Welcome: Dr. Dennis Lancaster, Chancellor emeritus, Missouri State University-West
Plains
9:15 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
Panel 1: Ozarks Fiction
Description:
- Steve Wiegenstein, Author
- Reading from the author's upcoming novel, Bring Daybreak
- James Fowler, Professor Emeritus, University of Central Arkansas
- Mara W. Cohen Ioannides, Ozarks Studies Association
- Reading from Yellow Jack and Turpentine
- Jo Van Arkel, Professor of English, Drury University
- We Know How to Read the Clouds: Consensus, and the First-Person Plural Voice in Fiction
11:15 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Panel 2: Conflict Across the Twentieth-Century Ozarks
Description:
- Susan Croce Kelly, Author and Editor
- The Ozarks' King-of-the-Road-Succession-Conflict and Other Close Encounters of the
Horse/Car Kind
- Dawn Larsen, Professor of Theater Emerita, Francis Marion University
- Vincent Anderson, Baxter County Library
- Armageddon in the Ozarks: The Rise and Raid of the CSA Compound in Marion County,
Arkansas
2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m.
Panel 3: Land, Food, and Ozarks Geography
Description:
- Jared Phillips, University of Arkansas
- Creating an Organic Ozarks
- Denise Henderson Vaughn, Science Journalist
- Ozarks Karst Dramas (documentary screening and discussion)
4:00 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Panel 4: Ozarks Poetry
Description:
- Michael Blanchard, University of Central Arkansas
- Ozarks Pastorals - Poems of Time, Memory & Mountains
- Dave Malone, Poet and Screenwriter
- Tire Lots, Grounded Grannies, and Roving Black Bears: Nature, Family, and Neighbors
in Conflict and Consensus
5:30 p.m.
Missouri State University-West Plains Keynote Presentation: Olivia Paschal, University
of Virginia
Presentation: Creating the Neoliberal State: Arkansas in the Clinton Era
Description:
It was the 1980s in Arkansas. Bill Clinton, the ambitious “Boy Governor,” was staring
down a jobs crisis and deindustrialization at home. Wal-Mart and Tyson, headquartered
twenty miles from each other in northwest Arkansas and three hours away from Little
Rock, were becoming two of the most dominant companies in the retailing and poultry
sectors. The men that ran them, Sam Walton and Don Tyson, were becoming some of the
richest and most influential capitalists in the world. Clinton’s political work and
relationships with his state’s (and eventually the nation’s) wealthiest corporations
and capitalists began well before his presidency. Under his administration, Walton
and Tyson were able to use their outsized economic influence and Clinton’s presidential
ambitions to reshape the state’s political economy, its northwest corner, and its
very environment. These relationships, forged between two of the richest and most
powerful companies in the world and the governor of a small, poor state—in the 1980s,
less than 3 million people lived in Arkansas—followed Clinton through his presidency.
But before hitting the national stage, they produced and shaped forms of state-level
“neoliberal” governance in Arkansas, which became a laboratory of state-level neoliberal
experimentation.
Olivia Paschal is a writer and historian based in the Arkansas Ozarks and in Charlottesville, VA,
where she is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Virginia. Her academic work centers
on labor, business, and neoliberal capitalism in Arkansas—home of Walmart, Tyson Foods,
J.B. Hunt, and Bill Clinton—and her peer-reviewed scholarship has appeared in Agricultural History and the Journal of Ozarks Studies. Her essays and reporting have appeared in the New York Review of Books, The American Prospect, The Nation, The Atlantic, and The Guardian, among other publications.
Saturday, September 20, 2025, Magnolia Room, West Plains Civic Center
9:00 a.m. - 10:15 a.m.
Panel 5: Health in the Ozarks
Description:
- Cathy Otten, Founder and Healthcare Coach, Patient to Partner
- Take Charge of Your Healthcare: A Rural Missouri Perspective on Medical Mistrust and
Patient Empowerment
- Chuck Davis, Visual Artist and Independent Curator
- Healing Waters and Segregated Springs: Stereo Views of Arkansas
- Tom Kersen, Jackson State University
- America's Greatest Psychic Marvel: The Strange Case of Dr. Khiro and Mr. Darnell
10:30 a.m. - 12:15 a.m.
Panel 6: Ozarks Biographies
Description:
- David H. Jerome, University of Arkansas
- Kitty Ledbetter, Professor Emerita, Texas State University
- Headed for the Big Time: Dottie Goes to Nashville
- Aleshia O'Neal, Associate Professor of English, College of the Ozarks
- The Life and Work of Charlie May Simon
- Jan Stock LaFever
- Lloyd "Shad" Heller's Legacy
2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m.
Panel 8: Storytelling in the Ozarks
Description:
- Danette House, Traditional Ozarks Storyteller and Folk Practitioner
- Feuding Families of the Ozarks
- Kim McCully-Mobley, Aurora High School/Drury University/Crowder College
3:20 p.m. -5:00 p.m.
Panel 9: Ozarks Literary Criticism
Description:
- Leslie Reed, Instructor of English, Arkansas State University
- New Light in a Dark World: The Rhetoric of Extinction and Survival in Daniel Woodrell's
Landscapes
- Kristen Ruccio, Associate Professor of English, Arkansas State University
- "We're Still Here": Nature as Character in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House Books
- John J. Han, Professor of English and Creative Writing, Missouri Baptist University
- Redemption and Exclusion, Race, Class, and Eugenics in Harold Bell Wright's Social
Vision
- Craig Albin, Professor of English, Missouri State University-West Plains
- " 'Sunk to a Moaning Place': Defying Despair in Winter's Bone"
