"Folk art can help you to lead a halfway decent life," Robert E. Smith (1927-2010) was heard to say; but Springfield, Missouri's most famous, eccentric, and beloved painter pushed his work into the realm of outsider art. Self-taught, Smith began painting while a young man: forcibly institutionalized following a nervous breakdown, he retreated into his art. Unsurprisingly, his art brut is unbounded by logic, time, and space, brilliantly colored, at once childlike and troubling. But Smith's art reveals more than an imagination unfettered. The work of an inveterate story-teller, his paintings present witty, savvy, complex visual narratives. Cartoon animals mingle with sidewalk preachers, movie stars, and U.S. Presidents; in busy street scenes, bicycles and trolley cars bustle below while blimps and airplanes and UFOs-and an occasional nuclear bomb-fly overhead. Smith's painting revels in satire, revealing an eye for incongruity and an inherent love of life. Even a cursory view of his work reflects a man who led a rich, wondrous life and whose fanciful yearnings inspired the community that cherished him. Born in St. Louis, Smith moved to Springfield in 1975. Drawn mainly from local, privately-owned collections, the present anthology features thirty full-color illustrations along with cartoons, poems, and stories by the artist.

robert e smith: Paintings, Drawings, Poems, and Stories

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Moon City Press

Recounting the many live vaudeville acts and films that graced the theatre’s stage and screen, The Gillioz “Theatre Beautiful” presents a social history of entertainment through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Second World War, the Cold War, the Sixties and the Seventies. Of note is the Springfield theatre’s hosting of three movie world premieres―with future U. S. president Ronald Reagan appearing in each.

Gillioz "Theatre Beautiful": Celebrating Springfield's Theatre History, 1926-2006

History

Americas

Jim W. Corder will be remembered by students and colleagues at Texas Christian University for his writing, teaching, and original thinking. He was one of the most influential composition specialists of his generation―his Handbook of Rhetoric went through numerous editions, becoming a classroom staple nationwide―yet he gave his final years to the “fourth genre” of creative nonfiction. His numerous publications include Lost in West Texas (1988), Chronicle of a Small Town (1989), and Yonder: Life on the Far Side of Change (1992).

Jim W. Corder on Living and Dying in West Texas: A Postmodern Scrapbook

Literature & Fiction

Jim W. Corder

Composing Ourselves: Writing from the Composition Program at Missouri State University

Some of the Words Are Theirs is far more than the tale of an adult child of an alcoholic. Jensen’s story chronicles how he came to widen the lens through which he saw his past, removing the filters of the victim and abandoned child, allowing him to see events as significant primarily in the meaning we choose to give them.

Some of the Words Are Theirs: A Memoir of an Alcoholic Family

George H. Jensen Jr.

Parenting & Relationships

Confederate Girlhoods gathers materials from the Campbell-McCammon Collection, as preserved in The History Museum for Springfield-Greene County. One of Springfield, Missouri's founding families, the Campbells were prodigious writers whose memoirs, correspondence, and fiction portray four generations of pioneer women. Focusing on writings from 1853 to 1902, Confederate Girlhoods presents these women's views of Native Americans and early settling; of slavery and southern patriotism; of war and its social, political, economic aftermath; of the railroad and Westward migration; of an Ozarks community's early efforts at conservation and civic commemoration.

Confederate Girlhoods: A Women's History of Early Springfield, Missouri

Featuring work previously unpublished, The Heroes Have Gone shows off Jim W. Corder’s consummate skills as a memoirist, essayist, and cultural critic. Though the subjects are wide-ranging―West Texas, World War II, writing and teaching, TCU football―one looms above the rest: Corder’s lifetime love affair with America’s pastoral sport, baseball.

Heroes Have Gone: Personal Essays on Sport, Popular Culture, and the American West

Corder, Jim

Through a series of dramatic monologues (spoken by Mary, the Angel Gabriel, Paul of Tarsus, and the “Sidonian archer,” Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera), the fourteen poems gathered here give life to the Jewish-apocryphal legend of “Jesus, son of Pantera”―the story that Jesus was sired by a Roman soldier. Having learned of a tomb (unearthed in Germany) bearing the soldier’s name, Whitehead spent the last years of his life researching and writing about this fascinating, controversial tradition. In his introduction to the collection, renowned Biblical scholar James Tabor recounts the Scriptural, apocryphal, and archaeological evidence upon which the story is based.

The Panther: Posthumous Poems

Whitehead, James

Poetry

When James T. Whitehead (or “Big Jim,” as friends knew him) passed away in 2003, Fayetteville and the University of Arkansas lost one of its finest poets and beloved teachers. In 1965, Whitehead joined with his friend William Harrison to found the University’s Creative Writing Program. He taught in that nationally prestigious program for the next thirty-four years, from 1965 to 1999. He was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a Robert Frost Fellowship in poetry. Whitehead’s novel, Joiner (University of Arkansas Press), was listed among the New York Times’ Noteworthy Books of 1971. His many poetry collections include Domains (1967), Local Men (1979), and Near at Hand (1993). With his untimely passing, Whitehead left a large body of work unpublished. In this anthology of original poetry, short fiction, essays, and remembrances, twenty-four of Whitehead’s colleagues, students, and friends join in celebrating the man’s life and contribution to American letters. Included are posthumous works by Whitehead himself: six poems, an excerpt of creative nonfiction, and a draft-excerpt from Coldstream, projected sequel to Joiner.

For, From, About James T. Whitehead: Poems, Stories, Photographs, and Recollections

For, From, and about James T. Whitehead: Stories, Poems, Photographs, and Recollections

Michael E. Burns

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