Jason Peters

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Jason Peters tends a small acreage in Ingham County, Michigan, and teaches English at Hillsdale College. A founding member of FPR, he is the editor of both Local Culture: A Journal of the Front Porch Republic and Front Porch Republic Books. His books include The Culinary Plagiarist: (Mis)Adventures of a Lusty, Thieving, God-Fearing Gourmand (FPR Books 2020), Wendell Berry: Life and Work (University Press of Kentucky 2007), Land! The Case for an Agrarian Economy, by John Crowe Ransom (University Press of Notre Dame, 2017), and Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto (co-edited with Mark T. Mitchell for FPR Books, 2018).

Recent Essays

Of Dullards, Whales, Frustrations, and Shirts Like Fetters

Jason Peters - May 18, 2011

What of those who have never once thought it their duty to amuse their readers?

Boredom and the “App” for Self-Control

Jason Peters - April 27, 2011

The future is grim, my friends.

Magpie Education for Small-Mouth Bass

Jason Peters - April 6, 2011

We’re like small-mouth bass, and we’ve swallowed the technological treble hook.

Bar Jester’s Writing Seminar; or, How To Write Like the Average Undergraduate Male

Jason Peters - December 14, 2010

Save, print, drink.

Kingsley Amis (!) On the Priesthood

Jason Peters - November 17, 2010

Then it’s a bit up to you to be jolly crusty and jolly full of hell-fire and sin and damnation.

Handing Higher Ed to the Cripples: On John Williams’s “Stoner”

Jason Peters - October 26, 2010

If there’s one thing we have in higher education today it’s a superfluity of bluster.

Our Special Today is Spleen

Jason Peters - September 22, 2010

Ah, you know what? Screw it. Give me the hairshirts wherever they are.

Print Culture and the Fate of the Literary Quarterly

Jason Peters - June 8, 2010

The general continued to pay for the upkeep of the LSU tiger in an airconditioned cage. The amount of money involved was almost precisely the same as the subsidy for the Southern, then the best quarterly in the country by a large margin.

Bar Jester Chronicles 12(A): “The Way to Bliss” (A Work of Fiction–Sort of)

Jason Peters - May 18, 2010

Nor was it his great and almost constant tumescence, which his grey polyester pants could never quite sufficiently hide.

Meditation on the Cold

Jason Peters - February 3, 2010

Lovers of snow and cold are qualitatively different from the lovers of sun and surf; they are different moral beings altogether.

The Bar Jester’s Unpremeditated Verse

Jason Peters - January 20, 2010

But as a profound poet trying to make a comfortable living I can’t really trouble myself about that fit audience though few. . . . Were I to start thinking about poetry in the social context, I’d be sliding down that slippery slope toward place, limits, and liberty. And then what? Localism? God help us!

The Vast White Landscape: E.B. White’s “Great Snows” Revisited

Jason Peters - December 23, 2009

Rock Island, IL A century ago in New England, the approach to snow was quite different. When snow began to fly, people switched to...