Matt Miller

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Matt Miller is a native Nebraskan living outside Reeds Spring, Missouri. He teaches English at College of the Ozarks and is working with his family to reforest a small patch of Ozark ridgetop with a food-producing perennial polyculture. He writes reports from his garden and orchard at habitation.substack.com.

Recent Essays

Making Meaning in the Haunted Midwest

Matt Miller - May 12, 2021

Those of us committed to the Midwest and its literature can and should mourn the damages done to our region by our habits of transience. But we must also recognize, as these two books help us do, that it is not just the Midwest, but life itself, that is “fluid and impermanent.”

Finding Rest in the Immanent Frame: a Review of Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night

Matt Miller - January 22, 2021

This prayer, which enumerates what Warren calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability,” epitomizes how, far from being irrelevant or obscure, the mysteries of God fill the hardest parts of life.

Ravining

Matt Miller - January 11, 2021

I have spent considerable time in ravines, drawn to them by an appetite for domestic exploration: though they worry me, I have also been drawn to them; I traverse the ravines to find the spirit of my place.

When Home is No Home: On Becoming Native to a Changing Place

Matt Miller - August 11, 2020

Anyone who seeks to live with integrity in a place ought to seek to know it deeply, yet such knowledge carries with it the risk of disillusionment. It is hard, not in principle but in daily experience, to continue to find joy and beauty in a place one knows to be riven by abuse and injustice.

Tropical Fruits of the Lower Midwest

Matt Miller - January 8, 2020

The maypop shows, however, that localism need not mean confining oneself to an austere and moralistic diet. If I cannot grow bananas and mangoes in the Ozarks, I can nonetheless harvest maypops.

Learning to Die in the Garden

Matt Miller - July 15, 2019

I’m prone to say that the gardening year resembles nothing so much as a succession of heartbreaks, and while it’s possible that this sentiment...

Reading Seed Catalogs for Pleasure and Profit

Matt Miller - March 27, 2019

Gardeners are a modest and sober breed, not much given to the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, or the pride...

On the Costs and Rewards of Planting Trees

Matt Miller - January 2, 2019

I have just planted two apple trees from what my local nursery calls their “Posterity Collection,” heritage varieties grafted onto a slower-growing but durable and...