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.

Recent Essays

The Nightstand

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.

The Feed Store

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.

The Feed Store

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...

The Feed Store

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...

The Feed Store

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...