Matthew Miller
Matt Miller is a native Nebraskan now living in Branson, Missouri, where he serves as Associate Professor of English at College of the Ozarks. He writes regularly for Front Porch Republic, Fare Forward, The New Territory, and other venues. Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden is his first book. Find him online at matt-miller.org.
Articles by Matthew Miller
Writing Exile and Reading Homeward
Here, then, is my homecoming of the imagination: to hold the past bright in memory, and to love also the saplings and the weeds of my exile.
Marking the Year on Two Calendars: An Interview with Matthew Miller
Knowledge is a path to love, and so I’m bound to say that the book did change my affection for the place.
Belonging to the Garden
I belong to this place—if not for the next thousand years, at least for the summer. In such a displaced age, even that has to mean something.
Finding a Home Field: A Review of In Thought, Word, and Seed
If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives…
A Right to Imperfection
Lauck is unambiguous that he is engaged in a project of “civic retrieval,” to “remind us of our ideals and how many battles we have already won” and promote the…
Composition as the Art of Loading Brush
Instead, we have the opportunity to spur students to true and healing composition through the exercise of creativity, precision, care, and nuance. The best analytical writing assignments in the future…
Seeing the Midwest New: A Review of The Everlasting People
It is perhaps that personal search for contentment that makes this book a notable contribution to the literature on the American racial problem: Milliner’s “penitent Midwest regionalism” is first of…
In Defense of Nature Writing
Perhaps this, above all, is the work of nature writing: to bring the wild and the domestic together and to reveal the mystery at the heart of both. That Springer’s…
Making Meaning in the Haunted Midwest
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,…
Finding Rest in the Immanent Frame: a Review of Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night
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
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…
When Home is No Home: On Becoming Native to a Changing Place
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,…