On September 14, we will kick off the seventh annual StateoftheOzarks Fest on historic Downing Street in Hollister, Missouri. The event itself is a considerable undertaking, particularly considering StateoftheOzarks is a small business, and the festival is, certainly, the largest event in our calendar year. All in a single day, we will bring in some 80 or more festival vendors and fill two stages with music, all while corralling a unique collection of entertainment across the Hollister's historic Old English-themed street. Live painting, Ozarks craftsmanship, feasting Goblins, Medieval combat, Bald Knobber vigilantes, Viking shield walls, train station telegraphers, knives, archery, chainsaw carving, heirloom tomatoes, good Missouri barbecue, blacksmithing, Ozarkian crystals, and — generally speaking — a whole lot more.
It is fair to say there's not another arts-and-crafts festival in the Ozarks quite like StateoftheOzarks and I like it that way. The experience is often more than a little euphoric, and I enjoy watching newcomers wander into the temporary festival grounds of Downing Street. Subjected to sword fighting? Check. Accosted by Goblins? Check. To the uninitiated, StateoftheOzarks Fest doesn't make sense, but the experience has been this crazy for seven years now and we like it that way. "To preserve and celebrate Ozarks culture" is the mission of StateoftheOzarks.net and the resultant member community and, as editor-in-chief, I get to set the tone for such things.
I never liked the idea that culture is something stuffy or high minded. I also don't believe culture is meant to be locked up in a glass museum case as though it were a dead moth, preserved and dusty on a pin. Culture is a funny thing indeed, because culture is often the very thing we don't pay attention to until it is lost. Culture is earthy and real, strange and problematic, rarely adhering to party lines or, quite frankly, any lines at all. People are messy, times are hard, the sun is hot, the wind, rain and economy fierce. Culture is what happens when we take perhaps a moment to do more than just survive.
"It's hard to make a living from a pile of rocks," one of my very first interviewees said, way back in September 2007 and I took the statement to heart. Never knew then, coming from the comparative richness of my former life, just how rough life could be but survival breeds empathy, as well as community. StateoftheOzarks is my life's blood now. "What are your plans if you were to move out of the Ozarks?" I blink, uncomprehendingly. Transience is not an option. The heart of the Ozarks is one of resilience. Quitters move elsewhere. Fortunately for me, the Ozarks — and Hollister in particular — have also been kind. I've done things here with the festival and StateoftheOzarks that would be impossible elsewhere. Heck, they let me put Goblins in the first StateoftheOzarks Fest, that hot and unknown summer of 2007! And Goblins thus remain.
And so, we saddle up to do it all over again, a traveling, once-a-year tent revival without a tent, a raucous and caring and loving and wild day, a unique experience that, once missed, can only return again 12 months hence. Ozarks festivals abound in late summer through autumn here in Missouri and Arkansas. And with StateoftheOzarks Fest lasting for only a single day each year, it's easy even for some locals to miss. Nonetheless, there is something special about this single day affair.
I see each of my annual festivals to be something akin to a rare flower, blooming for only one single day. Miss it and you may regret it, but there are no do-overs. Such is the bombarding reality missed in a commercial and on-demand life. Skip something these days and its doppelgänger will appear magically the next day, no harm, no foul. Store shelves magically restock, TV shows remain perpetually available on streaming services. There is no "here and now," only a bewildering, perpetual twilight of "always," lulling us against the passage of time.
Not with StateoftheOzarks Fest, not here, not now, and not next year. Each festival is unique, a marker of the passage of time, not a drug against it. And celebrating and preserving the Ozarks? Culture is a funny thing, never constant, never yielding, and much like starlight, brighter from the corner of the eye, dimming under intense scrutiny. It can be hard to say what the Ozarks are, easy to say what they are not. Vance Randolph was one to discover the Ozarks were best understood by going native. He moved to Pineville and, uncharacteristically, learned to keep his mouth shut and his ears open and some of the finest works on Ozarks cultural preservation were published as a result last mid-century.
So come on down to the festival, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., Saturday, September 14, for StateoftheOzarks Fest '24 on historic Downing Street in Hollister, Missouri. You might find yourself a part of your own culture, no longer just an anonymous observer. And in the end, such is exactly how life is meant to be lived.
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