Publisher's Synopsis
William Childress has roamed the Ozarks of Missouri, Illinois, and Arkansas for 13 years. His training as a poet-he has published three books of poems-helps him create splendor and grace in a description of a sunset or shape the mood of a rainy autumn day.
Through striking word-pictures of his life, you will meet Chilly's irascible, lovable stepfather, his three sons, and long-dead members of his family whose lives or deeds touched him and were chronicled. And you will laugh with his neighbors and friends, whose humor helps them through life in a county that has been called "one of the poorest in America." They are not all saints, nor are the Ozarks heaven-just "paradise with the gate left off."
For more than a dozen years, William Childress has written of southwestern Missouri in magazines like Reader's Digest, Sports Afield, McCalls, Country Roads, and Friends (the Chevrolet magazine that has carried his national column since 1979). But his millions of readers know him best through his thrice-weekly column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and through his frequent personal appearances, where he sometimes sings his own songs and plays a mandolin, harmonica, and 12-string guitar.
