We are excited to announce that James Fork of the White: Transformation of an Ozark River has earned national recognition! We recently received notice that our book is a finalist in the Regional Non-Fiction category of the 2019 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, the world’s largest not-for-profit book award program for independent publishers. These awards are judged by leaders of the book publishing industry including many with long careers at major publishing houses.
James Fork of the White’s 352 pages describe a celebrated Ozark float stream, which has endured challenges as Springfield, Missouri, the largest city in the Ozarks, is within its watershed. Research for this book included exploration along back roads, feeder creeks, mill sites, fishing hot spots and flating past towering bluffs. The James is a classic Ozark stream that just happens to course through a major metropolitan area. Lessons learned along its length and through its watershed will apply to other streams as they too face the pressures of increased usage.
Even though transformed and changing, the James is in many places still scenic; where it lacks wilderness esthetics, its history remains intriguing.
Leland and I have collaborated on a dozen books on the Ozarks or pop culture. Our earlier river book, Damming the Osage: The Conflicted Story of Lake of the Ozarks and Truman Reservoir, was awarded a silver medal by the Independent Publishers’ Book Awards in 2013.
Our next book, Lover’s Leap Legends: From Sappho of Lesbos to Wah-Wah-Tee of Waco, will be published in February 2020. For the past three years, we have delved deeply into a remarkable sub-genre of legend and lore (“fakelore” some call it) tracing the source of the apocryphal stories attached to some of our most scenic landscape. In 352 pages with hundreds of color images (contemporary photographs as well as vintage images), we track these tales across America and to far flung precipices from Guam to Spain and points in between.
James Fork of the White and all our books are available on this website, on amazon.com and at Barnes & Noble. We’ll let you know when Lover’s Leap Legends is published