Missouri is Storm Country and my hometown is in a place affectionately known to locals as “tornado alley.” We share that designation with many other towns in Missouri, but after the disastrous tornado that hit Joplin, they have earned the title the hard way. My thoughts have been on Storm Country since I have been working on the anthology. My small press, Mozark Press LLC, was honored to donate publication of the anthology. Claudia Mundell, President of the Joplin Writers’ Guild, who lives in Joplin first came up with the idea of an anthology of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction stories with the subject of Midwest storms as a way for writers to help the people of Joplin. She said, “Not everybody can carry steel and lift walls and not everybody can cook, so everybody does what they can, and writers write.”
I have had a chance to read the book several times while copyediting. The stories range from poetic observations to raw emotions of a teenage boy who was crowded into a basement room with family and a stranger off the street while the EF-5 Joplin tornado raged overhead. The fiction stories speak of real emotions in intriguing stories.
The works in Storm Country: The Anthology were written by veteran writers, poets laureate, previously unpublished writers, and poetry by sixth-grade students.
This outstanding collection is available online at www.mozarkpress.com or at www.stormcountry.workpress.com/. All proceeds will benefit libraries in the Joplin School District. It isn’t everyday that you get to help a worthy cause by reading an outstanding book.
