Alice Driver is the author of More or Less Dead. She lives in Mexico but returns to Arkansas regularly to visit her parents in Oark.
An essay from the Place Issue
My dad wanted his death, like his life, to be a work of art—a tomb he designed and filled with ceramics—and one that would allow him to define death on his own terms. My mom, for her part, said, “I never planned to put anything in the tomb, but heck, who knows.”
Over the past decade, my parents have made art that reflects the changes they’ve seen in the land and water in the area where I grew up, near the banks of the mineral-blue Little Mulberry River in the Ozark Mountains of northwest Arkansas.