August 28, 2025
1. Old Dog, New Tricks
I was seventeen years of age during the Summer of Love—that's 1967 for the ignorant among you—and I had just dropped out of East Norton High School before the s.o.b.s kicked me out...
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August 21, 2025
2. A Hell of a Conundrum
Robin Fields ponders the mystery of choice and is led to write his own Ozarks folktale
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August 14, 2025
3. Spanish Gold
No matter how accurate the map, there's always a cyclone. Always...
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August 7, 2025
4. The Tale of Elbie Squires
Sometimes fake treasure leads to real discovery, and real discovery leads to real trouble
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July 31, 2025
5. "Grits and Biscuits, Boys!"
"A girl's gotta have some fun!"
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July 24, 2025
6. The Decline and Fall of Aunt Prim
Sometimes Hollywood changes more than just your address
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July 17, 2025
7. A Meditation on Aunt Prim
After witnessing Aunt Prim's spectacular fall from grace, I found myself pondering the nature of propriety and the price we pay for respectability...
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July 10, 2025
8. The Ontology of Sex
In all my years of theological questioning, nothing has caused more trouble than trying to figure out what the Almighty had in mind when He invented desire...
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July 3, 2025
9. Blue's Balls
Another Ozarks Folktale by Otis Bulfinch
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July 10, 2025
10. Pursuing Daisy Garfield: The Hummingbird Express
Killing a fella can make you go off the rails
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July 17, 2025
11. A Second Baptism? Part 1
What happened to me on the Wakarusa River
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July 25, 2025
12. A Second Baptism? Part 2
Why must everything be so damned hard?
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August 3, 2025
13. A Second Baptism? Part 3
If I could just get the voices to get along...
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September 13, 2025
14. The Recruiter's Visit
"Honor is like paper money: something the government spreads around because it doesn't cost them anything."
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
15. Soot and Ashes
A meditation on boyhood glory, camping on the Buffalo River, and the memories that redeem us in our final moments
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
16. The Mountain Maid and the Goddess of the Moon Part One
In the end, all things shall be restored
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
17. The Mountain Maid and the Goddess of the Moon Part Two
Nothing done in love is ever in vain
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
18. The Mountain Maid and the Goddess of the Moon Part Three
The hermeneutical problem with ghosts
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
19. The Summer of '81: Eureka Springs and the Triumph of Ellie Wheelock
John Gaskins finally meets his match
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
20. Not All Who Wander Are Lost
Talkin' 'Bout My Generation
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
21. Teddy and Louise
A hitchhiker's theological debate with a family from Illinois
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
22. Eureka Springs
A VW van full of hippies, the Ozarks Folk Festival, and the best day ever to be seventeen
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
23. John Thomas and the Reivers
Bawdy folk songs and anti-war anthems at the Ozarks Folk Festival
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February 10, 2026
24. Gerald L. K. Smith
The day a religious monument builder interrupted a protest concert in Eureka Springs, and what Vietnam taught us that we forgot by Afghanistan
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April 4, 2026
25. In Defense of the Little God
An oration by Hank Sparrowhawk on the Little God versus the Big God at the Eureka Springs Folk Festival
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
26. The Young Salvationists
When the Young Salvationists from Mountain Home mount the stage, a theologically exhausted crowd gets exactly what it didn't know it needed.
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Bulfinch's Memoirs
27. The Awful One-Percent
The Young Salvationists admit the difficulty of surrendering everything to the will of God in spite of our best intentions.
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Pursuing Daisy Garfield
28. The Triumph of the Lesser God: An Excerpt from Pursuing Daisy Garfield
In which Daisy looks into a glass dimly and doubts the goodness of the Power Behind the Stars. But who among us is righteous to judge her? Who among us sees more clearly than she?
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
29. Onyx, Arkansas
Wherein Otis Bulfinch remembers that oracles tell the truth, but they tell it sideways, because in the end, interpretations are never straight-forward, and let’s face it, interpretation is everything.
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
30. Resurrection
Otis Bulfinch interrupts his memoirs to recall the time his father saw a miracle.
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
31. Home with the Stones
The largest debts are the ones we didn’t incur
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
32. Man of the Year for 1967
Wherein Otis contemplates the “restless, questing youth” who will change the world and wonders if he’s part of his generation or not, and if he’s not, then whose generation does he belong to?
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
33. Camp Onyx
“I have provided for the house of my God the gold for the things of gold, the silver for the things of silver, the bronze for the things of bronze, the iron for the things of iron, wood for the things of wood, and onyx stones inlaid ….” (1 Chronicles 29:1-2)
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
34. A Meditation on Jade
“Thou hast been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold: the workmanship of thy tablets and of thy pipes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created.” (Ezekiel 28:13 KJV)
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
35. The Road to Wakarusa: Story the First — Creative Writing for Fun and Profit
What we learn and what we’re taught can be very, very different.
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
36. The Road to Wakarusa: Story the Second — Tornado Alley
A vignette of the man who loved tornadoes.
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
37. The Road to Wakarusa: Story the Third — What Happened at the Quiet Man
The truth will set you free, unless, of course, freedom is an illusion, in which case it’s hard to say exactly what the truth is good for.
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Bulfinch’s Memoirs
38. Transitioning: Where Do We Go from Here?
Wherein Otis Bulfinch discusses liminality on the open road.
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