Matt Miller

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Matt Miller is a native Nebraskan now serving as Associate Professor of English at College of the Ozarks in southwest Missouri. His debut essay collection, Leaves of Healing: A Year in the Garden (Belle Point Press, 2024), journeys through the garden year and the church year together. He is a contributing editor for Front Porch Republic and also writes a newsletter at habitation.substack.com.

Recent Essays

Writing Exile and Reading Homeward

Matt Miller - February 14, 2025

Here, then, is my homecoming of the imagination: to hold the past bright in memory, and to love also the saplings and the weeds of my exile.

Belonging to the Garden

Matt Miller - November 18, 2024

I belong to this place—if not for the next thousand years, at least for the summer. In such a displaced age, even that has to mean something.

Finding a Home Field: A Review of In Thought, Word, and Seed

Matt Miller - February 26, 2024

If I am therefore departing one field in which I hoped to do some good work in place, I hope to deepen my practice as an English professor who lives and reads in place, bringing my reading and my other work in the world closer together in the most literal, physical sense. For encouragement in my pursuit of that home field, I have Tiffany Eberle Kriner to thank.

A Right to Imperfection

Matt Miller - November 10, 2023

Lauck is unambiguous that he is engaged in a project of “civic retrieval,” to “remind us of our ideals and how many battles we have already won” and promote the story of the old Midwest as “a hopeful signal to us all in this moment of democratic peril and doubt.”

Composition as the Art of Loading Brush

Matt Miller - May 12, 2023

Instead, we have the opportunity to spur students to true and healing composition through the exercise of creativity, precision, care, and nuance. The best analytical writing assignments in the future may read a lot less like a traditional essay and more like poetry.

Seeing the Midwest New: A Review of The Everlasting People

Matt Miller - March 14, 2022

It is perhaps that personal search for contentment that makes this book a notable contribution to the literature on the American racial problem: Milliner’s “penitent Midwest regionalism” is first of all an attempt to heal within himself the disease and discontentment produced in those of us who have been told that what matters about us is that we are white.

In Defense of Nature Writing

Matt Miller - March 2, 2022

Perhaps this, above all, is the work of nature writing: to bring the wild and the domestic together and to reveal the mystery at the heart of both. That Springer’s book consistently does this is enough to commend it as a constructive entry in this vexed genre.

Making Meaning in the Haunted Midwest

Matt Miller - May 12, 2021

Those of us committed to the Midwest and its literature can and should mourn the damages done to our region by our habits of transience. But we must also recognize, as these two books help us do, that it is not just the Midwest, but life itself, that is “fluid and impermanent.”

Finding Rest in the Immanent Frame: a Review of Tish Harrison Warren’s Prayer in the Night

Matt Miller - January 22, 2021

This prayer, which enumerates what Warren calls “a taxonomy of vulnerability,” epitomizes how, far from being irrelevant or obscure, the mysteries of God fill the hardest parts of life.

Ravining

Matt Miller - January 11, 2021

I have spent considerable time in ravines, drawn to them by an appetite for domestic exploration: though they worry me, I have also been drawn to them; I traverse the ravines to find the spirit of my place.

When Home is No Home: On Becoming Native to a Changing Place

Matt Miller - August 11, 2020

Anyone who seeks to live with integrity in a place ought to seek to know it deeply, yet such knowledge carries with it the risk of disillusionment. It is hard, not in principle but in daily experience, to continue to find joy and beauty in a place one knows to be riven by abuse and injustice.

Tropical Fruits of the Lower Midwest

Matt Miller - January 8, 2020

The maypop shows, however, that localism need not mean confining oneself to an austere and moralistic diet. If I cannot grow bananas and mangoes in the Ozarks, I can nonetheless harvest maypops.