Talking Location With … A M Belsey: ARKANSAS

#TalkingLocationWith …. A M Belsey, author of Six Mile Store: ARKANSAS

Arkansas looks like freedom, in a way. It is an enormous state, mostly rural, with huge skies and unlimited natural beauty. Six Mile Store is set in the middle of the state, in 1998, and it features folks for whom all of that open space amounts to nowhere much to go. I grew up in that particular contradiction, between Conway and Vilonia in central Arkansas, and I spent my college summers behind the counter of the gas station that inspired this book.

The real-life Eight Mile Store (Eminem made it impossible to use its real name) sits at a crossroads on Highway 64, connecting routes north, south, east, and west. It is where my protagonist Honey stands watching while everyone else moves around her: the truckers passing through, the bikers roaring in on Sunday mornings, the regulars who just want a coffee and a chat. When one of Honey’s regular customers turns up dead, everything unravels around her. The crime plot is almost incidental to what the book is really about: what happens to people who have an instinct to survive but who have been systematically denied the imagination to plan much further than that. The store, with its crossroads that lead everywhere and nowhere, is the right setting for that story.

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A few miles away, Cadron Creek runs under the Springfield Des Arc Bridge, an iron bowstring arch built in 1874. It spent over a century in its original location before neglect and vandalism caught up with it, and was restored and relocated to Beaverfork Lake Park in 2017. In Six Mile Store it is still where it was, out in the rural middle of nowhere, and it is where Lisa, one of Honey’s co-workers, comes to a crucial, devastating understanding of what comes next in her own life. It was writing that bridge scene that clarified something I hadn’t quite yet realised about my own story: Lisa and Honey are not simply colleagues, but reflections of each other across time, bound to the same geography in ways neither of them fully understands. The Springfield Des Arc Bridge is the oldest in Arkansas, and that’s important too: it’s a structure that has outlasted everything around it, that has survived maltreatment and, that is still, in the end, a bridge over the same old water. Lisa’s relationship to that bridge told me what Honey’s relationship to this place would ultimately mean. That is as much as I can say without giving the book away.

Writing Honey, I kept returning to a question I couldn’t quite answer: what could she have become, if she had been given different materials to work with? Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, in the far northwest corner of the state, is where that question begins to find an answer. Alice Walton, of the Wal-Mart Waltons, built a world-class collection of American art in 120 acres of Ozark woodland at a time when the art world scoffed, saying a place of such culture had no business being in Arkansas. Twenty years on, that argument has gone quiet, as Crystal Bridges is now recognized as one of the top art museums in the country. Honey is quiet and curious, a person who has had to construct her own interior life from whatever was available to her – which wasn’t much. Unfortunately for Honey, Crystal Bridges did not open until 2011, thirteen years after the book is set and far too late to do her any good.

Another thing I realised while writing Six Mile Store is how Honey begins to see Arkansas differently through her boyfriend Karim’s eyes. Karim is an immigrant, and he finds the state far more beautiful and fascinating than Honey does. His love for Arkansas’s natural beauty made me wish they had gone together to Eureka Springs, up in the Ozark mountains. Eureka is a Victorian spa town that has leaned into its own eccentricity for over a century: a haunted hotel, steep winding streets, bookstores and curiosity shops, and a crowd of artists and spiritual seekers. I have been there many times in my life, and I love the place. Neither Karim nor Honey make it there in the book. Karim would have complicated feelings about the Christ of the Ozarks, the large statue just outside town that may be unkindly described as an ersatz Christ the Redeemer. But he would love Thorncrown Chapel: a non-denominational glass structure so deep in the trees that it all but disappears into the forest around it. Karim perceives the beauty and possibility in places that Honey has forgotten how to see – and in Honey herself. What Karim offers Honey is not just a fleeting romance, but a way of seeing herself as someone with potential, someone for whom the world might open up. Whether she loses that vision, and why or why not, is the heart of Six Mile Store.

Six Mile Store is, among other things, my attempt to explain Arkansas as the strange and contradictory place where I grew up: a culture of religion and lawlessness, hospitality and xenophobia, potential and hopelessness, education and ignorance, beauty and unloveliness. I hope it rings true to anyone who has ever stood at a crossroads and felt that none of the roads available were quite meant for them.

A M Belsey

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