SETH R. MERRITT
I write about survival, memory, and the lives built in the aftermath of collapse. My work moves across the rural Ozarks, the highlands of central Mexico, coastal and central Spain, and drought-stricken California. I’m a member of the Western Cherokee Nation of Arkansas and Missouri—a tribe erased by recognition, but still living in the hills I come from. I'm a writer by practice and a sociologist by training. I work through interviews, oral history, and archives to trace how people endure when the systems meant to sustain them disappear or stop working. I live with my wife between the Ozark hills of southern Missouri, Southwest Detroit, Michigan, and Colonia Guerrero, in Mexico City. Some of what I write is about love. Some of it is about land. A lot of it is about what remains when institutions and intimacy fail together.
PublicationsWhat Gets Passed Down — Hard Crackers (July 2025)Red Clay, Pink Stucco — The Forge (September 2025)Al-Fasher Belongs to God — New Verse News (October 2025)No One Was Coming — Scalawag, Dirty Energy / Dirty South series (Forthcoming, Winter 2025)The Hollow Forms of Adaptation — AS/POP Zine, (Forthcoming, February 2026)In ProgressThe Way We Move
A 4,000-word essay tracing the fading knowledge of inherited directionality through one winter night in the Ozarks. It follows a father and son stalking a deer by moonlight, opening into a requiem for ecological memory carried not in books but in movement. Pitched to Emergence.
NowDecemberDown in the Ozarks, getting a truck running, working on edits, getting ready for a move, and trying to stop biting my nails. Thirty-eight years. Time adds up.