BIG MUDDY: BRIDGING THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER VALLEY

If Big Muddy, the new journal of the Mississippi River Valley published by Southeast Missouri State University, looks like the brainchild of an historian and a poet, it is.

Dr. Frank Nickell, director of the Center for Regional History at Southeast, and English professor Dr. Susan Swartwout view the journal as a bridge that can link everyone who lives in the river valley.

"There are a couple hundred bridges across the river east to west," Nickell says, "but nothing that bridges the river from north to south."

Swartwout says the journal is "an historical record" of life along the Mississippi.

"This interest in the river is largely because the river reflects us as a people," they write in the preface.

The first issue is now available at the University Bookstore and at Barnes & Noble. The cost is $8 per copy or $20 for a mailed subscription. At this point the journal is being published twice yearly.

Connecting writers

Every other region of the country has its own journal, but none existed for the Mississippi River Valley until Big Muddy. The intent is "to connect writers, researchers, and those interested in the river valley in all of its dimensions: historical , geographic, literary, folklore, biographical, maritime, commercial and scientific," they write.

Besides prose and poetry, the journal includes photographs, including two by Cape Girardeau native and now Louisiana resident Emily Otto. Frank L. Snider Sr., a former Cape Girardeau river pilot, contributed the photograph "Towboats Together."

The call for submissions elicited Iowa writer Katherine Fischer's story about American Village, a theme park near Tokyo where an animated replica of the Lincoln Memorial speaks the Gettysburg Address in Japanese. Fischer's job was to write the text for an exhibit titled "Mississippi River Country."

It includes photos of Elvis and Dolly Parton and a baseball uniform worn in games played on the diamond where the movie "Field of Dreams" was filmed. The Japanese version of America initially is off-putting to Fischer, but eventually she concludes that their version of America is no less true than our version.

Some of the contributors are people accustomed to getting paid for their writing. St. Joseph, Mo., novelist John Mort wrote in "Behind Enemy Lines" about a Vietnam vet who lives with a timber wolf on an island in the river. In "Big Easy: A Childhood of New Orleans," Dan Guillory employs the lyrics of songs like "I Can't Help It" and Frankie Ford's "Sea Cruise" and Fats Domino's "Goin' to the River" to describe growing up in the Crescent City.

Guillory is chairman of the English Department at Millikin University in Decatur, Ill.

Nickell and Swartwout hope Big Muddy leads to the establishment of a university press that will publish local authors. "This is an under-published area of the nation," Nickell says. "Big Muddy is trying to fill that gap."