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, the Levant, 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 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)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.
NowNovemberBack in Mexico City, working on an essay for Emergence, planning a move, and trying to stop biting my nails. Thirty-eight years. Time adds up.