SETH R. MERRITT
I write about survival, memory, and the lives built in the aftermath of collapse. My work moves across the rural Ozarks, central Spain, the highlands of central Mexico, 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 (Forthcoming, September 2025)No One Was Coming — Scalawag, Dirty Energy / Dirty South series (Forthcoming, Fall 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, and opens into a requiem for ecological memory passed not by books but by movement. Pitched to Emergence.Gentrified Hunting — An essay on class, inheritance, and the quiet ethics of stalking deer without stands, scopes, or surplus gear. Begins with a bad shot and a blood trail, then turns outward to confront how hunting got priced, moralized, and turned into spectacle. Pitched to Defector.Moral Capitalism in the Woods — A critique of how affluent hunters co-opt the language of ethics to sanctify distance, gear, and property lines. Through the lens of a childhood kill, the piece examines how capitalist virtue disciplines poor hunters for doing what they’ve always done. Pitched to The Baffler.
NowJuly 2025Back in Mexico City, working on The Way We Move, Gentrified Hunting, and Moral Capitalism in The Woods and trying to stop biting my nails. Thirty-seven years. Time adds up.