SETH R. MERRITT
I write about infrastructure, memory, and the lives built in the aftermath of abandonment. My work moves across the rural Ozarks, coastal Spain, the highlands of central Mexico and drought-stricken California. I'm a sociologist by training and a writer by practice, working through interviews, oral history, and archives to trace how people survive when the systems meant to sustain them collapse. I live with my wonderful wife between the Ozark hills of southern Missouri and Mexico City. Some of what I write is about love, and some of it is about what remains when institutions and intimacy fail together.
Current ProjectsWhat Gets Passed Down — Essay on inheritance, tribal memory, and rural survival in the Ozarks. Currently under Review at Hard Crackers.No One Was Coming — On designed abandonment, failed electrification, and Indigenous erasure. Pitched to Scalawag.Red Clay, Pink Stucco — A personal essay on environmental abandonment across Missouri and Mexico City. Submitted to The Forge.The Hollow Forms of Adaptation — A political essay on desalination, institutional decay, and climate governance. Submitted to Protean Magazine.
NowTalking with family in Douglas and Wright County about what gets passed down when nothing’s promised.Writing 9 Years of Almost, a nonlinear piece about love, memory, and what lingers when relationships wither.Digging through tribal records and stories I was never taught.Thinking about how people live in places the state never really arrived.