University of Arkansas Press Publishes Daddy’s Money: A Memoir of Farm and Family

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Jo McDougall, author of Daddy’s Money

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has published Daddy’s Money: A Memoir of Farm and Family ($19.95, paper) by Jo McDougall, an established poet from Arkansas and a graduate of the University’s MFA in writing program. The book, the Arkansas Press’s third by McDougall, provides a foreward by Hilary Masters, author of Last Stands: Notes from Memory and Post: A Fable.

Daddy’s Money recounts five generations of Delta rice farmers using family archives and oral histories to trace how the family made its way into the fabric of America, beginning with McDougall’s Belgian-immigrant grandfather, a pioneer rice farmer on the Arkansas Delta near DeWitt at the start of the 20th century.

The book is a layered account of the day-to-day events of growing rice on the farm that McDougall’s father inherited. “The book illuminates an Arkansas rice farm in a way similar to John Grisham’s writing about an Arkansas cotton farm in A Painted House,” according to Larry Malley, press director.

According to McDougall, many people don’t realize that rice is grown in the United States and that Arkansas is the largest rice-producing state in the country. “I grew up with the romance of rice growing, in a fascinating part of Arkansas, with a compelling and quirky cast of characters – my kin. I wanted to put this segment of my life – from the time I was four or five until I was about 15 – down in writing, or that way of life, that time and place, those amazing people would be lost.”

The book is meeting with enthusiasm for both its unique content and its literary merits. Poet Miller Williams called the memoir “a joy to read for the story itself, but the joy is even greater for the use to which [McDougall] puts the English language,” and an Arkansas Times reviewer, commenting on several new poems that appear in the book, stated that McDougall’s words “never fail to provide an abundant harvest.”

McDougall, who now lives in Leawood, Kan., will be reading and signing Daddy’s Money across Arkansas. She’ll be appearing in Dewitt (July 28), Stuttgart (July 29), Little Rock (July 30), Fayetteville (Aug. 30), and Jonesboro (Nov. 8). McDougall also has events scheduled in Kansas at Overland Park (Aug. 16), Leawood (Sept. 13), and Pittsburg (Oct. 6). For full details on these events or more information on Daddy’s Money, visit www.uapress.com.