No Ceiling Season 3 Guest: Kaitlyn McConnell

Local women share their journey to the top of their professions and the challenges and triumphs they faced along the way. They’re rewriting the script on success and there’s no ceiling.

Kaitlyn McConnell is my guest on the second episode of No Ceiling Season 3. She’s the founder of Ozarks Alive, where she shares stories of the rural Ozarks with the goal of preserving culture and documenting the region’s people and places. Kaitlyn also has shared her stories through two Ozarks guidebooks. Her love of history started early, and her local roots run deep. In early 2021, she left her job as spokesperson for CoxHealth to pursue her yearslong side hustle of the Ozarks Alive website, which she says is a calling. In this episode, we talk about the changing face of the Ozarks and what’s behind that drive to tell the often untold, everyday stories in our region.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation.

Christine Temple: I want to start by talking about this amazing love of history that you have. Where did that appreciation for the past come from?
Kaitlyn McConnell: I always have had a love of history as long as I can remember. But it really wasn’t about the Ozarks until I was in high school. I’ve got really deep Ozarks roots, but in particular, where I’m from in Webster County, my family goes back many generations. When I was in high school, I stumbled across a book in the school library called “Walkin’ Preacher of the Ozarks,” which was written by an itinerant preacher named Guy Howard, who wrote about working among rural Ozarks families of around the same time period of my grandmother and great-grandparents living in Webster County. That was probably what my ancestors’ experience was like. It just sort of blew open this whole new world for me.

Temple: Having an appreciation for history and our background is kind of one thing, but starting a whole website dedicated to sharing these stories is quite another thing. What was the impetus for wanting to start the site?
McConnell: Back in high school, I did a weekly newspaper column for The Marshfield Mail about a local historic site every week, and this was life-changing for me. One, that I got the opportunity, which I still am just mind-boggled that an editor would give a 17-year-old in high school a newspaper column, but he did, and it changed my life because I’d never thought once about being a writer or journalist before that. I went to Drury [University], planned to spend my life writing about the Ozarks. As we know, life always has some weird turns along the way, and I ended up moving to Norway because I started dating someone who was Norwegian. Looking back, it was an amazing cultural experience. But I was very homesick the whole time. It was also just sensing, even from thousands of miles away, that the Ozarks was changing, and I wasn’t here to see that. I ended up moving back here in the Ozarks in March of 2015, and at the time, Ozarks Alive didn’t exist in my mind. I knew I just wanted to figure out some way to be writing about the Ozarks. I don’t want to wait for an opportunity to do that; I’m going to just do it.

Related: No Ceiling from SBJ Podcasts