Dennis leads a discussion of Winter’s Bone at the Jung Society. He grew up in the part of the country where the story takes place and was able to supplement the movie’s depiction of that bleak landscape with highlights of his own, like growing up across the road from the Apostolic Faith Tabernacle Church of God in Christ, where Sister Helen Tatum would let down her long hair and speak in tongues and all the boys lusted after her–or the man who ran over his own head with his pickup truck. Here’s a description of the reverend and his wife that Dennis has written as part of a story:

“Roy Butler worked like killing snakes that spring and summer on the church building. It was the first work he had had since he had gotten out of the pen at Jefferson City, after doing two years for taking up a collection when the McTassney house burnt that Christmas and then not giving it to them. It turned out that the man who was having him build the church was a preacher from Chicago named Jimes, a little Greek man with a heavy accent and a big bumper of garlic breath built out in front of him. Somebody said that his real name was Jimopolis and he had just shortened it to Jimes to preach under. He liked to get up close to you when he talked to you, too, assuring you that if you didn’t repent, the fire awaited, telling you over and over, almost like he had to convince his own self why he was there.  It was almost more than us ham and beans and light bread types could take. He had to be around sixty, and his wife was a sort of medium uncolored woman whom we all took to be some older than the reverend. They had a daughter, a kind of tall thin girl about fourteen named Sue, who just sort of hunkered over herself and didn’t say much. She wore glasses and had brown hair, and I can’t tell you what color her eyes were, for I don’t think I ever got a good look at them. She tended to stay in the back of the car, and in back of the Jimeses when she was out of it. When we looked at Jimes and his wife, we never could figure out where she came from. It didn’t seem to any of us boys that anybody could have been born to that pair, and they were a little low on the pay scale to have got her the way Joseph and Mary got their boy.”