Bethel Fall Market 2025

🎤Guest Lecturer: Be sure to arrive early* as we have a special guest presentation by Steve Wiegenstein, a featured artist of the Missouri Arts Council, on Missouri’s Utopian Communities. >> From Bethel in the north to Carthage in the south, nineteenth-century Missouri was home to a number of intentional communities designed to achieve an ideal social order, a planned alternative to the ordinary modes of life. This presentation describes Missouri’s well-known and little-known utopias, both religious and secular, and includes biographical sketches and anecdotes about some of the colorful and eccentric figures who founded them. Steve is the author of five books, most recently Land of Joys, a historical novel. His short story collection Scattered Lights was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction. Steve grew up in the Missouri Ozarks and worked there as a newspaper reporter before entering the field of higher education. For nearly twenty years, he was a professor of communication at Culver-Stockton College in Canton. He is now retired from teaching and writes full-time. Steve received the Missouri Author Award from the Missouri Library Association in 2022.