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BECCA MARTIN-BROWN NWA Democrat-Gazette F or more than 15 years, Abby Burnett was a household name around Northwest Arkansas as a columnist for The Springdale News, one of the predecessors of this newspaper. Her topic every week was food — made far more interesting than just recipes because her stories included her quest for understanding food and learning to cook as an adult. Growing up in the exotic cultures of Iran, Pakistan and India, she wasn't allowed in the kitchen, she remembers. "It made extra work for the servants." So how did she move from writing about food — which might be called integral to life — to the topic of death? On summer visits to her grandparents between boarding school semesters, Burnett became "interested in death in a positive, life-affirming way," she joked in a 2015 Profile story. Her grandparents were Moravian, a religious denomination related to Catholicism, and their customs piqued her already voracious interest. Walking the church cemetery with her grandfather, who kept its records, Burnett saw how men and women were buried separately from each other, even down to infants. So "I've always loved cemeteries, and started seriously exploring ones in the Arkansas Ozarks about 25 years ago," she says. "For me, it's all about making discoveries," she explains her fascination. "Older tombstones can contain macabre or enigmatic epitaphs (tombstone poetry), photoceramic portraits of the dead, and messages conveyed through the language of symbols. Modern markers, in addition to telling us so much about the deceased, can also be a source for deliberate humor. I've found a blonde joke, two sugar cookie recipes, a man's tattoos, photos of immense catfish, people's pets, actual possessions and several naughty words on modern granite markers." When years of lectures and short articles for newspapers, historical society journals, Arkansas Encyclopedia entries and Gravestone Studies publications could no longer contain her research, the Kingston resident thought she'd collect her work into a manuscript. All it needed, she thought, was a little research to fill in the gaps. The result was a 260- page book, "Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850- 1950," published in October 2014 by University Press of Mississippi. And she was no closer to done than when she'd started. "For the past four years I've been working on a book on Arkansas's most unusual tombstones and cemeteries," 10 WHAT'S UP! APRIL 18-24, 2021 SPRINGDALE See Cemeteries Page 38 FAQ 'Buffalo River Cemeteries' With Abby Burnett WHEN — Noon April 21 WHERE — Shiloh Museum of Ozark History via Zoom COST — Free INFO — Register at shiloh museum.org or call 750-8165 Gone (Back) To The Grave Author Abby Burnett studies Buffalo River cemeteries Author, lecturer and cemetery scholar Abby Burnett cleans some of the grime off a tombstone at Bluff Cemetery in Springdale. She'll speak on cemeteries around the Buffalo River April 21 at the Shiloh Museum via Zoom. (NWA Democrat-Gazette File Photo/Anthony Reyes)