Locations of Six Mile Store with AM Belsey

Submitted: 29th April 2026

Six Mile Store with AM Belsey

In 1998, Conway, Arkansas, was home to three universities. Every September the population roughly doubled, and every May it roughly halved again. In term time it fizzed with potential and youthful energy (and traffic); in summer, it was just a small town with fields stretching out around it for miles. And despite the number of college-age students, you could drive in any direction for half an hour and not find a single place to buy a beer. This is the time and place that inspired my novella, Six Mile Store.

Book map of Six Mile Store

I grew up between Conway and Vilonia, in an unincorporated community called Hamlet, where most of the action in Six Mile Store happens. During my own college years, I worked at the Eight Mile Store, the gas station that inspired the titular store. (Eminem made it impossible to give the store its original name.) The people who passed through – truckers, bikers, farmers, regulars, the occasional person who was very obviously lost – gave me fantastic opportunities for character study.

Book map of Six Mile Store

I left Arkansas at twenty-one, but my experiences with these strange and wonderful people stayed with me. And even if I thought I was done with Arkansas, Six Mile Store is proof that it wasn’t done with me. I hope you enjoy it.

Book map of Six Mile Store

Eight Mile Store

This is where it started. The Eight Mile Store sits at a crossroads on Highway 64, connecting routes north, south, east, and west. It’s a gas station and convenience store like most others: motor oil, a coffee machine that’s seen better days, and a cooler full of bait.

Book map of Six Mile Store

The people are the best part. The young women behind the counter, dispensing Mountain Dew and Skoal with a friendly efficiency and a complete lack of pretension, were the original models for Honey and her world. Working at the Eight Mile Store was my favorite job of all of the jobs I have had in my life. If you’re on Highway 64, stop in. Tell them I said hey.

Book map of Six Mile Store

Springfield Des Arc Bridge, Beaverfork Lake Park

Built in 1874 over Cadron Creek near Springfield, this is the oldest bridge in Arkansas and the only remaining iron bowstring arch bridge in the state. It spent over a century in its original location before years of neglect and vandalism caught up with it. In 2017 it was restored and relocated to Beaverfork Lake Park, where it now looks considerably better than it has any right to after what it’s been through.

In Six Mile Store, the bridge is still where it was, crossing Cadron Creek out in the rural middle of nowhere, and it’s where Lisa, one of Honey’s colleagues, has a pivotal moment in the story. Lisa is very much a woman who burns her bridges. It felt right to give her an actual bridge.

Book map of Six Mile Store

Robinson Center , Little Rock

Little Rock is only thirty miles south of Conway, which in Arkansas terms is practically next door. Robinson Center is an Art Deco performance venue on the Statehouse Plaza, built in 1939, overlooking the Arkansas River. It’s the kind of place that reminds you there’s a whole other Arkansas that doesn’t get talked about as much as it should. It’s the home of Ballet Arkansas, and it’s where Lottie, Lisa’s daughter in the novella, has set her sights on performing one day. Chelsea Clinton trained with Ballet Arkansas before her family moved on to other pursuits.

Book map of Six Mile Store

Just down the road is the Arkansas State Capitol, which looks so much like the US Capitol in Washington DC that it’s regularly used as a filming location to stand in for it. Arkansas: doing the same job, for less money, with less recognition. Make of that what you will.

Book map of Six Mile Store

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville

Crystal Bridges is the kind of place that shouldn’t exist where it does, and is all the more remarkable for it. Alice Walton, of the Wal-Mart Waltons, spent years acquiring major works of American art and building a world-class museum to house them in 120 acres of Ozark woodland in the northwest corner of the state. When she was doing it, the art world was not kind: the prevailing view was that she was buying things that belonged somewhere more deserving. Twenty years on, Crystal Bridges is regarded as one of the best art museums in the country, and that particular argument has gone quiet.

Book map of Six Mile Store

Honey is a quiet, curious person who has had to make her own intellectual life out of whatever was available to her. Crystal Bridges is exactly the kind of place she should have discovered young and returned to whenever she needed reminding that the world was bigger than it looked from behind the counter of a rural gas station.

Book map of Six Mile Store

Eureka Springs

Up in the Ozark mountains of northwest Arkansas, Eureka Springs has been a spa town since the Victorian era, and it has leaned into its own eccentric reputation ever since. Haunted hotel, winding steep streets, independent galleries, escape rooms: the full range of quirky.

Christ of the Ozarks

Book map of Six Mile Store

Karim, an immigrant to Arkansas in Six Mile Store, is someone who sees the natural beauty of the state with fresh eyes, the kind of attention that people who grew up there stopped paying long ago. He would have complicated feelings about the Christ of the Ozarks, the large statue just outside town that is a smaller version of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer.

Book map of Six Mile Store

However, he’d love Thorncrown Chapel: a non-denominational glass chapel deep in the trees where the building essentially disappears into the forest around it. The sort of place that works for everybody, regardless of what they believe.

Crater of Diamonds State Park, Murfreesboro

There is a state park in southwest Arkansas where you pay a small fee, get handed a map, and go dig in a ploughed field. Anything you find, you keep. It is the only public diamond mine in the United States, and in January 2026, two visitors found a 6.03-carat yellow diamond there.

A diamond ring matters in Six Mile Store. I’m not going to say more than that. But it almost certainly didn’t come out of a field in Murfreesboro….