Knowing the Farms That Feed Us

When Summer Moon Scriver and I collaborated on the book Hands at Work, we talked with and photographed a number of farmers. One of them, Henning Sehmsdorf, offered this vision:

Our dream is the community will feed itself. The only question people will ask about their food is which of their neighbors’ farms it came from. We believe we’re the future.

Photo courtesy
Hands at Work - Portraits & Profiles
of People Who Work with Their Hands

Two Lopez Island organizations—Lopez Community Land Trust (LCLT) and Lopez Locavores —have embarked on a three-year project to help Henning’s dream (and that of many of his neighbors) become a reality. BOUNTY - Lopez Island Farms, Food, and Community will tell the Lopez food story through photographs and profiles of twenty-seven Lopez Island farms (including S & S Homestead Farm, home to Henning and his wife, Elizabeth Simpson).

Sue Roundy, a past member of the board of the LCLT and current secretary of the Lopez Locavores, conceived of the project. “It’s time to celebrate our farmers and thank them for their hard work and delicious food,” Sue says. As Artistic Project Manager for Bounty, Sue has put together a team of photographers, interviewers, advisors, a graphic designer, and a writer for this effort.   In the project’s first year, photographers Steve Horn, Robert Harrison, and Summer Moon Scriver will develop a color slide show of the farmers, their land, and the food they produce.  The show will premier October 25, 2014 to celebrate the LCLT’s 25th anniversary at the organization’s Harvest Dinner.  The slide show also will be presented at the San Juan County Agricultural Summit in March 2015.

In Fall 2015, framed black-and-white portraits of farmers will be exhibited, first at Lopez Center in conjunction with the LCLT Harvest Dinner, then at Lopez Library and the Lopez Post Office. I'm honored to be involved in the project’s third phase, publication of a book including the photographs, stories and recipes. Bounty - Lopez Island Farmers, Food, and Community is scheduled for release in 2016.

The photographers and interviewers are documenting the process of telling the Lopez food story at the BOUNTY website.  Notes and images from farms such as Sunnyfield Farm Goat Dairy,

Julie, from Helen’s Farm, at the
Lopez Farmers’ Market

Sweet Grass Farm Beef, and Helen’s Farm  are filled with the same kind of passion that Summer and I found when we talked to people for Hands at Work. I look forward to discovering what themes will emerge from those whose hands are in the soil, those who witness cycles of birth and death of their animals, and those for whom their work is a way of life in which it really matters if it rains or not. 

BOUNTY is just the next phase in the LCLT’s history of supporting local agriculture  through its Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Development (SARD) program. It also joins the international movement to promote local, sustainable, seasonal foods and eating, ideas brought to public awareness by authors such as Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle), and Alisa Smith and J.B. Mackinnon (The 100-Mile Diet). Most recently, Vicki Robin chronicles the experience of local eating even closer to home with her latest book, Blessing the Hands That Feed Us. She committed to a month of eating only food grown within ten miles of her home on nearby Whidbey Island, WA and then wrote about it. During a visit last month to Lopez, Vicki talked about how she was “…surprised, peeved, moved, deprived, curious and empowered…” by her month of hyper-local eating and how she fell in love with the hands and lands that fed her. 

As so often happens, one person’s experience inspires others, and now the LCLT and the Lopez Locavores are organizing the “Lopez Bounty Food Experiment.” Beginning this September, participants will choose a month, or part of a month, to dedicate themselves to eating locally and blogging about it.  They’ll share what they miss most, what they’re most grateful for, and what new local foods they discover.  Interested? Contact the LCLT at lcltda@rockisland.com.

Whether you participate in the Lopez Bounty Food Experiment or not, you can be part of the community-funded effort to celebrate local farms and farmers. Contributions to BOUNTY will support the creation of the slide show, photography exhibit, and book that all will help tell the Lopez food story. I hope you’ll join us.

What questions do you ask about the food you eat? What do you know about the farms that feed you?

Writing Process Blog Tour

Many thanks to Janet Buttenwieser for inviting me to participate in the Writing Process Blog Tour.  Janet has an MFA in nonfiction from the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts.  Her nonfiction work has appeared several places, including Potomac Review, Literary Mama, Bellevue Literary Review, and SHARK REEF. She won honorable mention in The Atlantic 2010 Student Writing contest and was a finalist in the 2014 Oregon Quarterly Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest.  Janet teaches writing classes at Seattle’s Richard Hugo House. Find excerpts from her memoir-in-progress, GUTS, and her thoughts on the writing life on her website, Janet Buttenwieser.

You can read Janet’s responses to the Writing Process Blog Tour questions on her blog. I answer the same questions below.

What am I working on?

At the moment, I’m taking a pause from work on my memoir-in-progress, Hiking Naked—A Quaker Woman’s Search for Balance. The manuscript is my thesis project for my MFA program at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts, where I hope to graduate in August.  Hiking Naked is a personal narrative about what I learned while living in the remote mountain village of Stehekin, Washington about work, community, and leadings of the Spirit (as well as dealing with six feet of snow in the winter, ordering groceries by mail, and living without a telephone). Right now the manuscript is in the hands of my second reader. While I await her comments, I’m exploring a couple of ideas for future nonfiction projects (too soon to provide details, but they involve telling other people’s stories). I’m also sorting through the piles that accumulated in my office during the thesis revision process and in the aftermath of AWP#14 (huge writing conference in Seattle the end of Feb.).

Piles have been sorted now, and I can again sit in my chair
and on the couch.

I also write short-ish personal essays and have files of them on my computer that I’ve worked on the past three years while in the MFA program; it’s time to get back to them and see which ones are ready for another round of polishing and submission to literary journals and contests.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I’m still developing my unique voice.  My work is shaped by essayists and memoirists I admire, such as Ana Maria Spagna, Scott Russell Sanders, Annie Dillard, Brenda Miller, and Brian Doyle to name just a few.  Oh, to have my work NOT differ from theirs! I tend to wrestle with questions about spirituality, justice, work, and peace and to ground my reflections in nature.

Why do I write what I do?

In Writing from the Center, Scott Russell Sanders succinctly expresses my response to this question:

  

“I wake early in order to write, and I write in order to come more fully awake.”

For most of my adult life, writing has been a vehicle for me to understand what I believe, feel, question, and know -  “to come more fully awake.” I also strive to give voice to the untold stories of ordinary people; those stories often are the most extraordinary and the most meaningful. I never know who or what might call to me for telling, but I’ve learned to heed those stirrings of a good story. My first book, Hands at Work, was inspired by a series of black-and-white photographs of hands by photographer Summer Moon Scriver. The images suggested to me that these were people who were passionate about their work and were nourished by manual labor. I wanted to give voice to their stories and to others who work with their hands.

How does my writing process work?

A turning point in my writing life was an epiphany I had at a writing workshop nearly fifteen years ago.  Sometime during that week, I started to think of writing as my work and that I should treat it with the same respect and commitment I gave to my work as a public health consultant.  I recognized that I’m most creative in the morning, and since I was self-employed, I had control over my schedule. I still follow the practice I started then of reserving most weekday mornings (anywhere from one to four hours) for writing—I schedule those hours on my calendar just like any other commitment.

Coffee cup in hand, I climb the stairs to my office, the former bedroom of my now-adult son. I typically begin with some kind of centering activity:  a time of silence, reading something (often poetry) I admire, and a free write. Then I shift to the work at hand. Whether it’s writing new work or revising (my reward for having filled some blank pages), I set my timer for 20 to 30 minutes and write. I’ve turned off all visual and auditory notifications of anything coming in to e-mail or social media. If the phone rings, I let the machine answer. When the timer goes off, I stop where I am, re-set it for 10 to 15 minutes and get up from my desk. I do some task—hang laundry on the line, clean up breakfast dishes, brush the dog—that allows me to keep thinking about what I’m writing. I DON’T check e-mail or phone messages. When the timer goes off again, I re-set it for another half hour and return to what I was working on.  Depending on the day of the week and whether I’m heading off to my day job as a school nurse, I’ll repeat this cycle several times.  I’m lucky to be able to spend so many hours pursuing this craft.

Next week the Writing Process Blog Tour continues to branch out with two more writers I admire.

Chels Knorr is a writer first and an editor second. She's the editor of two monthly health-care publications (which on most days, basically just means she's a professional e-mail writer). She’s plannning to graduate with her MFA at the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts on Whidbey Island in Washington State in August 2014. She loves waffles, a competitive game of Scrabble and telling (mostly true) stories.  She lives in Phoenix, Arizona with her husband, Tyler, and dog, Goose.

A North Carolina native, Gretchen Wing is a 20-year teacher of high school English and history who now works as a baker in Washington’s San Juan Islands, and writes. She earned her BA in English from Harvard and her Masters in U.S. and Latin American History from the University of Washington. Her stories have been published in SHARK REEF, and she writes the monthly column, "Spotlight on Lopezians," for The Islands' Weekly. Her middle grades novel, The Flying Burgowski, was published early this year by Madrona Branch Press, and she is hard at work on the sequel.

Awaiting The Flying Burgowski

It’s been a lot of years since I was pregnant and awaiting the birth of a baby (which ended up being, well, two babies, when I was surprised with twins).  And I don’t have any grandchildren (yet), so I’m out of practice with this waiting-for-something-to-be-born business. I had a taste of it five years ago when I published my first book, Hands at Work, and I’m feeling it again as I wait for the “birth” of a friend’s new book—Gretchen Wing’s young adult/middle grade novel, The Flying Burgowski—Book One of the Flying Burgowski Trilogy.

Gretchen describes her novel as “magical realism for kids,” and that category fits. Literary critic Patrick Kennedy defines this genre as “…a manner of writing that combines precise historical, social, and psychological observations (the material of traditional ‘realism’) with elements of fantasy, surreal descriptions, and dreamlike touches.”  Magical realism is associated with Latin American authors such as Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, and Isabel Allende. And then there’s J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, which happens to be the literary obsession of Jocelyn Burgowski, the main character in Gretchen’s book.

When Jocelyn discovers on her fourteenth birthday that she can fly, this superpower opens a whole new messy horizon. She struggles to keep her flying a secret while rescuing her troubled mother, two challenging tasks for a teen living on a small, remote island in the Pacific Northwest. Throughout the book, Jocelyn wrestles with a dilemma: must she give up her powers to save her mom, or can she use them to heal the damage of her mother’s own secret?

The Flying Burgowski offers a rich cast of characters, vivid settings, and dramatic scenes to explore real-world “horrors” like substance dependency, sexual assault, racism, and homophobia. “Books are the safest place for kids to process their thoughts about these issues,” Gretchen says, and she handles them delicately—just right for the adolescent readers she hopes to reach.

Gretchen Wing, author

A high school English and history teacher for twenty years, Gretchen understands her audience well. She used to push her students to find their voices through writing, and to pay attention to the voices of others through reading. In The Flying Burgowski, Gretchen has applied that same passion to Jocelyn’s story, that of a girl who needs empowerment and finds it, not in magic as she hopes, but in herself.

I first met Gretchen at the local bakery and struck up a conversation about the Carolina Friends School t-shirt she was wearing.  Turns out, she not only attended the Quaker school in North Carolina, but her folks, Martha and Peter Klopfer, are the school’s co-founders. Now, Gretchen and I are in a writing group that meets weekly. Over the last few years I’ve enjoyed getting to know her,­ her writing, and how Quaker testimonies permeate her creative work. I wrote about her Musical Essays in October 2013, soon after she was interviewed on Northern Spirit Radio’s Song of the Soul.

Any day I’m expecting a “birth announcement” from Gretchen. Until then, I’m calling on a little magical realism to help the time pass quickly as I wait for The Flying Burgowski - and her siblings - to arrive. 

Afterthought #19 – Working Hands on Display

Hands at Work

What started as a casual comment almost ten years ago (“We could do a book together!”) resulted in a gratifying collaboration with photographer Summer Moon Scriver and a couple dozen people who work with their hands.

Now, many of those hands, and excerpts from their stories, are featured in an exhibit at the Washington History Museum in Tacoma, WA.  Thanks to the commitment and organizing skill of Stephanie Lile, the museum’s Head of Education (and an alum of my MFA writing program), the support of Redmond Barnett (Head of Exhibits), and the artistry of SueSan Chan (Exhibits Designer/Project Manager), framed images and printed excerpts will grace the walls of a small gallery in the museum through May 2014. 

If you’re anywhere close to the area, it’s worth a visit to Tacoma’s  Museum District that includes the History Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, and the Museum of Glass. You can go to all three for one low price with a Tacoma Museum Pass, and on the Third Thursday of each month, the History Museum is open until 8pm with FREE ADMISSION from 2-8pm.

Hands at Work at History Museum

Look what a bunch of hard-working hands

can do!

Beginning in January 2012, I instituted posting an “Afterthought” on the last day of each month, fashioned after a practice in some Quaker meetings. After meeting for worship ends, some groups continue in silence for a few more minutes during which members are invited to share thoughts or reflect on the morning's worship. I’ve adopted the form here for brief reflections on headlines, quotes, comments overheard, maybe even bumper stickers.