A Bushel's Worth: Part Two

This is the second of a two-part article. The first part was published March 12.

by Kayann Short

Kayann and her sister Kari (front) at their grandparents' farm.

As I began compiling the bits and pieces of my farming stories in a new draft called Farmroots, I borrowed from digital stories I had created about my great-grandmother’s teaching and farming lives, which now seemed so close to my own. I also drew from blog posts about my two prairie grandmothers, using one of their diaries to describe the weather and land that shaped their day-to-day tasks. I alternated chapters about Stonebridge with North Dakota memories, loosening the seasonal structure and adding photographs and recipes to illustrate the connections between the farms.

Once again, I sent queries to New York agents, who this time told me that interest in farming had already peaked. One agent even said she’d gone down to her local bookstore and found a “whole shelf” of farming books. It seems another farming book would be hard to sell without a national platform, one I didn’t have.

A whole shelf of farming books didn’t sound like a lot to me, but I understand the topical cycles of conventional publishing. I noted, too, that many of these farming books were about, in the words on one back cover, urbanites “escaping city ways.” My book was not about escape, but rather about reunion with my family’s farming past on our own Colorado land. I decided I needed an independent publisher who understood stories of the West. And that’s when I found Torrey House, whose mission is “to increase appreciation for the importance of natural landscape through the power of pen and story.”

As I prepared the manuscript one final time, I brought the Stonebridge story up to date. Torrey House co-publisher Kirsten Allen urged me to emphasize some of my concerns about farming. I joked that I didn’t want to seem too big a worrier, but that last summer finishing the manuscript upped the worry ante with injury, drought, and wildfire. I strengthened, too, environmental themes by including my fifth-grade memory of the first Earth Day, childhood camping trips in the Rockies, and discussion of development pressure along our foothills corridor with its attendant urgency for local farmland preservation. We titled the book A Bushel’s Worth after the chapter about Stonebridge’s instructive attempt to grow wheat. The subtitle comes from my own idea of “ecobiography” as ecology-based memoir at the intersection of nature writing and personal narrative.

Writing, like farming, takes persistence, patience, and a belief in the regenerative power of work, all lessons I surely learned from my grandparents and from the land itself. The generous support I’ve received from Women Writing the West members has been a wonderful boost on my journey, as has the encouragement of friends and family. My path to publication wasn’t easy, but I kept going until I found my niche.

At readings for A Bushel’s Worth, I offer this advice: write the stories you want to see in the world. With all the publishing opportunities today, be open to options that offer a better fit. Be open, as well, to revision and new ideas about your writing. Be flexible and welcome feedback, adapting what you need to further your greater vision. Once your book is in the world, keep listening. Stories don’t end with a book’s publication. Each reading provides another chance to harvest the stories we share.

Kayann Short, Ph.D., is the author of A Bushel's Worth: An Ecobiography. She is a writer, farmer, teacher, and activist at Stonebridge Farm, an organic community-supported farm in the Rocky Mountain foothills. Short’s writing has appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Colorado Gardener, Redstone Review, Women’s Review of Books, The Bloomsbury Review, Edible Front Range, and various academic journals. Short has taught ecobiography workshops on “Writing the Self in Nature." Read more about Kayann at her website.

Organically Grown in the West: A Bushel’s Worth: An Ecobiography

This is the first of a two-part article.

by Kayann Short

 

A journal. Newspaper clippings. My grandmother’s diary. Some weather reports. I started gathering seeds for A Bushel’s Worth before I knew I was writing a book.

Like all memoirs, mine began with the stories I wanted to remember, entries recorded in my journal from the day I moved to Stonebridge Farm, a ten-acre, century-old farm on Colorado’s Front Range. I wasn’t a consistent journal-keeper, instead noting the most memorable occasions: wildlife encounters, extreme weather, the vicissitudes of fieldwork, poignant celebrations, frightening risks, and always, the first day of the New Year.

Those were the stories I wove into a draft of Farmgiving, a term I created to mean lessons learned from the generosity and bounty of the land on which we grow vegetables for our community. The idea for the book came to me on a women’s writing retreat in a wintery Chautauqua lodge. I had already begun one essay—which became the chapter “Appling,” about our annual apple pressing—and at the retreat, plotted out eleven other chapters that followed our farm through one year. I grouped them by season and placed an event at the center of each. And then I began writing.

It took about a year to finish that first draft, in part because I wanted to follow the farm through the seasons by capturing the rhythms of our days. Once finished, I sent query letters to agents who specialized in nature writing and women’s memoirs. A few asked to see the manuscript. Their feedback was helpful and accurate: I had written two books. One, in their words, was a “nuts and bolts” guide to small-scale farming; the second, a lovely but “quiet” memoir that would be harder to sell in this publishing era of tragedy, disclosure, and scandal.

While waiting for these responses, I turned fifty and began Pearlmoonplenty, a blog about farming, food, books, and feminism. Started as a site for writing practice, the blog became a place to deposit ideas outside the book. Many of these stories came from my childhood summers on my grandparents’ farms in North Dakota. Some of them particularly resonated with my readers, whose enthusiasm encouraged me to continue in that vein. One day, I realized that my book needed to include those early experiences because they formed my farming roots. I could also show the continuity between then and now in small-scale farming and draw stronger connections between my family’s farms and Stonebridge with themes like rural thrift, family legacy, agricultural preservation, and farm-centered community.

 

How did Kayann incorporate her experiences in a book? Read the rest of her journey to getting published next Wednesday.

Kayann Short, Ph.D., is the author of A Bushel's Worth: An Ecobiography. She is a writer, farmer, teacher, and activist at Stonebridge Farm, an organic community-supported farm in the Rocky Mountain foothills. Short’s writing has appeared in Pilgrimage Magazine, Colorado Gardener, Redstone Review, Women’s Review of Books, The Bloomsbury Review, Edible Front Range, and various academic journals. Short has taught ecobiography workshops on “Writing the Self in Nature." Read more about Kayann at her website.