Tipping the Balance Towards Bounty
By Ariel Delgado Dixon & Ellyn Gaydos
I read an early copy of Pig Years (Knopf, 2022) by Ellyn Gaydos over the course of a mobile few weeks, beginning at the window seat of a café in Midtown Manhattan and concluding in the Swiss Alps, up in a steep cow town called Wilderswil. The cows in Wilderswil were blonde and standoffish, like the Swiss themselves, not like the cows I knew by name back in New Jersey.
Pig Years is a memoir of farming, described in The New York Times not as an ode or a farce—as farm narratives are often drawn—but as a momento mori. Five years of jobbing around upstate New York and Vermont have furnished Gaydos with a quiver of the sharpest, surest arrows. Decadent language, stark truths, and ruminant insights about ruminant beings, not to mention pigs, produce, country racetracks, life and death at large.
By the end of my read, I was leaving Europe, but I was returning with something else, stashed in my back pocket, something lifted from the pages of Gaydos’s exceptional book: a lesson I had sensed within the practice of farming but had not yet been able to name. “The work exists in a moment of suspension,” Gaydos writes of farming, and of course, this too is true of the practice of writing.
My conversation with Ellyn Gaydos took place over a few winter months, plus an overlap into early spring, questions and answers posed and closed sometimes within hours, often days, occasionally weeks elapsing between communiqués. The time between messages felt like fertile ground. It was heartening to see that penning fiction on a dairy farm in Jersey rang true a few states north, to a nonfiction writer plucking produce and poring over diaries and mothering someone new in the world. I was reminded of a bit of wisdom from a farmer I know: every farm makes its own rules. Everywhere the topography and weather and soil and hands are different, so even if farming is farming, its expressions are mutable, personal.
This is what we got up to.
Ariel
December 13, 2022
Ellyn,
Recently, I cornered my boss into addressing some matters of personal history about his origins in farming. We sat down at a picnic table together looking over the back pastures, Carhartt-clad against November wind. He told me that before he became a farmer, he was an archaeologist.
During a dig in Greece, he struck up a friendship with a local shepherd who complained all the time about the tedium of his job, the total devotion of attention and energy it cost to protect the herd, and how he wished he could do anything else, anywhere else.
According to my boss, the encounter was a big inspiration to go into the business of farming and animal husbandry, although this impulse seemed somewhat counterintuitive. Why would someone warning you not to go into farming entice you into doing the opposite?
I suppose there is the rebellious human instinct to be a contrarian, taste the poison apple, and so forth, but of course there’s more. My boss detested the stiffness and bureaucracy of academia. He wanted to be outside. He wanted a job that dealt in the tangible. And we both agreed that farming—most especially small-time local farming—tends to attract misfits, a descriptor with which we both felt a kinship.
Even though you and I are not seated at the same table, nor looking out over the same sliver of land, I want to kick off our correspondence about writing and farming with a two-part request. First, tell me a bit about your origins in farming. Second, will you weigh in on a proposed truth? Are farmers just misfits in overalls?
Ellyn
December 13, 2022
My first job farming was working for a family up near Canada. The father had run a dairy there, and the son and his wife and kids took it over and turned it into a vegetable/beef farm. (He didn’t want to have to milk twice a day every day, even on Christmas). His parents still lived in one half of the old farmhouse and were having a hard time giving it up. It was a very small town (the library was only open a few hours a week), and everyone thought I was a distant relative of one of the two big farming families. That far north, it was flatter than a lot of Vermont; you could see the weather coming in from far away and a mountain that looked like a thumb. Almost all the land around was in agriculture and it was very beautiful. I shared a trailer with another farmhand and ate all my meals with the family. The best chicken and biscuits I ever had. I spent most of my time helping with the vegetables, and we moved the cows twice a day.
The older I get, the more I realize farming is an impractical choice (if one has the luxury of choosing) because of the long hours, low pay, and seasonal variance. So yes, I think weird people choose to do it. People that don’t want to work all year long, or need to be outside or can’t stand busywork or can’t pass a background test or need to be high all day long or didn’t finish high school. But, on the other hand, they can stomach lightning, mechanical failure, animal escape, sunstroke.
I really dislike being cooped up in impersonal work environments, which keeps me coming back to farming. There is something very compulsive about it. Every February I think, it is time to start the onion seeds. In June, it is time to scape the garlic, etc. That’s why when I had a baby, I was scared I would have to repeat it over and over again, like planting cantaloupe (luckily, I was wrong). Also, I don’t want to have to eat mealy tomatoes.
What your boss said about the shepherd who “complained all the time about the tedium of his job, the total devotion of attention and energy,” I think is true. I am reading a book by Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan, and in it she discusses agriculture, manual work, as the origin of philosophy: “. . . labor on the land—humankind’s first vocation in the struggle for redemption—demanded, like other arts, an understanding and harnessing of nature’s generative powers. The peasant knew and read nature; therefore . . . this peasant engaged in philosophy.” I think it is a generative, and at times wretched, pursuit.
Ariel
December 24, 2022
Generative and wretched sounds right. I’m glad you brought this philosophical tilt to the conversation via The Body of the Artisan because a question whose heart I have been trying to lance is this: is farming romantic?
I asked my boss, and his immediate answer was no. It is not romantic. I pressed him. What about really good farm days? When things happen to be going right, there are no surprises. The weather is decent; you pause in a field and have that moment of being unified with, or at least inside, “nature’s generative powers.” You look around and think: I’m taking part in something primordial and beyond comprehension!
He thought this was funny. He said if you have time to look around and sniff the roses, you are probably not doing enough.
He did admit, if begrudgingly, that he’s had similar moments. There’s a reason he keeps coming back, why he still sheds a tear sometimes when he takes our cows to the butcher, why he delights in the calves in spring. Maybe romance is the wrong word. Maybe prayerful is better. It makes me think of a passage from Pig Years:
There is the established wisdom, but there are no false promises. Things thrive or die, and the farmer hopes to tip the balance toward bounty. Most years it is okay. But I’ve seen the cruel waters of flood eat away at a field or the cracked soil of no rain or worms rot a flock of sheep from the hooves up. Enough to know that life remains wild. For this reason too I like farming: one simply must accept the outcome. Here one’s hard work becomes like a prayer instead of a stubborn insistence that things will turn out okay. The work exists in a moment of suspension.
I only ask farmers this question about romance and farming because, to outsiders, I think farming appears quite romantic, bucolic—if admittedly hard and dirty, like a real-life cosplay of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.” This brings me to my next question, about the perceptions of farming from those outside it.
Most people are quite removed from where their food comes from and the processes by which their food is made. Your book spends some time at farmer’s markets and on that interface between cultivator and consumer. But, perhaps more fitting for a literary magazine, I also want to talk about that cultivator and consumer relationship in regards to writing about farming. It is often a violent, graphic, unyielding line of work, especially when working with livestock, and I wonder about the stomach readers have for those truths.
Q: When you were writing Pig Years, did this factor into your thinking at all? Whether those harder truths about farm life—raising your pigs for slaughter, for instance—would overwhelm the reader? How might those truths land for the uninitiated? How did you approach the bloodier moments and put them to words? What was that process like?
Ellyn
January 8, 2023
Since we are talking about farming in writing, I do think it is romantic in that sense. To me it is romantic to pick up Tess of the d’Urbervilles and understand her milking chores, and then, later on, when she has to work prying turnips out of frigid mud, to intimately understand the smell, the feel, and the look of the work:
The upper half of each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also. Every leaf of the vegetable having already been consumed, the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies.
To me, participation in an activity that spans so much of human history is romantic—it feels ahistorical. If you go to the county fair here and look at the agricultural booths, there is a very popular statistic thrown around that less than 2 percent of Americans are farmers. I realize good writing transcends vocation, but we are of the waning few who can enjoy, in a tactile sense, literature written in a world formerly peopled by farmers.
I did feel compelled to write some of the more violent aspects of the book. When you spend your time weeding carrots, killing pigs is an event of note. I have always been curious about death—what is it about the moment when a thing dies? There is a strange predatory noticing that happens with (in this case humans) killing animals. The blood is so red, the smell of it so intense.
In a sense, I was transfixed, and I recorded what I could remember of it in my diary that night. I did make the conscious decision to include only one extended pig slaughter scene (though others are touched on). Over the years, there have been many, but I think the repetition of them can be numbing. Though I would like to read a book by a farmer that really shows how repetitive it all is. Animalia by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, a novel that follows a French pig farming family generationally from subsistence to concentrated feeding operation, pushes the violent abject aspects of farming to their limit. I appreciated that it showed the psychic toll it takes on human beings to perpetrate the misery of animals. I think about what it might be like to work in an industrial pig farrowing operation or a Tyson slaughterhouse—the nightmares. Compared to that, making some sausage for the winter is a much more clean kind of violence.
In reading your book, I was searching for evidence of your own agrarian background. You jump back and forth in time, and I wondered what is time to a cow? Maybe a cow’s time doesn’t have much to do with a person trying to form a life. Without giving too much away, Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You harbors violence in the forest and the overgrown places around people’s domiciles. In one scene in particular, we come upon a frightening assemblage of animals both dead and alive in the woods. In a book where characters are repeatedly sent to the wilderness as a kind of therapeutic punishment, there is almost no “romance” to the woods.
Q: Does that relate to your own experience of the wild and the cultivated?
Ariel
January 16 and 22, 2023
What is time to a cow!
I do think about this. How does time feel to a being that lives their life outside? Time must, in some ways, equal light.
Then again, a cow understands the timing of routine. Some mornings when I’m even just a tad later than usual for milking, the cows will be waiting for me right at the fence, eager to head onto the lane and into the barn for grain. If I’m a tad early, they’ll still be curled up sleeping.
I’m a relative latecomer to farming. I didn’t grow up spending much time in nature. I was not part of a camping family, and most of my backyard was concrete. Before the farm, I lived in California and Idaho. I encountered vast Western vistas and loved them, and would come home to the East and love the woods and greenery even more. It was the farm, though, that made me a witness in a way I hadn’t been before.
Somewhere between finishing the manuscript of Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You and publishing it, I began working on the small organic dairy where I am now. One of my oldest friends—whose life inspires part of the novel, actually—had been working there a few years. I found myself hanging around a lot, going out of my way to follow her around and bottle-feed the calves and visit with the cows. When I heard they needed help for the summer, I told myself to privately consider it for a week or two, to not even mention my interest until I was sure I was ready to commit. I knew it was the sort of thing you had to mean. I couldn’t do it casually, ask of their time to train me and then bounce if it got too hard. I haven’t looked back.
Farming has unlocked a kind of bravery I struggled with before. Things simply have to get done. There is no paperwork to push around in procrastination. No one will come along and do it for you. You roll up your sleeves and wade into a giant pool of half-frozen shit or roll under electric fences or dodge bulls, but that is what is necessary for the day.
As for my book and its reckoning with animals and nature—the notion I had when writing was that nature is a place of innocence, in the sense that there is no human guile or narcissistic jockeying per se, but that does not mean it’s a place of peace.
This notion has only solidified, though it has perhaps become more nuanced. I do think it’s romantic to be in touch with seasons and light and weather and animals, but it’s also opened my eyes to a violence in nature that I hadn’t experienced viscerally. Last year, for instance, there was a strange plague around my region, where deer were wasting away and dying for no discernible reason. We’d find them dead in the field, no visible wounds. We learned there was a biting midge infecting the deer with a hemorrhagic disease, wasting them away from the inside. It’s common actually—though climate change has accelerated its presence in my region. Mundane violence courses along all the time out there in the woods, not to mention other natural violence, like predation, or scarcity, or exposure.
In the novel, I like to think there is a wrestling with the idea of programming—what is primal, what is learned, what is fated. I think this character’s obsession with animals is an attempt to understand or harness that guilelessness or innocence in animals, to extract it or exert control. Most people are less sadistic than this character, and though motivations may differ, everyone projects onto nature and animals all the time. We do exert control, and extract, and exploit, and superimpose our own narratives of what is wild, what is good, what is worth saving.
Since you’ve now mentioned two intriguing books that circle some of these ideas about nature, the labor of farming, its history, I’m wondering how you source these texts and what draws you to them.
Q: Do you have any favorites, or any particular texts that guided you as you were writing Pig Years? I’m sure there is a wide realm of historical farming narratives out there that I have yet to tap into. I suppose it seems obvious they should exist, considering what we’ve said about the historic nature of farming . . .
A secondary Q: How was the initial drafting and editing process of the book? How do you balance writing and farming now?
Ellyn
January 28, 2023
I don’t know that I had a singular text as a guiding light, but in the beginning, I thought of this quote from James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as a kind of epigraph:
. . . the farm is also a water spider whose feet print but do not break the gliding water membrane: it is thus delicately and briefly that, in its fields and structures, it sustains its entity upon the blind breadth and steady heave of nature.
I think the sense of precarity and suspension are remarkably accurate. Recently I read that, as a troubled child, Agee sometimes hurt animals.
Annie Dillard does what a farmer can’t: sit for uncounted hours, waiting for a muskrat to pass by and thinking about God.
I read a range of man-animal books, a sub-genre penned by authors not necessarily fit for human companionship: J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine; Gavin Maxwell’s account of living with otters, Ring of Bright Water; anthropologist Nastassja Martin’s In the Eye of the Wild, about her violent encounter with a bear. These are each exceptional for their removal from the human world, in some sense traded for the slow task of constructing a legible and immediate one out of plants and animals.
D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow begins on the Brangwen family farm:
. . . the women were different. On them too was the drowse of blood-intimacy, calves sucking and hens running together in droves, and young geese palpitating in the hand while the food was pushed down their throttle. But the women looked out from the heated, blind-intercourse of farm-life to the spoken world beyond.
Which brings me to your second question on process. For me, writing is a compulsion amidst strange unpaid chunks of time in winter and long work days on the farm in spring/summer/fall. I feel a little like a fraud in answering because I can’t work that way, at present, with a little kid. (I’m part-time now). But before, when I was writing the book, it was written in the clarity of morning or at night as diary entries. Later those entries were “artfully” combined or deleted. Looming around all of this is the problem of money. But if you write about your job, you are in a sense getting paid. That was the logic anyway.
Q: Do your fictional worlds cohabitate with your working one? Where did you write/are you writing your second book?
Ariel
February 11, 2023
You mention “artfully” combining and deleting as part of the process of building this book.
Q: Just how much was there to sort through, and how did you go about it? What was step one?
It makes me think of a film editor having all these scenes—b-roll, establishing shots, varying takes on the same sequence—and having to prune and order and splice.
Funny you should say you feel ‘a little like a fraud’ because you aren’t doing those full-on, long-haul days at the moment—despite the many hundred (thousands?) of hours you’ve farmed prior.
When I’ve spoken to other farmers who’ve taken time away, or decreased their output for whatever reason, there’s this sense that their status as Farmer, capital F, is diminished, on hold, or they can’t lay quite the same claim.
I feel that way too. I’m taking the winter away to teach in Ohio. The week I arrived, I went looking for any kind of barn gig, and now I’m mucking stalls at some horse stables. My friend, who’s been dairy farming full-time for about five years, only recently started calling herself a farmer instead of a farmhand. I wonder what this sensitivity is about, this consciousness of sweat equity and what it lets you claim.
I do a lot of writing in my head while working, or I jot things down on my phone. I will simply not retain any revelatory images or phrases if I don’t get them down right away. Sometimes I’ll say a phrase I like over and over again to try and wedge it in my head, but off it goes if I don’t create some evidence.
My favorite chore for contemplation is the back-and-forth of putting up a fence, taking down a fence, over and over. By the end, I usually have something new to chew on, and I get to look out and see all those lines I’ve drawn across the pastures. These days, it takes about four hours of morning work to clear the stables, and it’s just me and the horses in there. Your brain wanders, but your body is occupied. It’s a good mix for me, things shake loose.
I’ve been writing this second novel all over the place–in coffee shops, at home, on visits to the Hemingway House in Idaho, in airports, in short-term rentals I stay in when my long-distance girlfriend and I meet up in the random towns of Western Pennsylvania. I haven’t thought of it until now, but the first novel takes place all over, all throughout time, and I wrote it pretty much in one stationary spot, in Boise, Idaho. The second novel takes place in one stationary spot, one farm in Northern California, but I’ve written from a hundred desks and vistas.
Ellyn
February 17, 2023
I know what you mean about a repeated phrase, a phrase that becomes more and more refined or true feeling in the act of trying to remember it (which I often fail at). I also try to write things down, as they come. I like to write in the present tense. Maybe you have to work in a repetitive motion like setting up a fence to allow the thoughts to come in time. It can create something akin to ancient sung poetry or a kind of incantatory prose. The writer Rick Bass asked me if I listened to music while I wrote. I do sometimes, but I think maybe the rhythm comes more from a body and mind at work, thumping away.
To write my book, I used entries from approximately fourteen diaries. First, I read through them all, underlining compelling things and dog-earing pages. Then, I typed up what I liked and tried to make a story out of it. A lot of the pieces didn’t flow together well or were incomplete. It was a bit like an old flickering film, I was trying to grasp the light and put it back into the scene.
It probably goes without saying that I cried with frustration while editing my book. It all wound up being chronological, because I wasn’t sophisticated enough to attempt otherwise. I have a fantasy for a different type of structure in which each part of a book would be inlaid like a jewel in a crown—mesmeric on its own but also affixed to some gilded scaffolding.
Currently, I’m trying to write something both researched and reported and I can see my organizational methods breaking down. I’m trying to hold too many pieces of information in my head simultaneously. I don’t know how Nabokov did it, writing novels on index cards and shuffling them around. What kind of alchemy transpired?
Q: Did you have certain exemplary novels while structuring your book?
I know what you mean about the legitimacy of one’s Farmer status. I wrote from the point of view of a lowercase farmhand—someone who travels, doesn’t own the land or make the plan. It is in part out of deference to how hard Farmers work—the unpaid hours that add up to a solvent business, the generations of family drama, the cumulative knowledge of nature. This is not to say that you must be born into it or that it is equitable, who owns land, but there is a certain respect for the hard work, I think.
Tell me more about the farm in California, the one in your book.
Ariel
March 1, 2023
Fourteen diaries! Because I am fascinated by diary-keeping (and wildly inconsistent in keeping my own), I’m going to ask you a rapid-fire set of diary-related questions:
Q: How far back does your diary habit go?
Q: When you complete a diary, where does the finished volume go next? Do you have a special box or shelf somewhere?
Q: How often do you peek back at your old entries/diaries?
Q: This is a particular one, but humor me: how do you mark each entry? Date? Time? Location, etc?
I didn’t have many model books while working on my own—not for any good reason. I loved A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and did take from it a certain permission to be free of the confines of consecutive time. If nothing else, I knew how I wanted time to feel, how the shifts in time were sometimes driven by leaps of feeling or by a shared/related image rather than a hyper-methodic, traditional structural choice. In some ways, this probably got me into hot water. I’ve vowed with this next novel to try and move more linearly through time, and though it doesn’t seem to wiggle around as much as DSWDWY, there’s still some shiftiness. I can’t seem to rid myself of that. I like squiggly time. Fucking around with time feels truer to our real, layered experience of the past, present, and future speculation than literal chronology does. So it goes.
The farm I’m writing about was a once-utopic weed farm that’s gone off the rails. In my research of Humboldt County, I discovered there’s actually a long history of family dairy farms in the area, second only to the massive farm complex of the Central Valley. This liberated a desire I had to integrate some of my own exposure to farm life. A chance to think about “perfection” when it comes to one self-sustaining model of a small farm, involving multi-species grazing—cows grazing, sheep and goats coming behind, chickens and/or pigs coming behind those, the soil fed, fertilizer made, a cycle that produces a nice closed loop. This is a lofty, usually unattainable goal, considering the way things tend to break down. But so many of the farms and compounds up there in Northern California were founded on those very utopian ideals, even if there’s been a long hard fall, for all sorts of reasons related to prohibition, capitalism, climate change, the war on drugs, and so forth.
I want to ask a few more questions of you, and I’m attaching my Proust questionnaire for you to fill out.
Another Q: You talked about the independence required to be a writer—could you say more?
Another Q: What did the process of compiling and then publishing Pig Years teach you? For me, making a book versus presenting it to the world felt like two separate tasks. Even if I’d written my whole life, I’d never shared a book in such an official capacity. I felt my own greenness so potently, painfully at times. How did you feel?
Yet Another Q: What’s next for you? Do you have any specific projects (in writing, farming, or life) in mind? Do you have broader goals for the farming and writing life you’re aiming toward?
Ellyn
March
As for the diaries, I started writing more consistently in them as a teenager. I’ve moved a lot so the spot where they’re stored changes. Currently they are on a porch, under a twin bed, and I check, every once in a while, to make sure mice haven’t gotten into them. I do not enjoy going back through them but will if it’s for “research purposes.”
My daughter turned one last week, and I read what I wrote about having her and a few entries leading up to it about lying around very pregnant on the couch. Usually, I mark the entry with the date, though I agree about the strangeness of chronological time. It is strange reading through a diary, how the import of each day is so acute and that acuteness is immediately replaced by the next day, the new present. It is unsettling to say the least.
I think the independence to make art could mean different things to different people. For me, not having a “good” job has helped. I don’t work all year round (and only indulge in some extravagances). Also, having my own “independent” obsessions drives me—the need to write or read about a particular topic. I often only feel articulate alone and in writing. Of course, it is difficult with love and family and other social duties, and I certainly have not cracked that nut.
I think compiling Pig Years better tuned my attention by reminding me of what I’d failed to retain. When recording things, for example, I not only want to know what a person said but if, in that moment, their shirt sleeve dipped into their bowl of soup. My favorite part of writing a book was having an editor (Tim O’Connell for most of the manuscript and, in the last stages, John Freeman): the nerves, the talk, the exchange of ideas. I think I would’ve been happy if only the editors read it. Seeing my book on the shelf at the library, I physically had to turn away. (Maybe it didn’t help that I’d written unflatteringly about one of the librarian’s wigs).
I have to break it down into digestible pieces. If I want to write, I have to get some money for it. If I write a book, maybe someone will commission me to do an article. I find it painful and embarrassing, but I want to keep doing it. The other comfort is in thinking of oneself as a small impersonal piece of a conversation going on in literature. I was pleased by what Claire Messud wrote about Pig Years in Harpers—“Are pigs ‘nothing’ one might wonder?”
Q: Do you think your own sometimes “painful” feelings about Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You coming out will impact the writing of the next one?
Currently, I am working on a piece about gravestone carvers and granite sculptors in Barre, Vermont, “the granite capital of the world.” I’ve been bewitched watching carvers transform stone into a Madonna or an angel. The place, the ancient history of the art, the giant quarry, the different waves of immigrants coming to work—I’d like to write a whole book about it. At the same time, I’m gearing up for another farming season and can’t seem to quit even though sometimes I think I should. Hopefully the weather, childcare, and the muses will all align perfectly in my favor.
Here are my answers to your questionnaire.
The Ariel Delgado Dixon/Proust/Inside the Actor’s Studio/Farmer’s Questionnaire
1. Which words or phrases do you most overuse (as of late)?
“Brown-eyed,” maybe?
2. On what occasion do you lie?
I say yes too much, pretend to like things I don’t, and lie that I haven’t seen TV shows so I don’t have to discuss them at length.
3. What is your favorite plant to plant and your least favorite plant to plant?
I love planting potatoes. We have a 100-year-old potato planter meant for a horse but rigged up for a tractor. You sit on a bouncy metal seat, quickly placing cut potatoes into a revolving track, which feeds a shoot into the ground. In comparison, planting onions, which go in as tiny green slips, is very slow and tedious.
4. What is the quality you most admire in pigs?
I admire pigs’ ease. Perhaps it is just perfect breeding—Annie Dillard refers to overbred cattle as “a human product like rayon.” But in a less derogatory sense, I think pigs have an almost Edenic ease with which they get fat; they seem to opulently thrive.
5. What feels like your greatest extravagance?
Overeating and overdrinking.
6. What turns you on?
A book stuffed into a pocket, fixing things, long unexpected talks, the radio, bars, boredom.
7. What turns you off?
People with undue anxiety about their dogs, a lack of curiosity, excessive frugality.
8. What is your favorite curse word?
Fuck.
9. If you could eliminate one mundane facet/annoyance about farming, what would it be?
Mechanical failure—it is always ruining the plan for the day.
10. What is your motto?
I like risk it for the biscuit, but I don’t know that I’m brave enough to call it my motto.
Ariel
March 27, 2023
Ellyn,
I’ve been putting together the pages and themes and gist of our ongoing talk, and it was funny to read it back chronologically, all that time collapsed into a dozen pages or so—especially since chronological time was a recurring topic in our conversation. Something feels incomplete, or maybe I’m just sad to see our talk end. I thought I should write back one more time, to answer your last question and also to offer an encore question to you.
The process of publishing Don’t Say We Didn’t Warn You was a wild dream come true, but it was also a reckoning of what I want my writing life to look like. The winds of publishing are fickle and unruly, so I return again and again to the idea of building a body of work. This broadens the horizon and eases some of the pressure on individual projects, encouraging a kind of long-term exploration and experimentation, as well as an ongoing conversation with my obsessions for the sake of themselves. A real sculptor’s delight.
People ask all the time how the next book is going. I’m sure you’ve been asked the same. At first, I tried to answer truthfully—it’s so different than the first outing of the debut novel (I dislike the word debut, but there it is) where I’d had a lifetime build-up of material and musings and now the record is struck clean, starkly so, with the next book. Now I just say it’s going okay. I know this book and I have to duke it out more intimately, privately. I’m not sure why this is required, but I feel sure that it is.
I want to say finally that farming has certainly changed the way I write—what I am alert to, what I’m no longer scared of—as well as the physical and temporal routines of my writing. It’s obvious, at least to me, that farming and writing are both acts of stubborn labor, and acts of faith. There’s solace there, for now. I don’t see myself going back to life or writing as it was before.
Thanks for everything.
My encore questions to you, Ellyn:
Has your shirt sleeve dipped into some soup?
Is there rain?
What do you see that I can’t see, wherever you are tonight?
It’s been a pleasure,
Ariel
Ellyn
April Fools’
I like the idea of the second book from a mind that has just been emptied into a first, it sounds better in some ways, wide open. Reminds me of waking up in the middle of the night or very early in the morning and writing something, later upon reading it back it seems both universal and utterly alien, coming from some other place than oneself.
As a kid, my favorite soup was bean and bacon. I don’t remember but I must’ve dipped a cuff into it on occasion.
Yes, today there is a light rain coming from white skies. I went to the farm, and everything was very dead looking: gravel-crusted snowbanks melting to reveal a patina of flattened trash and neglected equipment rather sickeningly leeched of color or life. I can’t wait for the nettles to come out under the apple tree.
Warmly yours,
Ellyn