When I walked across the stage at my MFA convocation, dressed in radiant purple robes, to be hooded like the scholars long before, I was told, along with the rest of my class, that we were among the ‘overly educated elite.’ I dreamt of best sellers. I dreamt of writers residencies where I would talk craft and how to write. I dreamt of prestigious offices in revered academic institutions.. Of my own writing office in my home with antique glass doors, book shelves lined with volumes upon volumes and a growing section of my own publications. I would say to guests, “Oh you’ve not been able to find a copy of my latest work? Here," I’d take one from the shelf, and inscribe it for them, “with my love….” They would be thrilled and on the way home, wonder how they ever got to be friends with someone as cool as me.

Five years later, I am neither on the best selling list, the glass door office hasn’t been built. And instead of haggling over publishing contracts, I’m debating over the pros and cons of a dairy cow versus a pair of dairy goats to supply milk for our small family.

I have, against my own wishes and (possibly) better judgment, become a farmer.

Realistically, it may not be a far fall from the metaphorical tree. I grew up in a rural area of Northeastern Pennsylvania. Farming had been the primary way of life until Procter and Gamble moved into the area in the late 60’s.

My family always had some animals (not used as pets), rabbits and chickens mostly. one of my earlier memories was collecting eggs from our barn red chicken coops during a thunderstorm. i pulled my shirt out to make a hammock for them, and the warmth coming from the small, golden brown eggs radiated through my shirt to my belly, even though i was dripping with rainwater. I still love the feel of a warm egg straight for the henhouse and the beauty of the light brown shells.

This rural up-bringing has always set me apart. In many places I was a novelty so to speak. While living in the UK, I was an ‘agricultural consultant.’ By this I mean I ended up educating my city friends on the ways of country life. Behold the glories of Duck Tape (there it was Gaffer’s Tape) , hard physical work, and being unafraid to get one’s hands dirty.

While doing my MFA, my lifestyle was viewed by colleagues as some sort of pastoral idyll. They thought it sweet that I made my own bread, and that i grew and canned my own tomatoes. They marveled that I schlepped glass Mason jars, lids and rings through the subway turnstiles to my sister while she and her husband in Jersey City so she could make jam, syrup and preserves from the mulberries she found in a nearby park.

In this routine, my colleagues usually asked the same question: “well it’s fun, but why bother when you can just get it from the store?”

While it was certainly more work to bottle up all the mulberries into jam, syrup, or to dry them into mulberry raisins to be used in breads, oatmeal and muffins, there was something about it rewarding. something about doing for ourselves that made it worthwhile and made the jam taste all the sweeter. There was something about continuing the traditions we cherished so much. But to our city friends, we were novelties, and they smiled at us, and shook their heads.

“To each their own,” they would say, as they opened a jar of Smuckers grape jelly.

My sister, also one of the overly educated elite, graduated from an MFA theater program of only eight people. Her resume stretches longer than I care to think about. She and her husband moved to New Jersey so she could pursue auditions and an acting career. He was a successful equine massage therapist. But as time went on, they came out to the family farm more and
more, until they decided to make it a permanent move.

Fast forward a few years, and you find us all living on the same farm. My sister and her husband, my parents, my maternal grandmother and my husband and myself. Add to that two newborn babies, and we have four generations living on the same property we, our parents, paternal grandparents and great grandparents lived on.

The farm by this point was a farm in name only. A few of the fields were rented out, but that was the extent of it’s health. the ancient apple orchards survived in spite of everything, growing wild and tangled among themselves. But when we looked at it, each of us on our own, we could see what there was and what there could be.

So slowly, and individually, we began. It started with some Scottish Highland cattle and some Arucana chickens. The garden was expanded significantly. The barn turned into a working kitchen for canning season and smelled of celery and tomatoes for about three weeks in the summer while my sister, mother and grandmother all bottle home made tomato soup, sauce, stewed tomatoes and salsa.

Tomato season is followed quickly by apple season. The spicey aromas are replaced by a gentle subtle sweet smell as apples cook down to make apple sauce, or sliced apples for pies.

Then in the idle of the winter, comes maple season. Our patio begins to smells smoky sweet as the evaporator burns day and night to boil down the sap into thickened amber syrup. From one hundred gallons of sap, we get about five to ten gallons of syrup.

We have developed a strong streak for doing things for ourselves. We still make the majority of our own bread. We now make our own yogurt, baby food, ice cream, and are expanding our repertoire to include cheeses. When our daughter was developing severe rashes from her diapers, we switched mid stream to cloth diapers. From October to December I was bent over my 1970s Kenmore Sewing machine, making all in one cloth diapers out of old t-shirts and flannel until we had enough with the store bought flat diapers and ones we had borrowed.

Quilting has always been part of our heritage. My mother taught me to hold a needle when I could hold a pencil. So as old jeans wear out, and flannel shirts are no longer patched, they come to me, and they are turned into heavy quilts. I am learning to spin wool into yarn, and then to knit up anything we can think of with that yarn. I plan on expanding my garden to include herbs and flowers used for dying the fiber nearly every color of the rainbow.

On top of this doing for ourselves, we’re considering homeschooling or charter schools.

You may have noted the person change. What had begun as simply my story, has become a family story. Truth be known, this farm can’t run by itself. It takes a bunch of us to get the work done. We all contribute in many different ways, some not as obvious as others, but it is still all about getting the work done, and breathing life into what was once a nearly abandoned idea. The Family Farm, with the Family working on it.

We live in a time when the economy is like a drunken high school sophomore. Things that were old are suddenly new again. Subsistence farming is growing gradually as people become aware and realistic about their situations. Families are planting gardens again, buying pigs to be butchered at the end of the year. Murray McMurray – one of the leading poultry hatcheries in our country – has been consistently sold out of chicks. Books like Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day is on the best seller list. Ways of life that were scoffed at, or seen as sweet, are becoming more of a standard, more steady and strong like the rock walls that continue to line our countryside, centuries later.

The list is beginning to sound familiar. “Well I used to be a teacher…” or Social worker…. or any list of other occupations. And they turn to farming. Most likely not for the sole support, but as a supplement for their family. an actress, a writer, and a lab manager from Harvard. All reborn as farmers with horses, dogs, orchards, cows, gardens, and bee keeping operations either for themselves alone or for the small profit that comes once in blue moon.

Historically, farmers were not the most schooled people, neither were they the most pressing on the social ladder. But they had enough sense to survive. Now this new class of farmer is emerging, the enlightened farmers, with educations out the gesundheit, all to return to a more ancient and less applauded way of life. Though my studies didn’t teach me how to deliver a lamb or how to smoke out bees, my education taught me how to be a student, how to seek out teachers, and when in doubt, how to teach myself. in short, it taught me to keep learning.

These days when money is thin, and I find myself growing tired of having to make another few loaves of bread, puree up some baby food, hang the freshly washed still wet cloth diapers next to the fireplace to dry, which slowly eeks out the faint smell of urine throughout the room. It’s those moments that I wonder if this really was the best idea? My husband and I both still work, him full time, me part time. I wonder if this whole natural lifestyle is worth it. It really is just easier to go to the store and buy a loaf of bread, and a couple jars of baby food. And Smuckers really does make a pretty exceptional jar of strawberry jam. Is this whole thing worth it?

But when I see our daughter’s face when the sheep come up to her to say hello and the way she squeals at the new calf, when I taste the fresh bread, or do the basic math that shows how much money we have saved by making our own baby food, wipes and diapers…. when I realize that for as much as I worry, as long as we’re here and able to farm some, we will have food… when I see the apple orchards in full blossom and to steal a line from Keats, stand in the bee loud glade….or when I smell the roses my great-grandmother planted up against the barn - they were the only thing she brought to her new home when she married-

It’s those times I realize, that yes, this is worth it. It’s something inescapable i think. It’s part of my family's collective unconscious. And as long as we are here and are able to work together, we will have food, we will adapt to figure things out for repairs or how to make new things like toys and clothes. To raise my family to live in a cleaner more self sufficient lifestyle, in the mythology of her ancestors, this is worth it.

by ways of an introduction

By the time I can finally sit and scratch a few words on to paper, the voices in my head are already pissed.

“Write damn you! Write already!”

Never mind the four loads of laundry that still need to be folded and put away. Or make that re-folded as some probably were folded before and we’ve had to go digging through them in order to find clean clothing.

Never mind the dishes in the sink from yesterday, and the dirty skillet still on the stove from last night’s dinner.

And never mind the fact that the baby is still in her pajamas at two in the afternoon, as am I, and we’re both unwashed.

In the midst of the this, the yelling and impatience get louder and louder “Write already! What else is there to do! WRITE!”

I am jealous of my writing, umarried, non parent friends. There are no other requirements to get in the way of the art. No one to worry about except for yourself. You can do whatever you want. This is truly a selfish thing to say. But I think part of an artist’s life is innately selfish. One needs to be selfish, to focus on themselves, and what they’re doing, and not helping everyone around them with every aspect of their lives. They need to not be relied on. Just the artist and the art. Because somewhere, that battle between what you should be doing – the dishes, making dinner, working a real job – get in the way of what you really should be doing – writing.


There needs to be no one else in the room, looking over your shoulder, and wondering if you’re using just a bit too much black and red in the painting? “It’s so depressing? why not use some of that pink, and make it a happier picture?” There needs to be no one else in the room questioning the books you’re reading are just a little bit too out there? or if the word selection is really needed. “Do you really have to use the F word right there? It will make people uncomfortable.” This constant presence in the room, or in the mind of the artist is toxic at its very least, paralyzing at its worst.

And yet ironically, this is exactly where I find myself.

I find myself married for seven years, with no end in sight, nor do I want one. And I find myself mother to a beautiful little girl. I have no wish to return her.

I am surrounded by people, mostly my immediate family: parents, sister and her husband and their son, and my grandmother who is my last living grandparent; all who love me, call on me, and depend on me for various things.

Added to this, I find myself with one unpublished novel that is 99.9% done, and about five other ideas that are in varying stages of development ranging for hundreds of pages of polished text to ideas scratched out on note paper in crayon. What I do not have in my possession is the time to write them all out. Nor do you find me in possession of an agent or writing contract.

We all had dreams after graduate school. Writing, publishing, best sellers, readings, book signings. We were all going to be the next literary darling. We all had five year plans, and we all looked to the future with hopeful and enthusiastic eyes.

Fast forward those five years, and you find me frazzled, unable to speak a coherent sentence, chasing a half naked toddler who’s just peed on the floor, while my Alzheimer-ish grandmother stands in the laundry room because she has gotten lost and she can’t find her way down the hallway out the front door so she can hang the clothes out on the clothes line.

You’d also find me desperately making bread, laundry detergent, granola, yogurt, baby food, and cutting out fabric to make baby clothes and extra diapers, just in case….

And then somewhere, in the middle of this, of this manic opera of duties, of shoulds, of musts, or have tos, a realization hits me as unwelcome as a cold shower. This is my life.

Next come the questions: how did I get here, and how do I get back?

So, allow this, dear reader to be some entertainment, word of warning, teaching, What happens when a writer doesn’t write? What happens when life gets in the way? How do we realign our lives to meet up with our dreams and goals, taking into account the loves and passions we have found along the way? And how do we get by on making nothing?