...Regional Studies Lecture

The Horizontal Life began to take shape when I discovered that two of my great-grandmothers died very young in childbirth in the early 1900s, within ten years of their arrival in Dakota Territory from Russia.  In the memoir, I bind my own story as an ungrateful teenager growing up in the '60s and '70s to their story of privation.  I felt humbled by their sacrifice.  Was I what they had worked so hard to create, their future in America? 

The memoir addresses fertility and infertility—of land and of women.  In an agricultural world, a woman's body is a locus of production equally as important to survival as the land that is farmed.  Even as a young girl, I feared this fate and used every means to escape it.  In the chapter, "Pilgrim Soul," I write, "Farmboys, how we avoided them.  Like the plague, when they came around, their hands heavy with horniness, their bodies thick with longing.  Be careful of farmboys, we warned each other.  They know how to plant seeds."  

The book's title comes from the flatness of the Dakota horizon, a rolling, telluric landscape that stretches for miles around farmsteads and serves as a silent witness to passing events.  As each chapter of the book developed, themes of horizontal activity emerged: childbirth as a horizontal danger zone; sex as a horizontal pleasure zone; and death and burial in the land as a horizontal finality.  Eventually I realized that farming, the planting and cultivating of even furrows of crops, was a risky and expensive horizontal activity.  And I saw that writing—the making of even rows of text on a blank page—was my own act of horizontal survival.

(photo from Greatplains.org)

The writer, Audre Lorde, once expressed hopes of finding a new kind of nonfiction writing, what she called "biomythography," which showed awareness of the larger patterns and cycles of life and how the story of one's own life agreed or disagreed with those prevailing narratives.  In The Horizontal Life, I have interwoven myth with autobiography, then bolstered the fabric of the memoir with research in disciplines such as botany, geology, history, and literary criticism.  Like the land itself, the real story of life in the Midwest is complex, subtle, layered and variegated.  The effect, I hope, is a personal and political portrait of the deep ambivalences, the difficult lessons, and the hard love that one who is from such a place experiences.  

The narrative arc that governs The Horizontal Life is rebellion and return—flight and exile, followed by return and reconciliation.  The theme of migration runs through the memoir; the story of my own flight is told next to the story of my grandparents' flight from Russia and arrival in the Midwest in the early 1900s.  The land claims they took up in Dakota Territory brought to North America a centuries-old contract my ancestors have maintained as husbands of the land. 

(photo from greatplainsdogs.com)

In agriculture, the word "husband" is one who tills and cultivates the soil.  In this sense of the word, the husbandmen enters into a solemn contract with the land, agreeing to nurture it over the duration of a lifetime.  In my research on agricultural mysticism, I discovered ancient rites in which agricultural people made love on the land.  "The meaning of this union is clear," James Frazier writes in The Golden Bough, "it promotes the sympathetic influence of the sexes on vegetation."  In this way, the couple makes love on the land to promote fertility.  They and the land reach an agreement to produce fruit.  The couple produces children, who will serve in their own time as husbands of the land; the land will produce fruit, such as grains and corns, to sustain the children.  It's a circle of being.  In the end, the land takes the bodies back into itself to re-start the cycle.  Some people where I grew up are comforted by this arrangement—knowing where one belongs, where one will be buried.  Even as a child, I felt the claustrophobia of the arrangement and railed against it.  

(Photo by Ed Noonan)

Four generations of my family have renewed that contract for the last one hundred years.  In The Horizontal Life, I attempt to look at that commitment to the land—unblinking, examining the benefits as well as the deficits.