Greetings Friends!
So F(unny) Story
Today I got my first draft back from my editor.
Back story; I knew when I turned in my manuscript that my word count was over the target. In my mind, I would cut a few thousand words, get to add a few things I already know I missed, and then be good. Then I found out it’s 50,000 words over.
That’s a whole extra book too much. It’s 291 single-spaced, double-sided pages. Commercial paperback equivalent: nearly 600 pages.
I’ve been walking around for a few weeks thinking the best case scenario is, I’m going to have to cut my baby in half. I’ve been having day-mares about my editors saying (as dozens of editors before them have) “nobody wants to read about the nitty-gritty of agriculture. People want to hear about food porn, bad boy chefs with their arms crossed, and picturesque farms where it’s somehow always the golden hour. Nobody cares about the real story.” And then they’d just draw a big read line through hundreds of my pages. That’s what I was steeling myself for.
Don’t get me wrong, editing is for the best, for everyone. I’ve written any number of 5,000 word stories that get cut to 2,000 and it rips my heart out, but I usually begrudgingly realize that it makes the story more accessible. But this is different. This book isn’t just a piece I’m writing because it’s interesting and newsy and I need to pay rent. This book is my community. Its pages are filled with people I care about, talking about the most important experiences of their lives. I can’t just cut them willy-nilly because “publishing.” I don’t have it in me.
But then, the unexpected happened.
My editor came back, and said, essentially, “yeah, it’s too long. But it’s all good. And the thing is, you have a really natural break in the middle. I’m going to recommend you move forward with two separate books.”
And that’s how I got picked up for a second book.
But. Then my hesitation was that, you all, my people, paid for a book that includes both a blow-by-blow breakdown of the rise and fall of the small family farm *and* the revitalization of the Americas’ long Big Team Farms tradition (and the bonus Big Team Farms Playbook, too). I wasn’t about to pull a split-the-last-movie-into-two on you all.
So we came to an agreement. Everyone who’s already pre-ordered Farm (and Other F Words) will automatically receive a matching copy of Book 2 (current working title, what else, Big Team Farms), when it’s released in December 2021. That means if you purchased an ebook, you’ll get both ebooks. If you purchased a soft cover, you’ll get both soft covers. If you purchased multiple, you’ll get matching multiples.
All that to say, new secret perk y’all. Two books for the price of one. The first a painstaking chronicle of why the agriculture we have now isn’t working, and the second, a spirit-lifting saga of where the future of farming lies and how members of this community are getting us there. So this time next year, you’ll be up to your eye balls in sassy farm knowledge to impress all your family, friends, and nemeses.
And I’ll add that pre-orders are still open! If you’d like to buy (or gift!) a second copy, that’s still an option (or you could forward this email to a special someone and encourage them to buy it for you). Also, if you want to buy a copy and pay it forward, that’s still an option too, or if you know someone who would love to read these, but doesn’t have the funds, let me know. We’ve got some community-funded copies ready to go.
F(arm) Art
This week’s piece is the latest from the talented Alissa Welker. She’s done a bunch of great pieces for the #FarmArt project, and always brings a compelling mix of human and plants to the mix.
“It very much encompasses the idea that we are what we eat. Our energy and the calories we run on depends on the type of food we put into our bodies. Also, the two carrots come together in the shape of a heart to symbolize the idea that food and what we eat can be so core to our cultures and our individual personalities.” - Alissa
To me, this image highlights the way that the plants (flowers, fruits, vegetables) that we cultivate become a part of who we are. We grow them, not just by planting seeds, but with our minds and hearts. Over the course of human history, they’ve become reflections of our wants and needs, our tastes and aesthetics. And as we shape them, they in turn shape us. We sync.
Technologist Kevin Kelly says, “technology is the real skin of our species,” and though today, we think of technology as smartphones and spaceships, the reality is, Indigenous Americans used their deep, agricultural knowledge to transform the simple grass tesotine to create the most advance piece of food technology the planet has perhaps ever known; corn (or maize). Technology is applied human knowledge, and therefore our food-procurement technologies; farming and proto-farming, hunting and fishing, domestication of plants, animals, fungi, and bacteria (even those that live inside us) are, as Nate Silva says, “an extension of our mindedness.” We feed plants our minds and bodies when we select, plant, tend, harvest, and eat them. “We build them, and they build us.”
F(arm) Museum Update
Just a quick hit today; a *deep* cut from the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie, a quote from The Collector on Knowhere;
"These stones, it seems, can only be brandished by beings of extraordinary strength. These carriers can use the stone to mow down entire civilizations like wheat in a field. Once, for a moment, a group was able to share the energy amongst themselves, but even they were quickly destroyed by it."
You might notice that this being, who resides in the far reaches of the galaxy, seems to be unexpectedly familiar with Earth’s crop mix. Or perhaps wheat is a more adaptable species than we expect, and it (or a similar species) is actually common throughout many worlds. Or maybe it’s a translation issue. What struck me about this quote was not the incongruous farming callout in general, but the specific visual it conjures. It’s a common agricultural trope, actually, highlighted in stories like Children of the Corn and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the idealized farm aesthetic used as a visual tie to harvest in its incarnation as cold, purposeful, systematic, and complete death and destruction. It feels like this representation is a perversion of agrarianism, but is it? Or is it just following it to its logical conclusion?
My favorite part is the third sentence though because, of course, *SPOILER ALERT* the Guardian’s will go on to share the energy amongst themselves and live. A subtle “the way to overcome the destructive tendencies of agriculture is through teamwork” insight from the MCU? I like to think so.
Anyway, highly recommend the pop culture podcast Binge Mode Marvel if you’re into this kind of deep dive (they do Game of Thrones, Star Wars, and Harry Potter too).
Last F(ew) Things
I wrote a thing, The US Farm Sector is Gearing Up to Cash In On Climate Action. In case you thought that I believe in paying farmers for “carbon sequestration” through privately organized markets, that’s a no for me dawg. (You can find some other potentially interesting writings of mine on Medium as well.)
It’s a little farther afield, but if you ever have 30-40 minutes to kill on a Friday afternoon and want to watch rural reporter Bryce Oates and myself *go off* on rural news stories, check out our live weekly recap for ruralorganizing.org here.
As always, don’t hesitate to respond to this email with thoughts, questions, concerns, or really good gifs. And follow along on Twitter and Instagram for more regular updates in between BTF emails.
Rock on,
Sarah