and on to the next stage…

Yep, a year went by. A. Whole. Year. Plus some. And now we’re in the midst of high summer, squishing the squash bugs, stringing up the tomatoes and hoping for rain always.

In the meantime, a new website took shape. It still has a few kinks to work out, but you can check it out. I don’t blog quite like I used to, but I am starting again. I write for the website, and I’ve started a new series of posts about farmers markets on the LJW site, WellCommons. I’m doing this under the umbrella of Farmers Market Board Chair, aka Who Else Would Volunteer to Do This?

I’ll still post here once in a while, I think. It’s a good, creative thinking space.

 

 

Mystery revealed, the swish of April, and wishing there were 8 days in the week

It amazes me that they begin small yet strong, standing on wobbly legs for that first drink.

This is the long awaited kid of Number 128, our mystery goat. He was born three weeks ago.

Then came: thesis defense (passed with honors – woot!), planting and more planting, the arrival of new bees, market preparations and I don’t remember what else because who can remember all the little details when you’re on a full gallop through the month of April? Pant, pant.

In the coming weeks, this blog will undergo a transition, a sort of diverging of personality. I’m not sure what the end result will be. Some content will be at theredtractorfarm.com, and other observations will stay here. But it’s almost May, and anything could happen. Stay tuned…

 

the big day

I just left the chickenhouse, the sound of peeping fading behind closed doors as I walked away. I’m tempted to go there again, sit on the floor, and watch those shuffle-hop-waddle creatures for a few minutes.

I was a wreck with nerves! We had last minute preparations this morning  that I rushed through. The mailman was due in three hours, then two, then one, maybe now? We put the brooders on blocks off the floor, set up the heat lamps, spread the bedding and filled the new mason jar-top waterers. Then we checked the temperatures in the boxes (90 degrees and rising) and went to the truck to haul a large trashcan filled with 170 pounds of grain. We used a dolly to ferry it across the soggy marsh the yard has become after days of rain.

Then the phone rang. The post office. The chicks had arrived, and would I please come pick them up?

At the post office, the staff had put the box on the counter. We could hear them the moment we entered the doorway. The employee who asked if they were ours cooed at them and told them goodbye. “I’ve been talking to them,” he said. “Must be working too much.”

The large box emitted sharp chirps the whole way home.

In the chickenhouse, we carefully opened the carton and picked up each tiny day-old bird. With one hand we held each one firmly and with the other gently pressed its beak into the water. Fifty-four times in a row, the same quick motion.  Twenty-four hours on the road makes a little bird thirsty, and we wanted them to know where to get started.

Then we watched them, oooed and awed. New life at the farm.

 

Mystery Goat

Goat One-twenty-eight is one of the head-scratchers — a member of the herd who likes to be petted.  She isn’t forceful about her desires, however. She has a plodding gate that exudes an air of constant relaxation, as though she knows she can take as much time as she would like to slide up to me, lower her head, and expect a rub behind the ears.

This attitude suits her pregnancy, too. We’ve been waiting for her to kid since the end of January.

At that time, One-twenty-eight looked as big as any of the other does. One by one, they each kidded and we led them away to their private stalls. One-twenty-eight stayed alone in the manger. When she still had not delivered after three weeks, we decided to return her to the herd with all the other does and the 13 kids. I have wondered if perhaps her portly figure was merely a sign of reaching into the food trough too often. I affectionately have called her Fatty Goat, but she ignores the teasing and eats the same as the other does.

This morning, as I do every day, I watched her waddle up to the hay to get her share. She stopped to relieve herself, slowly easing the back half of her body to the ground. Her udder brushed the straw covered floor. Surely, I thought, this week she will kid.

We don’t know what happened. I’ve speculated that she lost a kid early in the season and got pregnant again later. Or she might have had her turn for a romantic evening with Cash much later than the other ladies.

She’s the Mystery Goat, and she’s going to keep me guessing.

 

1: Blogging the farm, and farming the blog

To go forward, I look back. It’s a circular, reflective process. By blogging about the farm, I’m farming the blog: learning, creating, cultivating.

We studied our successes and failures of last year to develop our growing plan for this year. If I am intimidated by the arrival of chicks at the farm next week, I realize I neutered male goats in January, a major step up from walking the dog around the block, no? Less than two years ago I lived in town and my greatest concern on Saturday mornings was deciding where to get coffee and groceries.

We study the past of farming, too. We consider the diversity that farms used to have, with garden plots, several kinds of livestock, ponds, pastures and trees. Those farmers managed to make a living without many of the harsh pesticides, herbicides and antibiotics that upset the balance of the land or the animal. We want this for our future, too. I want eggs to taste creamy rich golden the way they do when chickens peck in the grass. I will eat meat knowing that it roamed in the pasture only days before, with the company of other animals and plenty of food and space.

In writing, I re-read what I have written a day ago, a month and years ago. I see awkward phrases. I cringe at ostentatious and gaudy words that stick out from the page. Then, here and there, I discover a gem, too.

I joy in what is good, and vow to learn from the rest. Improvement is impossible without recognizing where I began, and how I have arrived at the present.

 

2: Art; why blog an MFA

I did the essay. For about eight years I studied its form and history. I wrote about 20 of them, each about 10- 15 pages long. Then I workshopped the buggers until I couldn’t stand creative writing workshops anymore. In the course of those years, I never wrote an essay that wasn’t for an assignment. That stands out to me now, as this blog-thesis project draws to a close, because I looked forward to blogging in a way I never had with essays. I’m hooked.

Essays are taught in creative writing programs nationwide alongside the short story, the novel, the play and the poem. The blog, to my knowledge, is not often taught as a place to explore the techniques of the essay, or fiction or poetry, for that matter, but it should be. It’s a frame that can adapt each of those forms, from serialized fiction to poetic verse to lengthy inner monologues.

But is it art, Joe Harrington asked.

It’s a tough question for me to answer. Bloggers — bloggarts? — have much in common with the essayists, even those credited with creating the form. Early essayists such as Sir Francis Bacon pioneered the “fresh interest in the ordinary bustle of living,” essayist Lydia Fakuldiny said. This included “people getting sick, deluding themselves, having friends, behaving like fools or like sharks, finding others (or themselves) unbearable at times, growing old, acting up and all the rest, often in the most baffling combinations.”

Nearly any type of blog brings this personal approach to observation. A political blog comments upon the achievements and faults of politicians, a family blogger writes of the comedy of childrearing, an artist blogs about his struggle to bring meaning to the statistics of consumer culture. They attempt to put a personal focus on common or uncommon experiences for the purpose of sharing or conversing about those observations with others, creating a sense of community in humankind.

Unlike a printed, bound, static essay, however, the blog lives. It creates a community by directly engaging the reader/viewer/listener in the conversation. Through comments following a blog post, people in that blog’s readership or community can respond to the writer, pushing her to reconsider her point. A reader may also affirm the universal nature of the writer’s observations. There can be a back-and-forth to the conversation, the very essence of an essay to begin with.

I ditched the essay for the blog because I finally found a form that could be short or long, carry on a conversation indefinitely or never bring up a topic again. It was the perfect medium to test character development (fiction techniques), narrative and tension (essay techniques) and could handle an experiment or two (poetry). It cultivated an audience. It became written performance.

When I started this project, I was afraid to write anything that was not a narrative. Then there were lists. One-line entries. Randomness. Poems.

But is it art?

Art often takes an existing form or object or view and inverts it somehow – makes you see it in a new way. So, what does this blog do differently than another? How does one novel stand out against another? By itself?  What makes it art-ful/full of art? What makes it worth of a master’s degree in creative writing?

The answer, for me, lies in connection. I have achieved some level of art if the writing engaged you, made you look at your food or your choices or your relationships differently than if you hadn’t read it. It’s that connection forged between humans that gives art meaning, and meaning to our lives.

 

3: Everything happens at once

I want to sprinkle nails in the neighbors’ driveway. I take the high road. Other neighbors restore my faith in Well Behaved People. The tractor broke. The first week of 70 degrees every day arrives. I wish I was outside playing in the dirt. Is the dog going to be sick from eating a whole chicken carcass she stole from the trash? Meetings are scheduled three nights out of five. The lawnmower leaks a dark inky pool in the shop. The grass grows. The thesis is due.

Sunlight: a salve for stress.

 

4: Analytics

Most number of visits:  January 7 post, Snowbows and snowdrifts, with 78.

Month with the most visitors:  January, with 570 views. It’s all about the goats – serialized drama with the mamas.

Number of views from May 27, 2009  to March 26, 2010:  2,473

Number of posts:  121

Number of comments:  207

Number of times I’ve used the word crazy, as in we are or I am:  3

Number of times I’ve used the words “not easy”:  2

Number of times I’ve used the word goat in a sentence, title or caption:  114

Post with the most comments, so far: Classify that writing, with 10. Coming in second, with 8 responses each, are Grow enough to share and Goats versus Farmers

Personal favorite of the comments: Joe Harrington, responding to blog lit post: “Risk averse??! This from the person who is doing a BLOG as her MFA thesis? While holding a responsible full-time job AND running a farm in rural Kansas with her lover??? Maybe that’s so much of the landscape that you don’t see it any more, but to me, that does NOT say “risk averse.” Excelsior!

 

5: A Wrinkle in Time

When I began writing the 31 days of blogtastic fun, the idea was to have a post a day. Illness and the work of the farm have intervened, delaying writing by a day or two. But I’m still committed to the idea, so sometimes I put up three posts for three days all at once, as I’m doing today. This completely defeats the nature of a blog, which usually provides one morsel of writing at a time.

Time has been central to this blog — both thematically and in form. The plan has always been to conclude at some point and turn it in. More recently, I’ve decided I don’t want it to sit frozen, dormant in the house of WordPress, so I’ll keep writing. Perhaps on a new blog for Red Tractor Farm, or maybe here.

WordPress allows me to decide what the date of a post is to be in the present, past or future, so I can alter time. This blog also has a bug I never fixed that assigns time to comments and sometimes posts that I know weren’t written at 3 a.m. I’ve noticed this repeatedly over the past several days I have copied each post into an enormous word document that will become the pdf I turn in for the thesis.

I keep asking myself what I am losing by converting from the online form to a form intended for print. I want to preserve as much of the active functions of the blog as I can, so I’m including links back here for every post, and links out to the information I connected to in the text before.

The comments that have appeared here up to Tuesday, March 30, 2010 are included with each post, but the final pdf will of course lack the ability for people to comment any more, unless they go to the blog.

I think the main thing that I lose in the conversion is readability. The elegance of columns and the ease of connecting to the rest of the blog disappears.  Maybe someone in a far-off university who is researching blogging in 10 years will come across the thesis and skip the pdf in favor of reading it on line.

The irony, of course, is that what started as an online medium will be converted to PDF for submission, to be accessible online through a thesis and dissertation database. Ha.

All this hoop jumping for The Institution makes me woozy. Or it’s the lack of sleep.

 

6: Community creation sensation

My daydream for the farm is for it to be a place that fosters community. This has everything to do with choosing blogging as a form for an MFA thesis, too.

A farm inherently has drama. Here we draw fear, uncertainty and hope in the same breath. The farm gives so much to us but takes enormous energy and dedication. There’s the anticipation of new animals being born here, the wonder of food growing from seed and of course the people who strive – and sometimes fail – to make a farm successful. It’s naturally a place of life, and of death.

Some farms bring these tenets of farm life to light by offering workshops and classes on butchering, compost creation, organic gardening, shearing wool and home-canning vegetables. Sharing the work of the farm lifts the veil. It makes food a more intimate experience. It expands the community of people who know how food travels from farm to fork.

One of the attractions to providing such experiences is to make the farm more than the physical buildings or the land. They build connections and create a sense of place. I’m anxious to get there, but I know we are still farming newbies and probably years away from offering much more than tours of the goat pens for friends.

Blogging the farm provides a similar intimate experience for the people who follow along. The posts peek in on the theater of farm life. As more people follow the arc of a story, they become invested in its outcome as individuals, but also with fellow readers. Reading and commenting on the blog becomes a shared experience. It creates community among people who will likely never meet.

So, where does this take us? Drama…theater…performance…audience…community. Blogging makes writing into a performance act before an audience. For a moment of a post or months of writings, the audience is participating in the same experience. Some do so at a distance, while others want more direct involvement.

The opportunity to write in front of a (participatory) audience is of the chief reasons I chose this form over writing a collection of essays for my MFA. Perhaps a failing of this blog project is that I haven’t cultivated that community enough – yet.

Hope springs eternal: first 2010 seeds planted outdoors