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In 2008 I attended the University of Michigan’s annual Bear River Writer’s Conference and attended the sectional led by Anne-Marie Oomen on creative non-fiction and memoir. She was wonderful. A gentle, experienced teacher ( at the time of this review, teaches at Michigan’s Interlochen Arts Academy and is chair of creative writing) who encouraged us, in response to writing prompts, to make lists of thoughts, write fast and dig deeper. While attending the conference I bought Pulling Down the Barn, a collection of essays recollecting (re-collecting) Oomen’s childhood on a farm in Michigan’s Oceana County. As her bio in the back of the book says, she “ totally failed as a tractor driver. Which led her to believe that perhaps she wasn’t meant to spend her life on a farm.” Though it was a realization that did not “change her love of the place, just her direction from it.” Which is obvious, I think, in this collection. Oomen’s love comes through even in the midst of stories that most distress her (and us) – the killing of the sick cows on Christmas, the violence recognized between two young brothers, the burning of the horse who died near the artesian wells (the fire chef telling her father when he asks for permission to burn it, “Do what you gotta do.” ) In each essay – she takes us back with her, let’s us stand in the same field, sit round the same dinner table partaking in family banter, lie in the same bed as she gazes out the window at the moon, wondering , worrying. In these essays, she let’s us love what she loves. But what is it about pastoral stories that move so many of us? For those of us who have never lived this life, who have grown up in suburbs or cities, seeing cows and horses only in picture book stories, who recognize the shape and purpose of a tractor but have never even had an opportunity to fail at driving one – it’s their earthiness I think. And probably a naive idealization of growing your own food, knowing the animals you may kill for their meat, or raise for their milk or eggs or wool. But we sense those who live or have lived this life have hold of something that eludes city folk who depend on the electric grid and machines to ease our daily existence. On the farm, life and death, sex and love, and the need for helping hands have daily context. It’s a world that consists not just of other humans and a few pets, but includes large, grand animals, both domesticated and wild. It’s a place where the hay, the trees, the fields, the rocks, the cultivated rows have major roles, demanding we pause, notice so that, as Oomen does, we can one day honor them in our remembering. In our session Anne-Marie Oomen said that reading these essays now, she thinks they are perhaps a bit too lush. I say – in these spare postmodern times – let’s hear it for a little lushness. And for the mist they bring to the eyes as we read. <back to list |
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