Melanie Hoffert

Prairie Silence (eBook, ePUB)

A Memoir

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

A rural expatriate's struggle to reconcile family, home, love, and faith with the silence of the prairie land and its people Melanie Hoffert longs for her North Dakota childhood home, with its grain trucks and empty main streets. A land where she imagines standing at the bottom of the ancient lake that preceded the prairie: crop rows become the patterned sand ripples of the lake floor; trees are the large alien plants reaching for the light; and the sky is the water's vast surface, reflecting the sun. Like most rural kids, she followed the out-migration pattern to a better life. The prairie is a hard place to stay-particularly if you are gay, and your home state is the last to know. For Hoffert, returning home has not been easy. When the farmers ask if she's found a "fella," rather than explain that-actually-she dates women, she stops breathing and changes the subject. Meanwhile, as time passes, her hometown continues to lose more buildings to decay, growing to resemble the mouth of an old woman missing teeth. This loss prompts Hoffert to take a break from the city and spend a harvest season at her family's farm. While home, working alongside her dad in the shop and listening to her mom warn, "Honey, you do not want to be a farmer," Hoffert meets the people of the prairie. Her stories about returning home and exploring abandoned towns are woven into a coming-of-age tale about falling in love, making peace with faith, and belonging to a place where neighbors are as close as blood but are often unable to share their deepest truths. In this evocative memoir, Hoffert offers a deeply personal and poignant meditation on land and community, taking readers on a journey of self-acceptance and reconciliation.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Beacon Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 8. Januar 2013
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780807044742
• Artikelnr.: 38234662

Autorenporträt

Melanie Hoffert is the author of Prairie Silence: A Memoir. She grew up on a farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota, where she spent her childhood wandering gravel roads and listening to farmers at church potlucks. Her work has been published in several literary journals, and she holds an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University. Melanie lives in Minneapolis and works for Teach For America. Learn more about her work at melaniehoffert.com.

Inhaltsangabe

Chapter 1: The Allure of Grain Trucks
Chapter 2: Silent Prairie Beginnings
Chapter 3: Harvest Retreat
Chapter 4: When Love Gains a Face
Chapter 5: Rubbers and Nipples on the Farm
Chapter 6: The Last Kiss
Chapter 7: Yoga in the Air
Chapter 8: Born Again for the First Time
Chapter 9: Small-Town Tour
Chapter 10: The Boy
Chapter 11: Floating toward the Light
Chapter 12: Redheaded Redneck
Chapter 13: Bible Camp
Chapter 14: God’s Followers
Chapter 15: The Plainness of Holiness
Chapter 16: Grain Truck Apprenticeship
Chapter 17: Sheets and Lights
Chapter 18: Tiny Cowboy Town
Chapter 19: Flow
Chapter 20: The Last of the Barns
Epilogue: Going Home
Acknowledgments