Affiliated Symposia Archives

Food and Farming in American Life and Letters: A Symposium

15-17 June 2000

Fairgrounds of The Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association, Unity, Maine

Featuring

Carolyn Chute, author of Merry Men, Letourneau's Used Auto Parts, The Beans of Egypt, Maine

Jane Brox, author of Here and Nowhere Else, Five Thousand Days Like This One

Symposium Highlights

Thursday and Friday

critical papers, essays, and poetry
tour of MOFGA's fairgrounds and demonstration plots
readings by Jane Brox and Carolyn Chute
lunches prepared with organic, locally grown foods
book display

Saturday

Trip to Bear Well Orchard, Searsmont, ME
Steve and Cynthia Page have recently placed their twelve-year-old farm under a conservation easement, insuring their land will be farmed in perpetuity. Steve is author of The Orchard Almanac and president of the newly formed Maine Farmland Trust. Lunch available in nearby Camden after the tour. $10 fee.

Trip to Morris Farm, Wiscasset, ME
Since 1994, Morris Farm has been run not by a family but by a community nonprofit organization called The Morris Farm Trust. Mixing dairy, poultry, vegetable, raspberry, and cut-flower production, Morris Farm also runs educational and community outreach programs. Lunch available in Wiscasset after the tour. $10 fee.

Maine Stoneworkers' Guild Rock-Knockers Festival, Unity, ME
To be held all day at MOFGA fairgrounds, this event includes stoneworking workshops, foods by local vendors, a solstice celebration, and evening dance. Stay for all or part of the festival. Free.

Symposium Report

gardens "We were a small community right from the beginning," writes John Gourlie (Quinnipiac College), rather than individuals lost in the anonymity of a large conference. The weekend of 15-17 June, John and twenty-four other scholars, teachers, writers, and farmers--hailing from parts of the Northeast, South Carolina, Ohio, and as far away as Utah in one direction and England in the other--came together in Unity, Maine, to explore the significance of literature and language to our experiences of food and the farming that provides it. Held in the New England-style post-and-beam "Common Ground" conference center run by the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association (MOFGA), this symposium was ASLE's second effort to date at convening a handful of people deeply interested in a focused issue. (The first such meeting was the 1996 symposium on Pacific Rim literatures, held in Hawai'i.)

Papers presented ran the gamut from ecocriticism of canonical authors (Robert Frost, John Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Willa Cather, and Wendell Berry, for example) to critiques of the language employed by biotechnology; from personal narratives on farming, gardening, cooking and eating to an "eco-folkloric" study of the differing significances women of various ethnicities bring to their gardens in the American west; and from analyses of cookbooks to exposes of the genetically modified ingredients readily found in most natural-foods stores. During Q and A, over coffee breaks, and during meals--but of course!--symposium participants discussed these and many other related issues, from agriculture's heavy ecological toll to the ontological strangeness of eating itself. If British writer William Ralph Inge is right in commenting that all of nature is a conjugation of the verb "to eat," then we covered quite a lot of natural grammar among ourselves in a very short time.

chow And speaking of eating--oh boy, did we ever! Praise and glory go to Unity caterer Melissa Bastien for her generous, banquet-style luncheons featuring such organic foods as peas, spinach, beets, potatoes, portabello mushrooms, rhubarb, strawberries, and the like, all procured from local farmers, a list of whom graced every table. Even the flowers--chiefly tall, pink and purple lupines from Melissa's garden--were organic and local. Add to all this the colorful tablecloths, "real" dishes and flatware, the tinkling of wine glasses around delectable hors d'oeuvre boards set out for the keynote authors' receptions, and it's no wonder one participant remarked afterward that the entire symposium felt like one long dinner party.

chute Other highlights from the weekend included readings by Jane Brox and Carolyn Chute. Brox is the author of Here and Nowhere Else and Five Thousand Days Like This One, nonfiction works on her family farm and the surrounding Merrimack (Massachusetts) Valley; Chute is the author of The Beans of Egypt, Maine and three subsequent novels, all of which concern rural northeasterners and the poverty imposed upon them by contemporary economic trends. The Fertile Mind Bookstore (from nearby Belfast, Maine) made these books and many other literary treatments of food and farming available for purchase at two long display tables. MOFGA's Executive Director, Russell Libby, led a walking tour of the 200+ acres of experimental garden plots surrounding the Common Ground Center, and local organic-vegetable farmer Tom Roberts presented a slide show on his efforts to educate (as well as feed) his customers in the importance of growing food in ecologically and socially responsible ways. Evenings included excursions to the Maine coast, as well as an impromptu visit by some of the group to the trial fields of world-famous Johnny's Selected Seeds (a JSS seed expert happened to number among the participants, and she happily obliged people's interest in touring the farm). On the symposium's final day, participants who where able to stay chose between, on the one hand, workshops and a solstice celebration sponsored by the local stoneworkers' guild, and on the other, a van trip to Morris Farm in Wiscasset, where a community non-profit group is demonstrating that a special family farm can survive the death of the last family member willing to farm it.

In a letter he sent me weeks afterward, symposium presenter Bill Conlogue (Marywood University) commented on the significance of the meeting to participants' efforts to widen the ecocritical lens, which some see as too narrowly focused on writing about wilderness and wildlife, to the exclusion of humanly inhabited environments: "We can't live in the world without using nature, and our use (and abuse) is most visible in our rural areas. And there are so many social justice questions at stake here. Ignoring food and farming as areas of literary study is to abandon our imaginative response and definitions of each to those who are more interested in commodifying than caring for them." I can think of at least twenty-four other scholars who couldn't agree more.

--Allison B. Wallace, Unity College of Maine