Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology

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In the foreword to Singing the Land, author Stephanie E. Dickinson writes, I have been waiting for someone to bring Iowa, the black soil breadbasket of my youth and the mono-crop cornucopia of my maturity, to enduring life … Chila Woychik has written such a book. Part memoir, part travelogue, part lyrical essay, Singing the Land records life on a family farm in Iowa over the span of a year. We read about the never-ending cycle of events that serves as the lyrics to her song of love and respect for the land– snowstorms and windstorms, mountain lions and coyotes, crop- and life-destroying flash floods, newborn ducklings and calves, herbicides and pesticides that harm the life-giving nutrients of soil. Throughout, Woychik returns again and again to themes of sacrifice, loss, love, struggle, and, above all, time. Time is a peace child with daisies. A joker with a card up its sleeve. Time is a wristwatch strung to the arm of fate. Time flies and dives and dies.