Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Graduate Theses and Dissertations Dissertations 2016 Erratics: a collection of linked stories Dana L. Thomann Iowa State University Follow this and additional works at: https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd Part of the Creative Writing Commons Recommended Citation Thomann, Dana L., "Erratics: a collection of linked stories" (2016). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. 15180. https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/etd/15180 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Iowa State University Capstones, Theses and Dissertations at Iowa State University Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Iowa State University Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Erratics: A collection of linked stories by Dana Thomann A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Major: Creative Writing and Environment Program of Study Committee: K.L. Cook, Major Professor Abby Dubisar Barbara Haas Paul Lasley Iowa State University Ames, Iowa 2016 Copyright © Dana Thomann, 2016. All rights reserved. ii DEDICATION For the smart, strong, and selfless woman who always puts her family and the “fanch” first. Without Ma Sue’s nurturing spirit, this work would not exist. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii PUBLICATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENT iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v PREFACE vi FAMILY TREE xii EPIGRAPH xiii PART I. HEAVY LIFTING 1 ACT OF CONTRITION 2 HEAVY LIFTING 20 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT CHARLIE 22 SHITWORK CENSUS 36 PART II. WEANING 41 WEANING 42 FLOCK 56 BURIAL 66 IN MEMORY OF PIGS 88 PART III. RURAL BODIES 92 ERRATICS 93 FLOOD GAP 121 RURAL BODIES 132 SEED SAVING 133 REFERENCES 144 iv PUBLICATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENT Grateful acknowledgement to Flyway Journal of Writing and Environment, which first published “Flood Gap” in 2014. Sincere thanks to Glimmer Train Stories for recognizing “Heavy Lifting” (previously titled “Mother’s Day Tornado”) and “Burial” as a finalist for publication in the New Writer’s Award competition. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Iowa State University is exactly the place I needed to create Erratics. The Creative Writing and Environment MFA Program and the Sustainable Agriculture Program at Iowa State University provided me with inspiration and ideas I would not have gained elsewhere. I am grateful to have been given an academic and writing home in my home state of Iowa. I had the distinct pleasure of working with the brilliant K.L. Cook who took me under his patient wing as my major professor. He never stopped being an advocate for each story in this collection. His mentorship is something I will aspire to emulate when working with my students. Professor Barbara Haas, Dr. Dubisar, and Dr. Lasley also deserve thanks for serving on my committee and kindly offering helpful insights during my defense. Special thanks to my MFA cohort: William Bonfiglio, Corinna Carter, Chloe Clark, Sam Futhey, Elizabeth Giorgi, Erin Schmiel, Kelly Slivka, and Adam Wright. Your relentless encouragement and good cheer kept me writing. Dr. Daniel Johnson Platt, I’m so grateful Iowa and literature brought us together. I look forward to having you, a gifted intellect, alongside as we both strive to publish work that pays homage to the ever-inspiring, natural world we both adore. My sustenance, my muses: family and home. Love and thanks to my sisters Deanna and Temple—the best Southeast Iowa walking buddies a gal could ever have. Trail’s End Angus is my favorite place in the whole wide world, full of pasture and songbirds. Without the work ethic of Pa Dean and Ma Sue, it would not exist. Pa and Ma are the most noble, sustainable “fanchers” I know. I am grateful they allow me refuge on our humble “fanch” whenever I need. The “fanch” and people of my place never cease to inspire me. I am proud to be a farm girl from Iowa. vi PREFACE My MFA thesis, a short story cycle entitled Erratics, follows two farm families from 1986-2015, the Deans and Elsasses, who live in Buccan County, Iowa. Told through many voices and in twelve separate stories, the collection begins as the families and their community confront the 1980’s Farm Debt Crisis and continues to document the aftermath of the crisis, particularly the effects on human bodies, landscapes, and the primary source of income for the families, swine. Why did I choose the 1980’s Farm Debt Crisis as the subject matter for the collection? In Southeastern Iowa, I was a farm child born into this tumultuous historical and political beast. I recall the palpable tension, sorrow, and anxiety of the time, especially during an uncle’s farm sale. In 1986, I was four-years-old when farmer Dale Burr shot his wife, banker, another farmer, and himself in Lone Tree, Iowa—the community in which my mother was raised on a farm. The murder-suicide occurred only a few miles down the road from my family’s farm in Riverside, Iowa. Burr, a once successful farmer, was being foreclosed on by the bank. I attended high school with a friend whose father was murdered in the tragedy. An article clipped from the Iowa City Press Citizen detailing the Dale Burr incident is nestled at the bottom of a wicker basket, a place my family keeps articles of significance. Stacked beside this article is another piece, dated February 1985, entitled “Farm Debt Blowout Looms, Farmers Threatened by Serfdom.” It features a prediction by Dr. Neil Harl, Iowa State University Professor of Economics, that family farmers would soon become industrial serfs to larger corporate agricultural interests. I used to rub my fingers along these articles as a young child, both fascinated and appalled as I read. When my family started losing money, due to both vii falling prices and swine disease, on our pig herd in the late 1990s, my mother would repeat, “Serfs. We’re turning into serfs.” In 1999, I became one of two students in my rural class of forty-four whose family’s sole income was generated by the farm. In the 1980s, at least half my classmates’ families’ sole incomes came from family farming. As a teenager growing up in the aftermath of the 1980’s Farm Debt Crisis, I felt embarrassed about my family’s livelihood. Although we had, unlike other farm families, survived, we were considered failures. We worked hard in adverse conditions (heat, manure, rain, ill livestock), got very little in return, and felt an intense anxiety that we would lose the farm, our home, the place my parents precariously tried to make payments on each month. I loved growing up on the farm—my animals especially—but I felt being the daughter of farmers made me poor, marginalized, and academically inadequate. My parents did not have college degrees. I studied and worked incredibly hard to leave the farm behind. After attending the University of Iowa as an undergraduate, I moved to South Dakota to teach on the Rosebud Reservation through Teach For America. I document this to acknowledge a turning point in my thinking about my upbringing, especially the shame I often felt as a child of a multigenerational farm family. Digging into issues of power and privilege, I started to understand that good, hardworking people can be forced into bad situations through no fault of their own. (Of course, I fully recognize as a person of the dominant culture, I have an abundance of privilege not experienced by people of color.) People in corrupt systems are not necessarily to blame as much as the system itself. I started to understand that oppressive systems most succeed when people are led to believe they, as members of the system, are an embarrassment. They shy away from speaking viii out, for fear of calling attention to what feels like personal, family, or community failure. This cycle of shame further perpetuates oppression. When my Lakota students on the Rosebud Reservation felt courageous enough to write about their culture, the grotesque and the beautiful, I knew it was some of the most moving writing I would ever read. I always say my students taught me more those two years than I could have ever taught them, and in an indirect way, I am indebted to my students for giving me the courage to tell the stories of my own family, my own culture, and the ways we have dealt with a crisis that feels beyond our control. Silence only undermines the oppressed. My hope is that Erratics will give voice to strong people who knew the world of pre-industrial farming, who knew pigs before they were put into confined animal feeding operations, and who knew farmland before the use of glyphosate. The two families featured in the collection are no saints, but they are hardworking, smart, and resilient, and they are confused by what is happening to them and what it means for not only them but for their children and grandchildren and the tradition of family farming. They cope and endure, and still they sometimes come up short. Ironically, my personal evolution as a farm kid coincided with the appearance of a new, hipper farm movement. Books such as The Ominivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser, and the organic food movement have gained momentum. This movement provides a support group of sorts, gives me confidence to add my voice to the many voices contributing to the complex discussion of the United States’ agricultural system. When my Teach For America colleagues from cities, who grew up with CEO lawyer parents and graduated from Ivy League schools, started listening to bluegrass, growing and canning their own food, and talking of wanting their own farms, I was stunned.