In Thomas Jefferson’s day, 90 percent of the population worked on family farms. Today, in a world dominated by agribusiness, less than 1 percent of Americans claim farm-related occupations. What was lost along the way is something that Evelyn I. Funda experienced firsthand when, in 2001, her parents sold the last parcel of the farm they had worked since they married in 1957. Against that landscape of loss, Funda explores her family’s three-generation farming experience in southern Idaho, where her Czech immigrant family spent their lives turning a patch of sagebrush into crop land.
The story of Funda’s family unfolds within the larger context of our country’s rich immigrant history, western culture, and farming as a science and an art. Situated at the crossroads of American farming, Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament offers a clear view of the nature, the cost, and the transformation of the American West. Part cultural history, part memoir, and part elegy, the book reminds us that in losing our attachment to the land we also lose some of our humanity and something at the very heart of our identity as a nation.
Evelyn I. Funda is an associate professor of American literature at Utah State University. She has written extensively on Willa Cather and her creative nonfiction has appeared in literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner.
Evelyn I. Funda is an associate professor of American literature at Utah State University. She has written extensively on Willa Cather and her creative nonfiction has appeared in literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner.
Table of Contents
List of illustrations
Preface: "In Dirt We Trust" Dodder Loosestrife Wild Oats Sage Cheatgrass "The True Point of Beginning" Notes Acknowledgments
What People are Saying About This
Alexander Theroux
"I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed Weeds. Such a truthful book. Your book made me admire Evelyn Funda, yearn to become a farmer, wish to live out West, and love the real America all at once! "—Alexander Theroux
Kim Barnes
“Funda writes about farming, family, love, and loss with the ear of a poet and the eye of a scholar. . . . Weeds is a soulful, intelligent reexamination of what it means to be an orphaned daughter of the American Dream.”—Kim Barnes, author of In the Kingdom of Men
Lisa Knopp
“Weeds is a loving, poignant, and insightful story. I’m placing my copy of it on the same shelf in my home library as the western memoirs of William Kittredge, Linda Hasselstrom, Ivan Doig, and Terry Tempest Williams.”—Lisa Knopp, author of What the River Carries
