Announcements to make. My name is danny kane and the owner of the bookstore where im sitting right now. Im the director of the paper plane area festival. We appreciate you being here with us today. It would be perhaps more fun if we were all together on a beautiful sunny day but we appreciate this regardless and plan to be back and stronger than ever in 2021. We had a great series of Online Events they are all archived and available for replay. A couple other things about how this is going to work. Marie is going to give a short author talk and show photos about her book then we will open it up to questions. You can ask questions by clicking that ask a question button at the bottom of your screen or typing into the chat window at the right hand side of your screen. We appreciate you asking questions to keep the discussion moving and we want this to be participatory event as much as we can another thing to note at the bottom of the screen is says by american harvest will take you through the raven bookstore. Com where we have plenty in stock to ship very quickly. Or if youre in lawrence we can deliver it to your house tomorrow at noon for free. Without further ado lets get to american harvest, which is a thoughtful and important look at the intersection of faith and landscape and agriculture in the heartland. These are all issues we are thinking about here in kansas. We are really excited to ab putting this book together for Marie Mockett aba memoir with the japanese say goodbye which is the final for the 10 open book award. Shes written for the new york times, national geographic, glamour, posture and other publications and has been a guest on the world talk of the nation and all Things Considered on npr. Shes a core faculty member of the raneer writing workshop visiting writer in the mfa program at st. Marys college in moraga california. She lives in San Francisco she is coming to us from the monterey peninsula and california today. Please welcome Marie Mockett. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Im so glad we get to meet even in this virtual space. Is that for me . Thats the clue for me to start my presentation i take it . Yes. [laughter] i have a few, i will start with a few photos that i have come a little presentation around american harvest to explain what it is to you. The opening line is this is the land of primary colors. Here are some of the primary colors that i refer to in the book. These are a couple large combines, most farmers i refer to as combines, people outside affirming often refer to them as turbine harvesters. This is a backdrop against which american harvest is set. To give you a little more historical background i live in california but my father side of the family my father is american, both sets of his grandparents emigrate to nebraska, this is my great grandfather percy who was actually born was english but born in spain and then came to the United States via camden new jersey and became the Union PacificRailroad Doctor and moved to western nebraska and here he is driving his horse and buggy no doubt off to go help somebody who is six somewhere in the prairie. I used to read these historical notes on how he became famous in that part of nebraska during the 1918 flu epidemic when he would hire people to drive him from homestead homestead as he would sleep and wake up and take care people who are ill. I used to think that story was amazing because origin so when my family has a tendency to drive as many hours as they can before stopping to sleep on the side of the road. Now of course i think its amazing because i realized he participated in trying to relieve some of the suffering during the past epidemic. Thats made me sort of reflect on that story a little bit differently. Both of my great grandparents purchased or were bartered on a cliff notes version that led to vienna austria, my mother was from japan they both study opera got married in nebraska. Heres my mother and her first ever christmas and they got married and had me. Thats a picture of my grandfather looking at it older combine machine. This is a newer machine, photo taken maybe three years ago. One of the biggest differences you might notice is how long the thing is on the front thats the header. The piece that actually cuts the wheat and then send the cut wheat heads to be thrashed and later the grain is separated from the head of the wheat and goes to the back of the combine. If the front part thats much larger. Therefore more efficient at cutting the wheat. Farmers like us every year eric gets ready in Lancaster County pennsylvania. He loads up his equipping on the back of semi trucks. This is a photo that was taken by a drone i think by the character in the book whose name is samuel. After loading up equipment like this eric and his crew driver about 1700 miles from Lancaster County to texas where the american wheat harvest begins. I have here a map for you that shows you what the journey looks like. The blue dotted line is the harvest journey that eric takes every year, cutting wheat for harvesters in each state and this is the route i followed that forms kind of the spine of the story of american harvest. In this map including a couple of other historic roots the green line shows historical cattle trails, the red line is the oregon trail route. Of course the mormon trail route would be almost parallel to the oregon trail route and vacancy the Union Pacific railroad or the transcontinental railroad. You can see how the harvest route i took in 2017 intersects with a lot of famous roads to Early American History so a lot of the details from the stories around those historical incidents also appear in american harvest. Once on the road the custom harvesters who live in trailers like this, the immovable campsite, the laundry hung out to dry, think somebody put the American Flag up for this picture. I think it looks nice in the picture. Every sunday we go to church, which was a new experience for me. There are a lot of conversations about religion in the book. Cutting wheat in the middle of nowhere means sometimes things break down and miles from town. The guys who eric hires to work from him not only can drive the equipment but are very good at fixing it its a very different way of life than my friends in the city have where if a car breaks down youd take it to a mechanic take it to a shop wait for some videos to fix it and then get the car back. Thats not really the way it works on the farm. Generally these guys try to fix themselves faster and cheaper and its something every worries about with farming because you want to get the crop out right before its destroyed by any of the natural elements. Our journey meant we were exposed to many scenes of great beauties this is actually a picture i took last year in nebraska and its one of those amazing great plains sunsets. The wheat harvest start in early may. You can see how the route goes up to oklahoma and through western kansas and then nips into colorado and nebraska and then there is a long journey through wyoming and over to idaho. That is a little bit of the background for american harvest. I will come back to the virtual conversation. Those photos are gorgeous. What a great way to have a document, not only with the book you written about the experience but also the gorgeous photos as well. Its really great to see those. We have a question from the audience which actually glanced at at the end of your talk. Im wondering about the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on these harvesters. The question is do you tell us what the harvesters are doing now in the crisis . Have they been declared essential . Business as usual for them or . I think it is business as usual for them. I saw a photo the other day they loaded up the first sets of equipment that have to move from pennsylvania to the staging area i think they actually set everything up first in oklahoma before taking it down to texas. The equipment is already on its way. Yes its business as usual. I had heard the last time i have spoken to eric i knew that every year he gets new guys who joined the crew who get a Truck Driving abi know the dmv has been closed since march in pennsylvania so i dont know what the update is on that but thats going to be affecting lots of harvesters. It also harvesters which use International Workers because so Many Americans go to college in september but harvest extends during september into october depending on how far people go. I havent heard with the latest is for International Workers. I think theyre not able to get into the country this year. It already became more and more difficult when theres more paperwork. I wonder with church being such essential part of their life, that. I dont know if theyll continue to go to church maybe Virtual Church which they watch live stream over computer in a trailer or or if they do some version of house church in a trailer i could imagine a scenario in which churches start to meet again in those states before they do in the coastal states. But its good to be very interesting its going to require more improvisation. Heres another question from the audience. Given the time and research there must be a lot that didnt make it into the book. Whats the favorite detail that didnt make the final edit . There was a second pig hunting scene in texas. There is one where we have one pig hunting scene ive never been hunting before and wild pig is really big problem as people who live in rural parts of america know. I was introduced to me and i go on a hunt. The second pig had abpig hunt had been taken out and that was unfortunate because i was trying to capture that crazy adrenaline. I was trying to convey some of that expense. That doesnt make it in. Theres so much history that this book intercepts with that i think we had to cut out a lot of it but theyre still quite about history and the book. Those things didnt make it in. Theres also a visit i made to a farm actually in kansas which is where i had a rather abit didnt really fit in with the characters were front and center in americas heart so that got cut. Theres a number of things the first chapter i wrote is really long and we had to keep all of that material. This really interesting just thoughts on the writing process which is always as a writer might itself is it questioning always wanted. You written a novel in a memoir, now youve written american harvest which is nonfiction with somebody else as the main character. Do you find, what are the differences in the writing process for you between the three different types of projects . Its so funny because i intended for this to be i intended for this very much to not be a book in which i appear as the character. I was really trying to say im going to take a step back and betray this world as i see it. The problem i ran into was that i couldnt fade into the background. Im female and different looking enough that i kept having experiences that interrupted what i thought the narrative was going to be. I thought the narrative was going to be me describing what the harvesters were doing so that people at home, by which i meant the city, could understand how it was that harvest happens. Things kept interrupting the experience for me and those interruptions became more intense and by the time we went to idaho, the last place the story of the harvest takes place, we were camping on an indian reservation in the rv park of an indian reservation, harvesting wheat, it was owned by a new tribe but actually farmed by the son of the mormon settlers. Its really complicated piece of American History. And its impossible to focus on harvesting the wheat because everywhere i went nate dont want people thought i was native american. I couldnt pretend like this wasnt happening and i couldnt pretend like we were not on an indian reservation. All of that intruded on the narrative. A profoundly affected the shape of the story took. One of the things that happened was my editor read the first said he was a character initially appear on page 80 i said thats probably the time i realized im gonna have to be a character. We have to reinsert the presence in the beginning. That was an interesting experience. Some ways its not that different than the previous book. It strikes me as even im glad you became a character in the book because it wouldve been disingenuous to ignore all the things happening. It speaks to the issues of the urban and rural divide and identity and all kinds of interesting things that the book is dealing with. Speaking of the rural urban divide. You see this as another audience question. Dc correlation current debate around covid19 and the rural urban divide in america as an urban resident in a rural state and very interested in hearing what you have to say about this. I was actually thinking of this morning i had a childhood friend who lives outside of the city and and say the encrypted infection rate is incredibly low but its not to help to reopen the United States for business. I said that infection rate is lower than we thought it was to be because people have been sheltering in place. I feel like theres a huge, i feel it covid19 has revealed that difference between the lifestyles in the ways that we work. There was a meme i saw the other day on facebook from someone living in the city. Im going to point out how all new yorkers sat stayed home and midwest stormed their capitals waving guns saying reopen our state which of course is a gross over supplication of whats happened in the cities and the midwest. The kind of rhetoric which is unhelpful and may be sad. I think this pandemic continues to highlight those. Here in kansas two things that i think are relevant that are going on, one is the current hot spots in kansas are in dodge city and garden city is the meatpacking plant. Couple largescale meatpacking operations having a really hard time controlling their ab containing the virus. Theres really intense debate bouncing around in the courts about what churches can and cannot do. There is a church near lawrence that is really trying hard to keep this right to have services in person and theres all sorts of rhetoric between people within lawrence who tend to have more cosmopolitan and urban point of view and the people in the country where the church is located. So it certainly is an interesting way. Its funny too, a few weeks ago i had this conversation with eric on the phone around food supply and we were talking about how covid19 is impacted wheat farming and i wrote a piece which was published about a week or two weeks ago. In that conversation he said to me, the interesting thing to watch is meatpacking and meet facilities. This is weeks ago. As is often the case of conversations with him now im suddenly showing up in the news. Somebody has a comment on meatpacking facilities in south dakota and iowa. I think also in nebraska around grand island, anywhere along the interstate 80 you can see how the viruses spreading and traveling across the United States and impacting bar houses and meatpacking facilities. The other stories is there to be meat shortage. We will see. Its interesting because that will also reveal to us how dependent we are across the country on people who live far away from us. The very idea of who is essential has become such a political and loaded an important question. Is it really coverage of who is essential which i understand, it was always medical people and medical personnel but its not like farmers really set at home and sat on our homes for very long if at all because of course that is essential. Heres an interesting question from the audience. Was it hard to spend so much time with people who are so different from you or in what ways was it hard or not so hard. Before you answer that just how long were you on the road with the crew and camping alongside them. Can you talk a little bit more about the process of the book and then answer the question about spending so much time with people who are different . I think i was on the road with the harvesters for about five months total from may to september. Might have been a little bit shy of that. There were a couple times i had to leave and come back. To give you an understanding of how extraordinary the people are in the book, eric had purchased, i didnt understand this completely the first time he told me that he had purchased an additional trailer for a girl. There was a trailer that eric lives with his family had a trailer for the guys and he would say, i bought a new trailer for a girl because the character named bethany in the book was going to go along for harvest. He was also saying, you can stay in that trailer. Before i really fully understood the implications of what that meant. He was extraordinary and open and we had been having a number of conversations over the years about farming. He knew i lived in new york city but my family had this farm he knew my farm but he knows it still my farm ground better than i do. He was trying extremely hard to share his knowledge of agriculture and farming with me. Not just wheat farming in nebraska but all kinds of farming. He took me to my first abi know you were talking to ab earlier about to confirm she took me to my first layer firms, dairy farms, etc. In pennsylvania so i could start to get the whole picture of agriculture. Then what happened was really in 2015 we were all, he was very nervous before the election, he remembered so many of his thoughts there was no way donald trump would win, eric had a lot of concerns he said i think its possible he will win. And then trump did win and then eric thought, one of the reasons this happened is because we have this gap in understanding the way our country works so thats when it was sort of the decision or invitation was put forward that i go along with harvest to start to develop an even more whole picture of what this urban and rural divide was. That is kind of the background to the book. As far as how difficult it was, it was only difficult in the sense that i didnt always understand what was happening, what i was seeing and what i was hearing but theres also the degree to which i would like being placed in a situation like that. It was challenging but i never it wasnt like an unwelcome to challenge because thats an environment i thrive in the kind of thing i like to do and those are the kinds of conversations that i generally like to have. What was one of the biggest surprises to you that came out of this process of writing this book. One of the biggest surprises would be that i had to ask the question of what christianity was and was there anything i could unders