Of Farms and Fables: Project (B)Log

A Post-Show Blog Post (Jennie)

2012-01-10T12:41:00.000-08:00

Two months have passed since the final performance of Farms& Fables. In that time, I havebeen on family vacation, fought my way through piles of receipts registered inthree different Quicken accounts, written final reports to funders, returnedprops and held post-mortem meetings, attended a professional development workshopvibrantly focused on The Future, and kept a cheerful holiday in my home.

Waiting for preset . . .

Two months have passed, and I am still working on theproject, but not working on it. Looking back to analyze and describe, looking forward to discern WhatComes Next. Taking time to go onlong walks with my son, and stressing over that $7.14 that doesn’t belonghere! People ask me if Farms &Fables will continue, what the next project will be, how did it go? I have some reasonably truthful answersstowed for emergencies in my back pocket but really I’m just buying time untilI can change the subject. For methis is a time of not knowing, not thinking, not answering. It is a time of In-Betweens, of Not Really,of Maybe, and I’ll Think About It.

Emily preps the cast for dress rehersal.

Mostly I'm enjoying the freedom of not thinking a whole lot about it. But sometimes it surprises me torealize that the door really is not closed. Agricultural news still catches my eyeand raises a flurry of active questioning, changing my perspective slightly onthe stories that have seeped under my skin. I stumbled upon this article the other day: Blue Hill Farmer. And then there is this: Saco Farm. I know from both Penny and Steph thatthis is the week of the Ag Trades Show – it’s happening now! – and I findmyself wondering: should I go? Maybe I should go . . . I read a newsletter from the Scarborough Land Trust and it launched me into a twenty-minute monologue to my husband overdinner, on date night. “Sheesh,” Ifinish, gulping plum wine. “Wecould write another whole play!”

Emma's "Dress Rehearsal Face"

Claire's "Dress Rehearsal Face"

Neftali's "Dress Rehearsal Face"

Jesse's "Dress Rehearsal Face"

This process of processing, of stepping back to get a betterview, of identifying the lessons and the successes, of remembering the triumphsand marveling at the sheer quantity of new experiences, cannot be rushed. In truth, no part of this particularproject could ever stand to be rushed. We cannot hurry our assessment of treasured moments, painful failuresand inordinate joys. The journeyhas been too complex, too fleshy. I confess I do feel a pressure to understandthe full impact of the Farms & Fables process now. To assess itsvalue. To summarize success andfailure for myself and for every remotely interested passerby. And yet it will not be rushed.

And so I wait. Inthe meantime, to aid our process of remembering and to share another piece ofour production with those who could not see it, here are some photographs,which somehow never made it onto this blog:

Flora and Claire - "What do think this growing season will be like?"

Juan Bobo

Strawberries!

Full Cast Finale

Flora helps with strike.

And now it's gone . . .

Dog Wants Out Wants In! (Seth Asa)

2011-10-26T22:48:00.000-07:00

I'm so excited about this post I'm putting part of it in large print...

On Saturday, October 29th, at 6:30pm, before the Of Farms and Fables evening performance, the music group Dog Wants Out will treat us to a live acoustic performance!

Dog Wants Out has been performing their brand of Alternative "Funtry" music for Farmer's Markets and local food events to help promote local agriculture and healthy, sustainable living. They have graciously provided us with original recordings, from their upcoming album for use in our production. For more information about Dog Wants Out, please see my earlier blog post and/or listen to my phone interview with John Zavodny on the Production Audio widget (right-hand column).

Sound/Sight/Thought Bytes from Cue-to-Cue (Cory)

2011-10-25T15:10:00.000-07:00

CLACK. Door opens.
CLACK. And closes.

"We're at five." "Thank you, five."

"Going dark onstage."

Stacy plops a bag of Broadturn-spiced popcorn down on the tech table, next to the dregs of a bag of chocolate-covered gummi bears and a box of day-old Dunkin Donuts coffee; Jennie gasps a happy greeting for "the best popcorn in the world."

"Are these pink?" asks Flora, fingering the set's four fabric rows. "No, they're white, that's the lights," says Emily.

CLACK.
CLACK.

"Heather, what kind of gobo is that?"
"It's called 'sponge.' It's slightly out of focus, too."
"I like that."

Tali in a red hoodie and blue baseball cap. Emma's paint-stained pants and crocs. Claire with a floppy-brimmed hat, whispering with checkered-dressed Flora in the center vom. Penny in her "Karen" digs, plain waitress's clothing - and divested of her usual Penny costume: her khakis, her boots, and her iPhone, which she leaves with me.

"Are we good in here for places?"
"We are. I just need to use the bathroom. Oh, and I need to pile that stuff in the barn real quick."

Penny paces a moment. Stacy, sitting in the audience, encourages, "Just look out here and find my face." "Oh, I'm planning to," Penny replies. "Every time."

CLACK.
CLACK.

All actors onstage. Where's Jennie? Milling, murmuring, nerves. Emily instructs everybody to "just stand still one moment while I get my head on."

CLACK.
CLACK.

"It's a totally different vibe tonight," Stacy says to me.
"Yeah. Completely different feel."

Emily: "These are our rehearsal fence posts. The real ones are on the way. Please note that the REAL fence has five posts, not four."
Chris: "I can't work this way!"
Laughter.

CLACK.
"Can we tape that thing?" Seth storms to the offending door with a roll of gaff tape. "Oh, no. It's that kind of door."
CLACK.

Emily's head is now on.
"All right, let's get set for the top of the show."

Sound, preshow: go.
Who's your farmer? sings Dog Wants Out. Who's your farmer?
The preshow sequence ends.

A lot of things have changed about this play from Draft 1 to Draft 2 to Draft 3.
But the opening moment is something that hasn't changed.

Just past dawn. A field of weeds and two workers – OMAR and RAMÓN.

They stretch.
They spritz themselves with bug repellant.
They pull on plastic gloves – snap!
OMAR puts in iPod earbuds.
The workers begin weeding.

In our very first script conversations, Claire, Jennie and I dreamed up a pair of "weeders" who would weed throughout the play. The image was important to me and my understanding of the structure of a farm, as something with two different trajectories: one forward-moving and innovative, the other cyclical, conservative, sustaining. I wrote that moment in January - the very first chunk of script to make it from my head to the page, and one of the very few to remain essentially untouched, as-is, through the performance draft. And we just got to see it pop off the page, in vibrant sound and color, for the first time.

Tech's the day where the creative juices flowing from all the artists hard at work on a play come together for the first time to marinate the play in a giant vat of courage, risk, color, and heart. Words meet actors meet music meet lights meet puppets meet costumes meet scenery meet movement and, as a whole, become more than their sum.

One ingredient's still missing: people to watch it happen. On Thursday, we toss that into the pot, ready or not.

A Chance to See (Jennie)

2011-10-24T17:45:00.000-07:00

Today, today is the day of our long-awaited Load-In. I have been in the theater, what usedto be the Great Room at Camp Ketcha, all day and I imagine I’ll be here well intothe night. All around me there isactivity. Seth and Heather buildingand testing at the tech table, Perry and Chris rigging The Barn, Gregg hangingcurtains in the hall’s massive windows to block light during our matineeperformances.

I took a break about an hour ago and went out for a walk onthe Camp Ketcha grounds. I was inneed of fresh air and the last of the day’s light. There’s a trail across the fields that heads out through thecamp’s ropes course in the woods, past a pond and across the Libby River Farm, ownedby the Scarborough Land Conservation Trust, ending at the ScarboroughMarsh. The Libby River in itscurrent honorific is named for my ancestor some twelve generations back, a Mr.John Libby, who settled on Pine Point in 1632.

When I left the room, I had no idea where I was headed orhow long I would be gone. I emergedfrom the woods into a clearing with a stalwart pine on its southern border. I rounded a bend and passed throughlong grasses, bittersweet popping like fire to my left and right. Burning bush, deeper maroon and purple,hunched low in the cattails. I wascareful to keep my feet dry. As Iwalked, I thought about journeys. Discoveries made, unexpected surprises: astand of birch with a dozen leaves remaining on their topmost branches,saluting the season, beckoning nightfall. A nervous Penny Jordan staunchly delivering her lines and creativelyconcocting solutions through a minefield of dropped cues. Eddie Benson and his daughter Kati, in my rehearsal room, coaching our actors in the staging of a cow chase.

I thought about journeys: how we startwithout knowing, how we traverse multiple subtle landscapes, how we findcomfort in reminders of home. Iwalked steadily across land once roamed by generations of my own family, unsureof my goal but purposeful in uncertainty, remembering beginnings, honoringpassage. Nearing the marsh at the end of the trailI felt my pace quicken with anticipation of the finish and when I reached it Idiscovered: an observation deck. A place to gain perspective.

Why do I make community-based theater? What has been the value of my Farms& Fables journey? Only a bitof perspective. Only a chance tosee, with eyes that are cleared with wonder: a complex, delicate, and vitalecosystem of human relationships, and a collaborative creation of greatbeauty.

THANK YOU to Mike Vance, Mike Hahn, Bill Hahn, Cheryl Laz, Johnny Speckman, and Claire's friends for all of their help with Load-In today!

The Final Countdown (Claire)

2011-10-22T17:37:00.000-07:00

We're in full swing here in Farms and Fables land and I mean FULL. With only eight days left until this play is OVER, and we're doing our darnedest to make sure to make them count, and life is a flurry- no a blizzard of activity: Seth mixes audio on the fly while we run the play over and over again, nailing down the details and picking up cues, and while Cory is putting the finishing touches on the program, Jennie is making plans for our last few of rehearsals, and I run around like a chicken with no head, gathering last minute props and touching up puppets. Even my grammar is going full blast- what a run-on sentence!

My emotions are a pendulum. At one extreme, a constant urge to go faster, and get more and more accomplished. "ONLY EIGHT MORE DAYS! GO! GO!" I hear over and over as I work- my life is a rock anthem, and this is it's theme song:

On the other hand, I have sudden fits of wallow-y, petulant and nostalgia-soaked stubbornness that screams "Noooooooooooo!!!!!" at the thought of this project ending. This side of me wants to curl up in a blanket, make a scrap book out of everything that this project has been and slow the remaining seconds down to a snail's pace so I can savor absolutely everything there is to savor.

Of course, I have no control over any of this. Time marches on at it's own pace, whizzing past in a dizzying frenzy of to-do lists and rehearsals. We're on lunch break right now in yet another marathon rehearsal day and the chatter ranges from a discussion of our sandwiches to cues that we have just run.

Emma and I are siting next to each other and while she plays me her new favorite song from her computer she makes this beautiful comparison: Autumn corresponds with the end of the show. She calls it, "the end of the glorious season and ephemeral perfume that is summer. Farmers slow down and relax after the hectic sprint that is summer, and at the end of the show the actors from Farms and Fables will be able to too." Imagine that.

I much my sandwich, make a few adjustments to my to-do lists, Emma goes back to homework. Emily groans: We've got ten more minutes left in our break. You can feel the mood shift as we all hunker down- heads down, noses to the grind stone. And in my head, the anthem starts up again.... "its the fi-nal count down! Bah-duh BAH BUH! Bah- Duh- Bup-Bup-Bah!....."

They're Growing Music! (Seth Asa)

2011-10-21T01:41:00.000-07:00

In my teen years, my mother was a writer for The Journal Tribune. I spent afternoons at the newspaper office in Biddeford, browsing promotional CD's by aspiring bands hoping to be reviewed. Later, as a WBLM intern, I made my way through more promotional CD's never destined for 100,000 Watts of Rock N Roll airwaves. I analyzed combinations of appealing band names, cover artwork, and song titles, and chose my auditions accordingly. Using this system, I found some of my most enduring favorites.

Part of my duty as Sound Designer for Of Farms and Fables is to help choose music for the show.

I began on the information superhighway, cruising for Maine bands and songs about farming. With blazing fast speed, I was directed to www.reverbnation.com/dogwantsoutband and the music of Dog Wants Out. Loved the name. Loved the artwork. Loved the song titles. As I listened to Moo for Me, Who's Your Farmer? and Pickle You, I felt I had discovered a musical voice for the show. Upon visiting www.dogwantsout.org, I learned of our shared goal for the promotion of local agriculture, farms, and farmers.

Jennie and I struck up a dialogue with John Zavodny of Dog Wants Out regarding our desire to use DWO's music for Of Farms and Fables. Not only was John open to the idea, he provided several additional as-yet-unpublished recordings for our use!

It is a rare blessing, when searching through band names, artwork, and song titles, to discover real people and to make new relationships. We are fortunate to have been given access to advance recordings intended for the forthcoming Dog Wants Out album, "The Farm Market Waltz."

To hear an audio piece featuring clips from "The Farm Market Waltz" with excerpts from a phone interview with John Zavodny of Dog Wants Out, simply follow the link below or use the "Production Audio" widget in the column on the right-hand side of the page.

http://soundcloud.com/sethasa/john-zavodny-on-dog-wants-out

Dog Wants Out plays "Alternative Funtry Music" with a folk sensibility. Their set list is designed to provide hum-along opportunities for the farmer's market crowd and includes "He Thinks my Tractor's Sexy," "Who's Your Farmer?" "Melt with You," and "Harvest Moon."

Dog Wants Out is Amy Arnett on Fiddle, Anna McGalliard on banjo and washboard, Chris Marshall on bass, Sara Trunzo singing and playing the mandolin, Cody Zane on suitcase trapset, and John Zavodny on guitar and vocal.

WERU Community Radio is the Media Partner for the Dog Wants Out Farmer's Market Tour (www.weru.org).

Dog Wants Out is an initiative of the Maine Community Music Project, a Unity Barn Raiser's Program (www.unitybarnraisers.org).
To learn more about Dog Wants Out, please visit:

www.dogwantsout.org
www.facebook.com/dogwantsout ("Like!")

Changing Seasons and Roles (Cory)

2011-10-16T10:18:00.000-07:00

I've been quiet on the blog but very much present on the project, more present physically than I've been since leaving Maine last August - living again in Portland, settling into the next and new stage of my playwright role, and watching in rehearsals as the characters in our play enter their own next stage of development - now, largely, out of my hands.

Parts of these characters were once farmers and farm workers I've met or characters from stories and articles that I've read. Then they became a chorus of voices clamoring in the blank space between thought and page, a jumble of emotions and motivations of which I had to make sense. Now they're undergoing a final metamorphosis. The actors are molding their own three-dimensional figures from my two-dimensional pages of words. Sidney's a smart spunky redhead, a hand-talker with a jutting hip and a flint-hard squint when she's working on a problem or trying to figure somebody out. Walker is tall and lanky, spry and wry, with a half-grin and an unapologetic vulnerability. Uncle Ed relishes the taste of certain words like sweet and sticky taffy and has moments of delighting in his own power over Mitch. The people of Farms & Fables are inflating to round and full with life - and now and then, Jennie and I hear the hiss of air escaping, evidence of a hole we have to plug up.

What do I do as the playwright during this new and final stage?

Help plug those holes (it's a team effort between playwright, director, and actor: this week, Jennie, Harley, and I are tackling Uncle Ed).

Tweak roles to fit the realistic abilities of a five-year-old performer.

Adjust language to reflect the reality of the community - whether it's changing "driveway" to "dooryard" (thanks, Stacy), reworking Karen's exhortations to her daughter about college as per Penny's insight, or taking out "bananas in the shade" when Jae says it doesn't feel real.

Answer questions about motivation or backstory, when I can.

Work with Seth, our sound designer, to interview farmers for material for our interludes.

Man our booth at farmers' markets.

Attend Green Drinks with Kati Benson King and hand out postcards.

Be ready to become Emily's ASM (helping to tape the space, carry props, be on book) or Jennie's AD (coming up/leading exercises, solving blocking problems) or Claire's pasty-handed chauffeur at a moment's notice.

Teach my playwriting workshop at The Telling Room to a group of very cool and open-minded teens.

There's a black fabric that's used widely in agriculture, a woven plastic that covers a bed with holes cut or burned into it, at intervals. Those are the holes where you plant your plants and grow what you're growing. The fabric has the benefit of greatly minimizing the amount of weeding that you have to do. It also has drawbacks: it can protect and foster pests, keep the soil from drying and block its absorption of healthful sunlight.

A bed of peppers on Jordan's Farm. Photo: Claire Guyer.

Depending on the weather conditions and on the season, the benefits of using fabric or plastic on beds can outweigh the disadvantages - or vice versa. During my last weeks on Ryder Farm this season, we spent a lot of time pulling up fabric. It had gotten us through the weedy spring but was causing problems in the wet summer and into early autumn, keeping the soil wet and letting root-gnawing pests thrive.

The technique of sitting alone at my desk wrestling with the script was what the play needed for a while, but solo writing season is over. Now we've torn up the fabric. What this dirt needs is sun.

...And, in less than two weeks, an audience. Don't forget to reserve your tickets.

Dressing the Character (Renee)

2011-10-13T13:33:00.000-07:00

As the weather has gotten colder and the leaves have started to change into their brilliant Autumn colors, I've been living in the summer-time world of Of Farms and Fables. The lovely photographs taken at Broadturn, Benson and Jordans Farms have been an invaluable reference for me while designing the costumes for OFAF. The colors found on the farms and clothing choices of the farm workers inspired me just as much as the script which Cory Tamler lovingly wrote.

For me, rough sketches are a form of brainstorming, they're quick, far from a finished product and a way for me to come up with a design road map for a production. Here are some of the rough, preliminary costume sketches done for OFAF:

While working on the final OFAF costume design sketches, the characters started to become more defined after conversations with the Director and final casting decisions made. Here are the final costume renderings:

One of the most interesting, and potentially, complex element of the production's costumes are the wings made of weeds which the entire cast wears at the end of the play.

The fantastical moment created a very real challenge for me as I problem solved ways to construct the wings. After exploring some different ideas, we settled on the "cape-style" weed wings made out of jute erosion cloth:

The erosion cloth made out jute, a natural hardy fiber, appealed to me for a couple of reasons. Erosion cloth is used in farming and landscaping, it's inexpensive and best of all, when pulled apart, can be used to create the look of long weeds.

Coming up Next: Experimenting with paint and dye techniques and sewing the wings!

Harvesting Hard (Jennie)

2011-10-11T09:35:00.000-07:00

Well, everything is rolling now.

Rolling into production. We have moved on from scene work to run larger portions ofthe play, allowing us to gain a bit more perspective on what our production isshaping up to be. Most of our castmembers are beginning to work without their scripts, freeing their bodies inrehearsals and giving the piece more breathing room. Seth is bringing more and more sound material intorehearsals, underscoring our work with a parallel life and energy. We are working more often with analmost complete company, getting to know each other better, beginning to moveas a group. Construction onscenery begins this week. Postersare going up all around town and throughout the greater Portland area. Postcards are being mailed. We’ve begun to think aboutload-in. We are excitedly chattingwith friends and family who are planning to attend performances, some travelingfrom a great distance. We scrambleto keep up with the forward momentum, thrilling at the ride. Hiccups dot our days, temporarilyslowing (or increasing?) the pace. We are harvesting hard. Flora brings bird feathers to rehearsal and learns her lines faster thanI can read them to her. Emilycalls for quiet. I sing to myselfwhen no one is around, take a quick walk around the building. People pour into the space, people pourout. I take a morning moment withmy script. Cory leads a warm-up,then watches and takes notes. Outside,the weather turns warm then back to cold, and the leaves begin their change.

We are looking for some help. Would you like to join?

Please contact info@open-waters.org or call (207) 200-6982 if you are interested! All volunteers will receive two complimentary tickets to theFarms & Fables performance of their choosing.

Love.

Update From Puppet Land (Claire)

2011-10-03T19:55:00.000-07:00

Hello there, friends of OFAF- I’m writing to you this week from deep inside puppet work for this project and I couldn’t be happier.

Here I sit, typing away in the big front room of my apartment, affectionately known as “the studio” along with about 50 drawings of what cows might look like if you were having a dream about them, what cows actually look like, drawings of bird wings, sections of bird wings, pig faces, and pig legs. Its so fun to be here. Working on puppets is always a joy, but after the intellectual and physical challenges of being in rehearsals and working on a script, sitting down and fiddling with the intricacies of how to connect part a to part b is so satisfying. An instant feed back loop. There is also something innately magical about the task of making a puppet. From the beginning of any puppet design process, the basic idea is always to

take materials that have no life of their own, and find a way to put them together that will appear to live onstage. A heady, frankenstein-eque project, to be sure, but one of the most exciting and miraculous design processes there is.

As far as puppets in this play are concerned, I’ve got a minor barnyard to re-create: 5 dream cows, some pigs, a crow, a chicken, and even some seedlings. So the question is: how do you get from inanimate materials to a puppet that will live in the world of the play?

Well, heres a little sneak peak into the development of a dream cow:

I like to start with getting to know the animal I’m basing the puppet on really well. Since these dream cows will only exist in a characters dream, I know that they don’t have to be totally realistic, but they do have to read as cows and be believable in the scene.

I pull up some of the photos I took last summer while at Benson Farm and take a good look through, looking specifically for shapes, textures, specific lines- things that make this cow look particularly “cowy”.

I start drawing things out- cow legs, cow ears, cow noses- and start to investigate how the animal moves. Where is it’s center? When it walks, does it lead with it’s head? Shoulders? When it takes a deep breath, what part rises and falls? Is there any part of it that moves when it walks (like a tail? the head? What are the ears doing? How does the breath change when the animal is going fast? Slow? etc.)

Videos like this one go into constant replay, often underscored by whatever loud music is keeping me motivated at the moment (when in doubt, Modest Mouse usually does the trick for me. Try it!):

Sources like this give me access to “cow” gestures that are really useful when looking for authentic movements that communicate cow behavior- in this case, movements that real Holstein cows are apt to do when they are in an uncomfortable situation, such as the dairy show depicted in the video. This video in particular showcases some moves that have become personal favorites- the cow head toss, and the single firm step forward and back. Both of these seem to show the cow’s need to assert itself and evade the person who is trying to lead it- perfect behavioral gestures for cows who are being chased (like some of the cows will be in our play) or are appearing in a dream as menacing reminders of a painful memory.

This kind of discovery often leads to a physical investigation of the movement, (AKA me walking around the room trying to toss my head like a cow) which always proves much more useful than I think it will- really. The sillier, the better, because once I can replicate the movement I’m interested in recreating in the puppet, I can break that movement down, isolating which parts of the body are directly or indirectly involved. Once I have tried out the head toss a couple of times, for example, I can discover that what looks like a single upward motion actually has three parts- down up down- so the head makes roughly the shape of an inverted letter V and also usually requires that the cow’s front feet are firmly planted. Inevitably, this stage of discovery coincides with one of my roommates coming into the studio to ask me, “What are you doing?”, at which point I either choose to sit down and start drawing out different ideas about how to make a puppet do what I just did OR go into the kitchen and make a snack. (Its a toss up.)

Once I have some ideas on paper, I’ll go back to the script to find out what the technical requirements of the puppets are. Will puppeteers be using their puppets for a long time or a short time? Are there any specific movements that the puppet has to accomplish? With these realities of the play in mind, I’ll start to build models of what I think might work. Often they end up being what I take to production meetings- like this model of a dream cow here. (excuse the desk clutter.) See the pig in the middle wearing something? Thats it!

Ok. So I couldn’t find a figurine of a person, so the dream cow is being modeled for us here by a pig finger puppet. What you see here is a skeletal version of what the dream cow will be like- one long pole supporting a semi-realistic head with a head toss line attached to the middle of the face that will allow the puppeteer to complete (my favorite) down-up-down head toss. What you don’t see is the light weight fabric “skin” that I’ll be building around the neck of the cow that will obscure the puppeteer's face, but be transparent enough to allow the puppeteer to see out of it and appear opaque in direct light.

And there you have it folks! I’ll do my best to get some video of one of these guys in motion when they’re ready so you can see it “live” before we get to show time. Till then, don't forget to start making plans to come see the show! We've got tickets for sale- find us on facebook! Tell everyone you know about this! If just for the dream cow puppets alone- (kidding, Jennie. Just kidding!) this is going to be a play you won't want to miss!

The Stand (Wade)

2011-10-01T11:30:00.000-07:00

One constant throughout the discussion of publicity for Farms and Fables has been:

"You should really have a stand at the Farmer's Market."

Well starting today at Deering Oaks Park in Portland, that vision is reality.

Armed with information sheets, post cards, posters, a banner and a modest wooden structure, Jennie and Seth greeted shoppers and farmers alike, and doled out plenty of information about the production and performances.

As Jennie's husband, my biggest time contribution to the Farms and Fables production process had been childcare for our two year old, Simon. As chief proponent of establishing a farmers market presence, I decided that building a theatrical farm stand (that will later double as a ticket booth) was too good an opportunity to pass up. I set to work with my very limited stenciling and carpentry skills.

The finished product is something I'm quite proud of, and I hope it will serve Open Waters Theatre Arts for years to come.

Huge thanks to Scott Nash, Nancy Nash and Scott Whitehouse of NASHBOX for the amazing logo and banner designs, which won many compliments. Thanks to John Bliss of Broadturn Farm for the photo. And thanks to Bayside Print Services for bringing it all to life.

Also thanks to Maine Hardware on St. John for opening at 8 and having a 10x10 party tent in stock when my rain cover plan didn't "work out".

See you at the market!

Wade

The Sounds of "Silence" (Seth Asa)

2011-09-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

I have recently returned to the backwoods of Maine after fifteen years of living in cities, eleven of which were spent in near-desert conditions. There is a profound difference in baseline silence here, free from the sonic weight of jackhammers, sirens, and constant traffic. As I made my way into New England, at the end of the long drive from the Pacific Northwest, I had only to roll down my window and I could hear life in the trees that lined the highway. There is no true silence here (or anywhere on Earth) but in the backwoods, microcosmic worlds provide a subdued, yet rich, aural landscape.

Here in Maine, all senses are engaged. The autumn air smells crisp, the handle of the chopping maul feels cold in the hands, the stars in the sky are a tapestry of light, the harvest tastes ripe, and among the crickets and autumn birds the rustle of browned leaves landing upon their kin signals the turn of seasons.

The audio widget at the top of the page will allow you to hear some of the nature recordings I have been making for "Of Farms and Fables." These online sounds are best enjoyed with headphones... especially the clip of leaves falling, a gentle sound almost as quiet as the moon.

I will continue to update the playlist as I collect new audio. Happy listening!

Pure Delight (Jennie)

2011-09-28T09:51:00.000-07:00

We are now one week into our rehearsal process. It has been a full and productive week, the highlights of which, for me, include:

Introductions on Neftali’s first day of rehearsal, when Emily and I stumbled through stating our name, hometown, and favorite food in Spanish as well as English.
The day that everyone participated in warm-ups: three actors, one stage manager, one director, and a sound designer. We had a pretty functional game of “yes” going . . . (my perennial favorite).
Flora Bliss, prompted by her mom, reading the role of Hannah at our first read-thru and sharing the scene with her older sister Emma. That was some sweetness.
Our first stab at staging the cow chase. Need I say more?
Teaching the whole company our gesture sequences for “transplanting” and “harvesting chard”.

Concurrent with the joy and richness of rehearsals, I am still grappling with a fair amount of the administrative headache required to see this project through to production. I received a call this morning from Amy Anderson of The Forecaster, a local newspaper that serves the greater Portland area, and it was a well-timed call. Amy is a good reporter, she asks good questions, and the interview provided me with an almost therapeutic opportunity to re-connect with the central lifeline of this project. Questions like: “Can you describe what you’ve learned?” and “What has been most rewarding?” whisk me away from the day-to-day particulars and demand that I invest in a little perspective. Beyond simply remembering the events of the project for myself, it is the requirement that I articulate their meaning to another breathing person that rejoins me with the gratitude and joy of making work I believe in.

What has been most rewarding? Well, the relationships. The long and complex process of building relationships is both challenging and creatively fruitful for me. I can remember the first time that Penny introduced me to Pee Wee and Neftali and that she then sent me out into the fields to harvest cucumbers with them. I remember how nervous and shy I was, how little Spanish I could muster, and the fact that I had never in my life seen a cucumber plant. I can remember hesitantly waving to them every time I visited the farm stand and I remember that day when they waved to me first. I remember all of the instruction I’ve received, all of the conversations with Tali through which I learned his musical tastes, and the day when I didn’t need to be told what to do in a row of beans. Now, added to my memory bank is the day that Tali first read the role of Omar at our second draft reading, the day of his first rehearsal when we all introduced ourselves in Spanish and English, and the day when I taught him how to harvest chard in the context of a theatrical transition:

Ultimately, I appreciate that this project has taken its time, that it celebrates complexity, and that it doesn’t foster time spent on easy roads. I appreciate that it challenges me to seek creative and educational partnerships with people I might never otherwise even meet, and that it allows me to make something directly out of information and experiences that are brand new to me. And it is unspeakably fun. For heaven’s sake, last week I staged a cow chase. Of all things, a cow chase! I found myself instructing actors: “If you run at her this way, she’s probably going to go that way.” “Never get between the cow and the fence!” Now that is just pure delight.

And onward we march . . .

The Addition of Voice (Seth Asa)

2011-09-20T12:33:00.001-07:00

Last Sunday I had the pleasure of meeting the cast that will perform "Of Farms and Fables," as well as other members of our production team, for our first full read-through of the play.

The first read is always exciting for me as a Sound Designer. This is my introduction to the voice of the piece. When I read a script, all characters have nearly the same voice, i.e, mine... I have many talents but acting really isn't one of them! Thus, when I am graced with the sound of the actors - their timing, the tones of their voices, and the human personality they breathe into the artful spirit of the printed word - I can begin to compose the aural landscape of their lives.

A week ago I was reading this play and hearing vocal tones limited by my own experiences and community. Because of the gift of voice given by our actors on Sunday, I now hear lives of toil; ecosystems of marriage; stresses and rewards of enterprise; frenetic exuberance of youth; and the curious wonder of innocence.

The sonic environment is an important part of one's disposition. For example, many people find the sound of the ocean to be relaxing. For one person, the dull roar and crash of surf may be a reminder of beach vacations of youth. Another person may be calmed by the white noise; the ever-present static that washes out all negative sonic space and engulfs the auditory consciousness. For a third, the sound may subconsciously recall the ebbs and flows heard inside the womb. Whatever the reason, the listener is calmed by the sea... and peace can do wonders for human interactions.

Likewise, moods shift with changing seasons. When the earth is teeming with new life at the start of spring and into summer, the lively sounds of birds (and bees) introduce us to our days, while the crickets and bats chirp us goodnight. Whereas, in the somewhat subdued sonic landscape of winter, the absence of living voice can foster disharmony and melancholy.

How does the sound of a farm affect a person? Do farmers have near-instinctual physiological responses to roosters crowing or cows lowing? Does the well-tuned ear distinguish a particular rustle of leaves as the herald of an impending storm? And how does a lifestyle of interdependence with rural nature affect voice, versus the mechanized stop-and-go of an urban backdrop? If we pay close enough attention, can we hear a person's whole life in the tone of their voice?

Tomorrow I will visit Jordan Farm and Broadturn Farm, where I hope to answer some of these questions... by listening to their worlds! Recordings to come... :)

First Days: The Arrival of Autumn (Jennie)

2011-09-18T07:56:00.000-07:00

Flora Bliss (Hannah) on a break at the first full company read-thru.

On the Broadturn blog this week, John began with a reminder of the fall season’s propensity to induce nostalgia. The thought has stuck with me through the week as I’ve repeatedly experienced flash memories that arrive with a strong, brisk breeze and a baking sun upon my head. These remembrances are brief, but they fill every pore of my awareness and block out all knowledge of the present moment. Suddenly and out of nowhere I am crossing a campus lawn, seeing the entry to my dorm building or, strangely and most often, running the length of a field for hockey practice.

Friday was my first "truly fall" harvest day. In the tomato hoop house, there was a beautiful cold wind to accent a shimmering sun on the grasses of the pasture. Every time I reached up to pick a Sun Gold Tomato from above my head, I would watch the sunlight sift through my fingers and feel the coolness of a world poised on the edge of winter. I would have thought that I would harvest faster on a day that didn’t have me sweating in a sweltering heat, but I found the opposite. It seemed that we all moved with the pace of the day, as though we were poised, too.

This first true day of fall, the first morning that my pellet stove was instructed by its thermostat to ignite and warm the den, arrived one day before the start of our rehearsals. I have been preparing for this chapter of our project for a very long time. Entering the rehearsal stage constitutes a momentous shift of focus and energy for everyone involved in our project. Standing in that hoop house on Friday, I felt this pivotal transition of our project underscored by the seasonal change all around me. With that stunning coexistence of summer and winter in a single moment, the longing for days past merged with an exhilarating awareness of the future, our project has eased into its most productive season aided and abetted by the arrival of Autumn.

My mother documented each fall beginning of my childhood with an annual First Day of School Picture. For her, I have recorded (at the age of 32) my departure for the First Day of Rehearsal:

At the Sill (Jennie)

2011-09-13T19:08:00.000-07:00

Oh, it is an exciting time. Last week, for me, was chock-full of meetings:

Tuesday afternoon: met with Renee, Claire, and Travis. Discussed initial concepts for costumes, props, and puppetry.
Tuesday evening: met with Cory via Skype to discuss the ALMOST FINAL draft of the play.

Wednesday lunch: met with Emily to draft the initial rehearsal schedule. Miraculously, everything fits (so far) into our allotted rehearsal hours!
Wednesday afternoon: met with Chris Price to discuss initial scenic design concepts and USE OF SPACE.

These are early sketches/notes of mine, and are not likely to have much in common with the final design!

Wednesday evening: met with the Advisory Board to discuss PR efforts, the Kickstarter campaign, and volunteer recruitment.
Thursday afternoon: met with Gregg and Heather at Camp Ketcha to answer venue questions like: how much power do we have? Chatted with Heather about initial approaches to her lighting design.

Gregg discusses the venue with Camp Ketcha director Tom Doherty.

Thursday night: attended the Maine Farmland Trust “Forever Farm” event at Broadturn Farm, where I chatted with the interns and saw Penny for a moment. Even Eddie and Bec were there! I got to show them the newly renovated barn facilities . . .

Stella guards the Forever Farm.

Friday morning: worked at Broadturn. Harvested potatoes and beans with Croix.
Friday afternoon: met with Scott Nash and Nancy Gibson-Nash of Nashbox Metropolitan. This powerhouse team of artist/illustrator/designers is creating our publicity materials. We met to discuss their most recent sketches and next steps!

Last week was marked by a barrage of in-person meetings, but I conducted a lot of phone meetings as well. I talked with three new cast members, one funder, one farmer’s market, a new fiscal sponsor, and an insurance company, just to name a few. I get so caught up in the business of moving from one moment to the next, that I sometimes forget just how diverse my day has been. I forget to pause and notice the remarkable experiences I've had, the thrilling conversations, the new information I've absorbed. Talking with a farmer about e-coli mastitis one moment, discussing the use of picnic coolers as tables the next, and finishing up with the intricacies of special event coverage. Amazing! It is an exciting time full of exchanges, ideas, arrangement . . . all of the many pieces of the project are traveling on their own course to completion, beginning to complement each other, and occasionally colliding with one another. Three days before the start of rehearsals (!!!!!!!!), I am taking this moment to breathe. Like watching a flower unfold at the sill, I am taking a moment to notice the daily, the hourly growth of this project we call: Of Farms and Fables.

Pruning the Play (Cory)

2011-09-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

It's September.

Five months ago, I turned in the first draft of Farms and Fables.

Yesterday, I completed the "final draft" - as final as it gets before design process and rehearsals start.

It's an old writers' adage that you have to "kill your darlings" and what people mean by that is that you have to be willing to cut stuff, even stuff you're desperately in love with, if it isn't a meaningful part of the project as a whole.

You could think of it another way, to the tune of growing: You can't focus just on the individual parts of a plant - you have to understand the plant as a whole. For example, keeping a tomato plant trimmed down to one primary life-giving vine can do a great deal to strengthen the plant as a whole and improve its fruit. The leaflets and the suckers, the secondary and tertiary branches splitting off that vine may look lovely and leafy, and like they'd bear bountiful fruit. But having multiple main stems stresses the plant, leading to smaller tomatoes, more foliage, and greater pest problems.

However you want to think of it, being willing - as an artist and a grower - to say "This should stay, but this should go" is incredibly important to the health of what you produce. For no other project have I killed as many of my darlings as I have during the writing of Farms and Fables and, ultimately, I am so glad that I did. The play is the better for it. I'm a better playwright for having learned to do it. But boy, was it sometimes hard.

Since there are so many passages that have been composted between Draft 1 and Draft 3, I thought I would share a few that were more difficult than others to let go of. These are snippets - some stage directions, some bits of dialogue - that, for a variety of different reasons, were scrapped. The play is healthier without them, but that doesn't mean I don't still regard them with wistful affection.

1. A monologue of Teddy's (the character who became Mitch)
TEDDY: It isn’t the same farm. I tried to love it like it was. This whole year. I tried. Half the house is gone, all Grandma’s quilts in the pantry, the old tools you always made me save. The old wood fence is gone. Where we used to write notes, leave them for Dad in that hole in the fencepost. Our tree burned. That thing was older than the USA I bet. The barn’s gone. It’s always been hard but I used to have these things here to remind me what I’m doing it for. That barn. Days when it seemed too hard and nothing was going to work out I used to be able to walk into the barn and remember: how you and me used to sleep out there sometimes, summer nights, itchy in the hay, and we’d wake up when dawn was on its way and the kittens started chasing swallows. Someone, Mom or Uncle Dan, would be coming in for milking, and I knew that Grandma had done the milking there when they were kids, and I knew the name of all the smells I smelled, and I knew what had to be planted or weeded or harvested that day, and now the barn’s gone, everything’s gone, and I don’t know what it is. The land. That used to be a farm.

2. Sidney's visit to Plentiful Valley Farm
SIDNEY in front of a sign: “Plentiful Valley Farm.” She wanders past fields choked with weeds. A few plants reach their tendrils out towards her from within the weed-prison, gasping for air and for water. She passes through a tractor graveyard strewn with sad metal corpses, mourned by one half-dead John Deere crying oily tears. A bored and bony farm animal wanders past her, more skeleton than beast. She comes to a house, knocks on the door.

3. Lily realizes the barn is burning
TEDDY: The air was dry like a dead grasshopper. All day I was sweaty as a devil, but the wind was strong and dried the sweat right away. I knew it was a bad day.
WEEDER 1: We had spent the morning trying to save the lettuce, but because it was so hot it had all bolted and was not good for wholesale. And after lunch we weeded and weeded but the weeds seemed never to get any less. We were driving home in the truck when our cell phones began to ring.
LILY: Are you in your truck? Get back here.
WEEDER 2: Lily knows when our day is over, it is over.
LILY: Get back here. Get back here.
WEEDER 2: Unless it is something seriously wrong.
LILY: Get back here.
WEEDER 2: She couldn’t explain anything. Just saying “Get back here” again and again.
LILY: There’s a fire on the farm.
WEEDER 1: Where? I don’t see any fire.
WEEDER 2: We didn’t understand. We’d seen nothing, no smoke, nothing.
LILY: There’s a fire on the farm. A fire.
WEEDER 1: A fire on the farm, a fire on the farm.
WEEDER 2: She just kept saying it. Finally we realized. She meant her brother’s farm. Her old farm. Family farm.
LILY: We have to go.
WEEDER 2: But she was shaking too hard. So my cousin drove us.

4. The fantasy sale of the Martin (now, Dayfield) farm
A cow is led in, wearing a huge ear tag that reads “Martin’s”. The cow’s body is marked, divided into different cuts of meat. A group of soberly dressed BUSINESSPEOPLE approach the cow and lay claim to different parts of its body. They then beat it to death. The cow is dragged off. SIDNEY, dressed as she was when she was a waitress, enters with plates of hamburgers. She calls off the names of the companies that have bought Martin land. “Wal-Mart! Webber & Webber Development! L.L. Bean! A rich guy from Boston! The Republican Party! Terrorists!” One of the BUSINESSPEOPLE always answers – “That’s me!” or “Over here!” or the like – and SIDNEY brings him/her a hamburger. The BUSINESSPEOPLE find the hamburgers delicious.

5. The foil of "agricultural tourism"
TEDDY: Have you been to Baker Farm? That place is no farm. They sell tote bags! They sell blueberry pies they bought from the deep freeze at Hannaford! Bill Baker!
LILY: The Bakers have the most organic U-Pick berry acreage in Southern Maine.
TEDDY: And you’ll pay eight bucks a quart plus your unborn child and both pinky toes for it! And they still couldn’t pay high school kids to weed the stuff without they’re getting subsidized!
LILY: I know how you feel about it.
TEDDY: And for what? Hayrides and cornstalk mazes in October. It’s not a farm, it’s an agricultural amusement park. Bill Baker!

6. Multiple variations on the fable of "The Little Red Hen" - this being my favorite
CHILD: The Little Red Hen woke up one morning at the crack of dawn and saw it was the time of year for planting wheat.
She went out blinking into the early morning sun and began to plant.
Along came the Dog, out for a morning stroll.
“That looks like hard work!” said the Dog. “I’ll help you if you’ll teach me how!”
“Oh, I don’t need help!” said the Little Red Hen. “It’s much easier if I just do it.”
“Suit yourself,” said the Dog, and kept walking.

The sun rose higher in the sky and the Little Red Hen kept on planting. It was tiring work, and she was starting to sweat and feel just a little dizzy.
Along came the Cat, chasing a butterfly.
“Hey, Little Red Hen!” said the Cat. “Looks like you still have a lot left to do. You need a hand? I’m happy to help if you show me what to do.”
“No thank you,” panted the Little Red Hen. “I’m doing just fine!”
“If you say so,” purred the Cat, and went back to chasing the butterfly.

In the scorching afternoon sun the Little Red Hen planted on, ever more slowly, dragging herself forward along the plowed rows. Her feathers felt like they were wilting in the heat.
Along came the Rat, nibbling on a hunk of bread.
“Wow, you look worn out,” said the Rat. “I don’t know much about wheat, but I can help you plant if you want. Or at least bring you a glass of water.”
The Little Red Hen could barely make a sound through her dry, swollen throat, but she managed to croak out, “No thanks.”
The Rat shrugged and went about more Rat-business.

At the end of the day the Dog, the Cat, and the Rat went to see how the Little Red Hen was doing. They found the field fully planted, and the Little Red Hen lying at the end of the field with her empty sack of wheat. The heat and dehydration had been too much for her and now she was dying. With her final breath she gasped out, “Dear Dog and Cat and Rat, I have planted the wheat but I won’t be here to harvest the wheat or grind the wheat into flour or bake the flour into bread or eat the bread. You will have to do it all yourselves.” And then she died.
The Dog, the Cat, and the Rat stood looking at her in silence. Finally the Dog spoke up: “But who will teach us how to do all those things?”
The three animals looked at each other and shrugged.

Curtain Up! It's Coming Together (Jennie)

2011-09-04T19:50:00.001-07:00

On Wednesday of last week I pulled into the Jordan’s Farm parking lot at 12:15 in the afternoon. I was there to speak with Neftali, a seasonal worker and a nephew of the infamous Pee Wee. Tali has been at Jordan’s for at least five seasons. I have known him for over three years, having first picked beans and cucumbers with him during my earliest visits to the farm in the summer of 2008. Tali has been an active supporter of our project, keeping newspaper clippings that documented our progress, donating his copies of “Que Pasa!” (a magazine about Puerto Rico, his birthplace), and attending every event we’ve invited him to. In early August, he auditioned for our play, and on Wednesday of last week I wanted to offer him the role of Omar. Since he and Pee Wee always take their lunch from 12 to 1, I knew that it would be a good time to catch him.

During my drive to Jordan’s that afternoon, I had been in the middle of solving a somewhat unrelated problem. We had agreed to be part of Curtain Up!, a “kickoff to the Portland theater season” presented by Acorn Productions as part of the First Friday art walk. Fourteen theater companies would be presenting brief performances and I had no idea what our contribution would be. “I wonder if Penny would do it . . .?” I mused. Penny had recently accepted the role of Karen in our final production and it would be easy to read one of her scenes as part of the event. It was very late notice, however, Penny had had not one single rehearsal . . . it seemed like an unfair request. I dropped the thought and returned to the business of casting a play.

I joined Pee Wee and Tali at the shaded picnic table and asked how they had weathered the storm. Pee Wee had lost power for about two days and had some tree damage on his property. Tali, who lives in South Portland near me, had nothing to report. We discussed their work for the day – they are picking beans, still summer squash, still cucumbers. Pee Wee informed me that he would choose the job of harvesting green beans over cucumbers any day. And then I asked Tali if he would be in the play. After inquiring about the rehearsal schedule, he agreed to play the role of Omar.

I headed back to my car, but found myself changing direction to enter the farm stand instead. I found myself standing in front of Penny. I found myself asking her if she would be willing to read at the event on Friday. To my surprise, Penny said that if the timing of our performance slot worked into her day, she would do it. Multiple e-mails later, we had arranged for Penny’s participation in Curtain Up. “Boy I must like you a lot,” she said in one message. “I have stage fright already!”

On Friday, we assembled a portion of our cast in public for the first time. Penny drove over from the farm stand, read her role, and headed back to the stand just in time to close. Emma Cooper, daughter of Stacy Brenner at Broadturn, read her role of Sidney. Also joining us were Jesse James as Harry and Jeff Wax as Mitch.

We read three brief scenes, and when we finished, Penny said: “It’s really coming together! It’s been a long time since our first meeting at Flatbread.” Whew. No kidding. Three and a half years, to be exact. Three and a half years ago Penny helped me plan this project. A year ago she taught me how to pick peas. Last week, she stepped onto an outdoor stage in a public square in front of a respectable audience, and to those people, she read our play. And next month . . .

Irene Comes Knocking: a hurricane special (Cory)

2011-08-27T07:59:00.000-07:00

I'd promised a post about push-brooms - but Hurricane Irene convinced me to change my mind. Instead you get my face in a video post (I hear the kids call them vlogs, but how you are supposed to pronounce that is beyond me) about how a hurricane can change up a farm's rhythm - based on how things have gone yesterday and today on Ryder Farm in Brewster.

The Man Who Created Paradise (Claire)

2011-08-24T10:10:00.005-07:00

This week I'd like to share a fable with you.

I found it while poking through some of Wendell Berry's work last winter while Cory was in the throws of beginning the script, and the rest of us were battling the snowy Maine winter. At the time, we were in the habit of meeting once a month at Jennie's house (Cory attended with the help of Skype) and we would sip tea and talk about our next steps, how the script was coming, and the latest scuttlebutt from our farmer friends. In between those meetings, we would send articles, ideas, stories and anything else we came across back and forth, just to make sure our inspiration and connection to each other hadn't been doused by the cold weather.

This piece has become very special to me in the few months since I first found it, and I thought that I would share it here to bring you, our reading public, and the designers who have recently joined the Farms and Fables Team in on the story.

"The Man Who Created Paradise" was written by Gene Logsdon (Introduction by Wendell Berry and Photographs, including the one above, by Gregory Spaid) and tells the story of how he met a man named Wally Spero and a tractor named Alice that turned acres upon acres of strip mined Appalachia into productive and very active farm land. Its a lovely, quick read. I really hope you'll give it a try.

Click Here to Read the Online version

"The Man Who Created Paradise"

"Plants Have a Rhythm" - a character study from Ryder Farm (Cory)

2011-08-21T06:32:00.000-07:00

Where to begin?

This is the end of my first week as an intern on Ryder Farm Organic in Brewster, NY. I'll be here until October 1. Then I'll head back up to Maine for the month to experience rehearsals, do any odd jobs the OFAF team asks of me, and hopefully carve a pumpkin or two! (Halloween in Germany just isn't the same.)

And...where to begin?

Living on a farm has turned my brain into a veritable hothouse of thoughts and ideas about farming. Observations we'd made last summer that had slipped my mind until now resurface like perennials: for example, how each farmer and farm worker develops his or her own "work costume" - like Tali and his hoodies, Penny and her boots, the Ryder interns and their daily long-sleeved plaid-patterned dirty button-downs. New experiences spark new thoughts and connections: I worked my first-ever farmer's market yesterday, in Union Square, and interacting with customers, setting up displays (and seeing what sells and what doesn't!), answering questions, inventorying - it all really drives home why it's important to plant, harvest and prep the way that we do. On a farm that manages to stay afloat, there may be madness, but there is a whole lot of method to it.

ABOVE: What the Ryder Farm stand at Union Square Greenmarket looks like

There are many things I could post about. An endless number of things. But another important thing I've (re)learned through the process of writing, sharing, and revising our play is this big thing that a successful small farm and a good play have in common: They are about people. Just as audiences are far more likely to invest and engage in a piece of theater if they care and understand and connect to its characters, customers are far more likely to support a small farm if they know and trust and care about the people who work on it.

So I wanted to write about a person on Ryder: Fuad, the field manager.

In some ways, Fuad reminds me of Jordan Farm's PeeWee. Fuad hails originally from another country (Bangladesh). He has worked on Ryder Farm for 15 years. Like PeeWee, he has developed over his time here an important relationship with a strong woman whose family owns the farm (Betsey Ryder), a relationship based on trust and communication. On a farm where most of the workers change from season to season, Fuad provides a strong and capable through-line, training and managing each year's new team.

Of course, Fuad is also not like PeeWee at all. I think the point of divergence starts with that crucial question to which we're always returning: What is a farmer? We've asked PeeWee before if he considers himself a farmer, and he's said "No." Though Fuad does not own Ryder Farm, though he is an employee, there is no question that he considers himself a farmer. He was trained in organic farming at UCA Santa Cruz, has worked on many different farms in many different states of this country, and lives, breathes and dreams farming.

Farmers are chock-full of knowledge and information about what they do - but it can be pretty rare to find a natural sharer who'll try to let you in on some of that information without being asked first. Fuad, however, is just that. He's a born teacher. He will never stop at telling you how to do something; he always tells you why to do it that way, too. A day working with/for Fuad is a day packed with knowledge nuggets and impromptu mini-lectures on sowing, harvesting, prep, food, plants, pests, tools, climate, sustainability and just about anything else you can imagine. There's a guest blog of his on Katonah Green about growing garlic from the 2009 season where you can get a taste of how much he loves to share his craft.

On Thursday, as we were sowing tiny sand-thinned radish seeds by hand in the hot midday sun, Fuad was inspired, waxing poetic in an unstoppable monologuic stream. "Plants are not active. They are passive. If there is not much of water in the soil, the plant will grow deeper roots to find the water. If the plant is growing in the shade, it will develop broader leaves to try to catch the sunlight. That is passive, that is not active. A plant cannot act. That is why I say it depends on environment. This is all environment. Water, light, sunshine. I do not believe people have green thumbs.

"Plants have a rhythm," he added. "You feel it when you touch the plant. In order to work with the plant you have to feel the rhythm."

Fuad is quite a character and it doesn't take long to pick up on his quirks. Like his own personal turns of phrase: "much of" (as in "There is too much of bugs") and "pick up" (as in "How much of basil did you pick up?"), and beginning sentences with "So what I have in mind is...". And his habit of always having a coffee mug in his hand until lunch - you'll often find rogue coffee mugs scattered forlorn and forgotten about the fields - and taking a nap during the midday break. He is curious about everything - he's already asked me scores of questions about the plot and characters in our play - and clearly beloved by the long-term members of the Ryder Farm CSA, who often show up to visit, bringing him hugs and chicken dinners.

"I know how to cook everything I grow. I eat everything I grow," Fuad said a few days ago. I think that's the heart of what makes him a successful and passionate grower.

Torn Apart by a Bear: Cycles of Innovation (Jennie)

2011-08-18T07:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a late birthday present from my husband arrived in the mail. It is a 365 page art book with 300 full-color illustrations and it is entitled: “Making the Scene: A History of Stage Design and Technology in Europe and the United States”. It is big. It is beautiful. It is my end-of-the-day, relax-on-the-couch CANDY.

As with many histories of western theater, this one begins with the Greeks and we talk at length about the Theatre of Dionysus, but but but . . . it’s all (all of it!) written from a scene design and audience-relationship-to-performer perspective. I have always been a sucker for captivating scenic designs, and I love to talk about audiences, but I really expected to treasure this book for its pictures. I didn’t actually anticipate reading it. I was wholly unprepared for the entertainment value of the writing, for full submersion in literary/visual heaven.

There are a number of things about the book that I love. The predominant message I’ve walked away with so far (I’ve only made it to the Renaissance), is that nothing ever changes. Really. So often we think we’re being innovative. From funders, from audiences, from the media – there is a pressure and an expectation to innovate in all that we do. This narrative has been one big fat reminder that we are recycling material and ideas ALL THE TIME. If the Greeks could fly an actor in 400 BCE and medieval priests could hire tradesmen to create “dummy bodies that could be hacked open to expose entrails and blood”, I think it’s all been done before, at least when it comes to scenic effects.

Intentionally or no, the book makes plain the cycle of innovation in the theatre (and we could probably extend this to include any branch of human endeavor) from a broad cultural perspective. First we see the germ of an idea, an organic movement, a collection of happenings just firm enough in their cultural presence to exist in some record 2500 years later. Then the idea grows, we see it crop up in more places, it changes a bit and it becomes more permanent. Where a temporary shack used to be fine, a standing theater gets built. Where a day or two and a collection of hand-made carts used to suffice, we find accounts of forty-day passion plays preceded by processions of people on foot and on horses. Eventually, the story is removed entirely and all that remains is the parade, the spectacle. Produced at great expense in celebration of some great king or government or body of power, suddenly we have the capacity to raise and lower animal cages, people, and scenic machinery from twenty feet below the Colosseum:

“In one recorded instance, a criminal impersonating Orpheus appeared from below the arena level, as if he were coming from Hades. He then played music that enchanted rocks and trees, which moved to greet him, and animals crouched at his feet. At the end of this display, he was torn apart by a bear.” (Brockett, Mitchell, Harderger, 23)

I’m pretty sure that last part is meant quite literally.

And then there is this:

“And there are accounts of actors falling off a machine and sustaining injuries or dying. It is not known how frequently mishaps occurred, but the emperor Claudius decreed that if any ‘automatic device or pegma’ had malfunctioned, the machinatores (engineers), builders, or assistants would be punished through gladiatorial combat.” (Brockett, Mitchell, Hardberger, 23)

Well, I guess that would have been one way to deal with the whole Spider-Man debacle.

I find the ongoing interest in scenic effect fascinating. I love the age-old question across centuries of dramatic pursuit: “how are we going to make that happen on stage?” For the OFAF team it will be: “how are we going to make weeds continuously grow throughout the play?” And: “how the heck are we going to burn down a barn?” (Thanks, Cory.) Even more delightful to me, however, are the reminders that the very core of our intentions, the basic need to make theater at all, is as old as humanity.

It is clear to me that I do not live or create in a vacuum. I am constantly in awe of the artists, leaders, practitioners, and organizers who have blazed trails with their courageous and truthful work. Most directly and in particular, I am thankful for the artists of Cornerstone Theater Company – but also for the vast web of community-engaged artists across America who generate the ideas, muddle through approaches, and prove that anything is possible.

Still, it is nice to be reminded of the community-engaged work from centuries ago, to acknowledge that ours is not the only moment that has inspired innovation and collaboration of this kind. In medieval Europe, it was Corpus Christi, the famed church festival conducted in nearly every town and hamlet. Corpus Christi encouraged and facilitated the participation of an entire community in the presentation of elaborate plays, generally dramatizing biblical events (Brockett, Mitchell, Hardberger, 33). I can imagine the impetus for a community event of this kind being similar to our incentives today. And clearly, many of the approaches are alike as well. I giggled audibly over this timeline for The Mystery of Three Masters at Romans, France in 1508:

July 1508

Representatives of St. Bernard's Monastery and the town council meet to discuss the ideas of the performance
Money is pledged from various sources and churches.
A body of commissioners is appointed to oversee the production.
Authors and secretaries are engaged.

December 1508

Monsieur Sanche of Dijon is appointed as producer.
Monsieur Francois Trevenot is hired as the designer.

January 1508

Building begins on the stage and auditorium at St. Bernard's.
Carpenters, a blacksmith, and a clocksmith are engaged.

February 1509

Canon Pra of Grenoble has a reading for the commission, and three notaries are engaged to make copies.

March 1509

Pra finishes the script and rehearsals begin. Notaries have trouble finishing scripts. There is one rehearsal per week in the town hall, and refreshments are provided.

May 7, 1509

A costume parade is held throughout the town to publicize the play and ensure the costumes are finished. Part of the text is rewritten.

Late May, 1509

The play has one dress rehearsal, and opens, but runs much longer than anticipated. It is a popular success, but loses money (Brockett, Mitchell, Hardberger 38-39 cite Harris, 122-24)

It is all just a little bit too familiar. For comparison, here is an early timeline (The Roadmap) made by Farmer Penny Jordan for Of Farms and Fables:

PHASE I

Nov 2008 – May 2009

PHASE II

Jun 2009 – May 2010

PHASE III

Jun 2010 – Aug 2010

PHASE IV

Sept 2010 – Apr 2011

PHASE V

May 2011 – Aug 2011

§ Advisory Board Formation

§ Fiscal Agent Identified

§ Funding Options Identified/Pursued

§ Demonstration Materials Compiled

§ Advisory Board Meetings

§ Core Artists Contracted

§ Fundraising

§ Community Gatherings at Farm

§ Advisory Board Meetings

§ Core Artists Work at Farm

§ Weekly Performance Workshops

§ Advocate Project at Farm

§ Advisory Board Meetings

§ Draft I Script Completed

§ Fundraising

§ Public Reading

§ Advocacy for Project

§ Designers/Stage Manager Contracted

§ Production Meetings

§ Advisory Board Meetings

§ Script Completed

§ Casting Completed

§ Rehearsals Conducted

§ Design/Technical Elements Completed

§ Performances Promoted

§ Performances Held

Five centuries later and the play still has to be publicized, the costumes still have to be finished.

Oh yeah . . . Spread the word! Of Farms and Fables! Of Farms and Fables!

Theatrical Sound: Natural Noises (Seth Asa)

2011-08-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

Hello, Of Farms and Fables fans! I'm Seth Asa Sengel, the Sound Designer for this fabulous project.

Sound Design begins with observation. During each day of our lives we are surrounded by multiple layers of sound and part of being a sound designer is learning to deconstruct the sonic sum to hear its multiple parts.

Even in the quietest spaces there is sound. It has been said that in a perfectly silent room, one may even hear the sound of their own nervous system!

The key to theatrical sound is not, as one might think, to directly and accurately reproduce the natural sound of an environment, but rather to work within the aural landscape to capture the natural feel of an environment while leaving sonic space to allow the actors to deliver the story.

Farms are rich with layers of sound. Animals, machines, ambient insects, and the movement of the surrounding flora, all contribute to the sound of a farm. For this project, in order to best represent the sonic ecosystem of farm life, I will begin by capturing live audio recordings of our partnering farms, both for reference and for source material for the design.

I will endeavor in future posts to include audio samples, if I can. More to come...!

Meet the Designers (Jennie)

2011-08-11T19:17:00.000-07:00

We brought our design team together for the first time today. At Broadturn Farm our sound designer, Seth, attempted to make a recording of the barn swallows but they refused to chirp for him (who ever heard of that?), and the geese chased us down a-la West Side Story. At Camp Ketcha we took a look around the great hall and then sat under a tree to discuss the play. And then I made everyone introduce themselves. On camera:

So You Want To Be A Farmer? (Claire)

2011-08-10T16:09:00.000-07:00

In our latest conversations about the script, Cory, Jennie and I have been putting a lot of energy into finding a story that explains the transfer of a farm. This is what we know: that one farmer leaves his farm and a new family- one that is brand new to farming- takes it over. Sounds simple, right? But we found out the truth. Its really really not.

Just take the case of the new-to-farming family. Its easy to imagine that first impulse to get away from the lives they know most of the time and trade up for a life of vegetables and bird song. Who hasn't run that though experiment? "Thats it! I don't need this _______ (fill in the blank: job, schedule, commute, etc.) I'll just raise sheep!"

Beyond that though, things get... complicated.

We've learned from our farmer friends that they need to be their own business manager, marketing director, hired help, blogger, weather man, veterinarian and and infinite number of other things to be successful- but nothing has laid these facts out quite so... nakedly... as a quiz I recently found that was posted on the University of Maine's Cooperative Extension Service Website. Its called, "So You Want To Farm In Maine?"

The quiz boasts four sections of questions: Basic Decision Questions, Financial Questions, Personal/Management Questions, and Miscellaneous Questions. On the surface, it looks pretty straight forward- each of the 42 one or two line questions has a yes or no answer, unless it could also be "undecided" or "unsure". So lets dive in, shall we?

So- not kidding around, huh?

The next section gets into the nitty-gritty financial details of running a farm but I think my favorite, (maybe because its where all the drama is...) is the Personal/ Management Questions section. Check it out:

...and there are more after that. I think number 6 has to be my personal favorite- followed closely by number 7 and its adjacent health insurance question. Subtle, extension service. Real subtle.

All this reminds me of an essay that I love love love by Suzan Lori Parks called "Elements of Style." When Cory was here visiting she reminded me of this part of it:

theater
Jesus. Right from the jump, ask yourself: "Why does this thing I'm writing have to be a play?" The words "why," "have" and "play" are key. If you don't have an answer then get out of town. No joke. The last thing American theater needs is another lame play.

(Dramaturgy note: Of Farms and Fables will not be another lame play.)

I feel like if the U. Maine Extension Service was in a more concise mood we could've just switched "theater" out for the word Farming and with minor adjustments received similar results as the 42 question test. "Why does this thing I'm doing have to be farming?"

As it stands now- this is how the test concludes:

Got that? No "try again!" no gentle reminders. Every question counts, and even if you do answer more than the requisite 32 questions with a "yes" all you get is my favorite congratulations I've read in a long long time: "congratulations on having a moderate chance for a successful farming career." Oy Vey.

Feeling optimistic yet?

All in all I think that this must be a very useful tool for potential farmers, and I'm sure it doesn't cover it all- where is the section of questions about managing a farm stand ? Or updating your blog? Or what about the part about dealing with town zoning laws? Its the tip of the farming ice burg-

So, you still want to be a farmer?

PS: "Growing Stories" the photo show that came out of our research process last summer is hanging up on the second floor of The Public Market House in Monument Square in Portland- if you're in town, stop by and check it out!

Of Farms and Fracking (Cory)

2011-08-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

At home in Pittsburgh for the past week, I've had plenty of occasion to see childhood memories in a new light. I was surprised when, a few days ago, some of my earliest farm memories were added to that list.

I'd heard about hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") - mostly because there's a documentary, Gasland, about it (which I haven't seen), and it was the focus of a recent episode of This American Life. Flipping through a Pittsburgh newspaper, I was surprised to see Trax Farms and hydraulic fracturing sharing a headline. Picking pumpkins and getting lost in cornstalk mazes at Trax Farms are some of my earliest farm memories. Well, apparently the farm has been involved in a bit of local controversy lately because the farmer has leased mineral rights on the farm for Marcellus shale drilling.

Hydraulic fracturing is a big deal in Pennsylvania right now, because there's a lot of it being done in the state. It's a controversial process. On the one hand, fracking taps into a huge store of energy and frees it for human consumption, creating jobs and stimulating the economy in the process. On the other hand, there are a lot of questions about the impact of the process on the environment and on public health - but those questions are unanswered right now, because there isn't enough information. There haven't been comprehensive investigations. When companies who are involved in fracking are asked what the health risks associated with fracking might be, they say they don't have enough information to answer. The same goes for environmental activists. Nobody has enough information to make a strong argument. And in the meantime, we keep fracking.

Here are some points from the article (linked above) that I found interesting:

Quote: Using all the land is part of farm life in Pennsylvania, company president Bob Trax said. Like its festivals, landscape supply store and deli, the gas well is another way to help Trax diversify and stay competitive. - The stress on "using all the land" and "diversification" comes up time and again in farming. We've seen farmers start composting, open stores and farmstands and restaurants, sell hayrides, rent large portions of their land for haying or grain, etc. - you've got to get creative, you've got to use all of your resources.
The effect on the community: some of the farm's customers are complaining. It's interesting that the customers are focused on the part the farm is playing in fracking, and not on the role of the companies actually doing the process. Or maybe the article's portraying it that way - which is also interesting.

So here's another article from the Pittsburgh City Paper that starts with fracking on Trax but goes deeper and brings a few other farms into the picture. Here we get the sentence, "Gas companies like Range Resources have seized on the idea that they are helping to rescue local farms." It seems like some drilling companies have figured out that, if they're seen as a viable diversification option for farms, a lot of people in agriculture will be open to the idea of fracking on their farm. (Though, clearly, plenty of farmers are pretty skeptical of fracking.)

And one last thing: towards the end of the second article, there's this great paragraph -

But when wells produce, it can pit farmers who have gas under their land against their neighbors, Snyder says. "There's a natural inclination for those who won't have drilling on their land to resent those that do. This is really going on in the rural community. Some people benefit, some people aren't - but are having to deal with the expense and mess of it."

This reminds me a lot of conversations we've had with some of our farmers about the kind of conflicts, jealousies, and resentment that can arise within the agricultural community when it comes to issues of selling land and/or development rights. Which all boils down to this: As a farmer, your land is your everything. Investments, assets, legacy, lifestyle. And it makes sense that you might get very territorial.

Fracking is still pretty new - at least, it hasn't been long since it was brought to public attention in Pennsylvania - and it will be interesting to see how it all plays out. How will the agricultural community ultimately respond? How will customers and community respond to farms that do choose to allow fracking on their land? And what happens when - if ever - we do have enough information to know what the health/environmental effects of fracking are?

The Theater of Mulch (Jennie)

2011-08-06T18:03:00.000-07:00

Scattered through the narrative of our play are a number of weeding and harvesting “interludes”. These are full-company moments, an opportunity for our audiences to remember and to observe some of the work that takes place on farms, to be reminded of the crops that appear in their season and of the constant need to protect these plants from pests, drought, and WEEDS.

One element we may employ in the staging of the interludes are snippets of conversation between workers on our fictional farms. These conversations have yet to be written. I joined the team at Broadturn Farm this year as a “work share member”. This means that I work for four hours each week in exchange for a share of vegetables. So for the last few weeks, I’ve been paying special attention to the conversations I hear and participate in while working in the fields, in the hope of providing some fodder for Cory’s snippet-writing process. Here are some conversations I've noted:

Back in the first week or so of June, John and Stacy welcomed 150 middle-school students from Scarborough to the farm for a tour. Part of the deal was that the students would do some “work”. The two jobs assigned were picking rocks and mulching Stacy’s flower garden. I helped to manage crowds of twenty to thirty pre-pubescents as they scrambled through the mulch pile. I heard some great sound-bites while performing this duty, most notably:

“Just use your hands. Stick your hands in there.”

“No way, I’ll puke. I’ll puke.”

And:

“Ew. I don’t ever want to be a farmer.”

To be fair, there were a number of kids who were able state why the mulch is necessary and who asked some intelligent questions about the process, though these questions did tend to revolve around discerning the cause of the smell emanating from the pile. At one point, I heard John addressing a group of squeamish thirteen-year-olds from atop the pile of mulch on the other side of the garden:

“Did you know that a study was done recently which showed that kids raised on farms didn’t get sick as often because of their exposure to the bacteria in dirt and compost?”

In response to which the teachers began chanting:

“The dirt will make you healthy! The dirt will make you healthy!”

And John told me a story one day while we were harvesting kale. Last summer, a group of Courtney’s friends visited the farm on a scorching day in July or August. (Side note: Courtney was an intern last year. Now she’s working on a new farm very near John and Stacy!) The group of friends camped on the farm and they wanted to do some work, so John invited them to mulch – this time in the potatoes. In similar form to his address of the middle-school students, John climbed atop the pile of mulch and delivered an eloquent speech about the potato plant and its cultivation.

“From the beginning of time, from the dawn of agriculture, ne’er has there been a plant such as the potato!”

Sheesh. Talk about theater . . .

And then there are the conversations that have nothing to do with farming or plants or food, the completely arbitrary conversations like the one I was part of yesterday in the middle of the squash field. It was a conversation about pet names:

“I think it’s weird when people name pets after people.”

“I don’t know any dogs named after people, but my friend had a baby and the name she chose for her son was the same as my family dog’s name. Of course, she didn’t know the dog, but it’s still a little bit weird for me.”

“I like dogs that have human names, as long as they’re not named for a specific person. But none of my dogs have human names. One of them is Cabot, like Cabot cheese."

Portland Maine's Food-For-All! (Claire)

2011-08-02T11:52:00.000-07:00

When you look at the larger issues surrounding the push to get people to buy local foods, one of the largest debates rages around weather local foods are ... well, elitist. Many have argued that the greater cost associated with locally grown organic produce keeps lower income people from being able to have access to this arguably "better" food source. On top of the greater upfront cost, many farmers markets and farm stands do not accept non-cash payments for their wares, not to mention no way to accommodate customers who receive food stamps.

Well- As of tomorrow, August 3d, if you have access to the Portland Maine Farmers Market, at least some of this argument will no longer be an issue. Thanks to grant funding, the market now offers tokens that market shoppers can purchase with their credit, debit, or food stamp cards that can be used with most of their vendors. Check out the full article from the Portland Press Herald here:

http://www.pressherald.com/business/food-is-fresh-and-natural-but-payment-can-be-plastic_2011-07-27.html?searchterm=farmers+market

...and in celebration of the deluge of tomatoes that is overtaking the farmers markets, one of my very favorite blogs to look at when I'm hungry: Canal House Cooks Lunch. A picture a day of what lunch looks like at this super fresh-local foods focused restaurant in New Jersey. This week, they've been just as tomato happy as I have been. Bon Appetite!

From the Inside Out (Cory)

2011-08-01T12:35:00.000-07:00

First of all, if you're reading this then I know you care about our project so you should take a second to check out our Kickstarter page and consider donating a couple of dollars or passing it on to your friends. There's a video about our project on the page where Jennie and Claire will charm your pants off, so at the least, give that a gander!

Now back to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Since coming back to America on July 12, I've been in six different cities. I've ridden two airplanes, Megabus and Concord Trailways, two different commuter trains to and from New York City, and Jennie's bike, and I've driven for a total of about 14 hours. I've seen and hugged seven family members and about two dozen good friends. And I've done it all without a cell phone.

Somehow during the past three crazy weeks, I also found the time to make a decision: I want to spend six weeks on a farm. I'm not sure what brought it on. Maybe it was the heat. Maybe it was my all-too-brief return to Portland and our three farms in July. Maybe it was swinging by the Chicago Green City Market and buying some sweet-as-candy beets. Or maybe it was the hectic pace itself: experiencing different towns and cities and states, one on top of another, with no time to reflect or sit back and take things in.

There were benefits and drawbacks to the way our work exchange was structured last summer. Benefits: Experiencing three very different farms and getting to see the way the farms changed over the course of the season in a broader sense - because a month would go by between our first and second shifts on each of the three farms, we could see the shape of the growing season, the dramatic changes it brought each farm. Drawbacks: Because of the part-time and time-staggered nature of our schedule, I saw and heard about but never experienced what it's like to work on a farm. To do the kind of work we did Tuesdays and Thursdays for 40, 50 hours a week as an intern or farmhand, or more than that as the farmer. To see something you've planted or an animal you're raising grow day by day, not month by month. To feel the way the season unfolds from the inside, not as a bystander. Kind of like visiting a city for a few days every couple of months, but never living there.

So I started contacting farmers about coming on as an end-of-season intern and was even able to visit a few of the farms. I ducked under electrified fences, ate chocolate-avocado pudding, saw refrigerators full of processed chickens and met eclectic intern crews. Some observations from the experience so far:

Fastest hiring process ever. Never experienced anything like it. I got an incredibly high and fast rate of response to my inquiries, which were all (initially) by email. Some of these farms had no website, or only the most rudimentary sort, but they are on top of their game with communication. And you really get the feeling that your work on the farm will be absolutely integral and necessary if you do decide you're the right fit for one another.
I've already learned quite a bit about the farm intern/apprentice community. For instance, one of the reasons I found so many opportunities so quickly is that many farm interns are college (or even high school) students who will be heading back to school soon. I ran across other programs I didn't know about, like an international apprenticeship program for young farmers and intern networks that help connect interns with one another across a state or region.
Our project isn't as "out there" as you might think. One farm responded saying, "We unfortunately don't have any openings right now, but we think your project is fascinating - and we (the wife and husband team who run the farm) are a poet and a playwright!" Another farm has an outdoor stage and a non-profit housed on the farm that provides artist retreats and workshops throughout the summer. A third told me that one of their current interns, a college student, is studying theater. And on and on. We've been right all along: artists and farmers go together.
Our script is on the right track. This is just a side effect, but it's been very encouraging to talk to the farmers who have been interviewing me a little bit about our script and the themes we're exploring. They're invariably interested in the project and they've all responded with excitement when I say that our script deals with farm transfer, the dynamic between generations, and the dynamic between multigenerational and new farmers. It's clear that we're touching on issues that are really important to the farming community and that is so exciting to hear.

So that's that. I'm excited about this last phase of writing and about the prospect of doing it while living on a farm. The two go hand-in-hand: the revisions to be done in large part have to do with making the day-to-day realities of running a farm believable, so though I'm not officially doing this as research, I know it will be helpful to the script. And I'm looking forward to getting really dirty and spending a lot of time outdoors and learning by doing and weeding, weeding, weeding. To not running from place to place, or farm to farm, but taking the time to get a little rooted, to try and see a farm from the inside out rather than outside in.

Auditions!

2011-07-27T10:50:00.001-07:00

Please Join Us

We are looking for members of the Southern Maine farming community (and their friends, neighbors, family, and patrons) to participate in our production. No experience is necessary. If you love to act but know NOTHING about farming, you are welcome too! Please attend auditions on Sunday, August 7 and Monday, August 8. The details are below:

Sunday, August 7, 1 pm – 4 pm

Acorn Productions

90 Bridge St., Suite 125 

Westbrook, ME 04092

http://www.acorn-productions.org/

Monday, August 8, 6 pm - 9 pm

Camp Ketcha

336 Black Point Road

Scarborough, Maine 04074

http://campketcha.com/

What to Expect:

We heartily invite you to take part in our production by auditioning for the play! No prior experience or preparation is necessary to participate. You may attend at any time during the three-hour session. When you arrive, you will be given a scene from the play and a character to read. You will have time to look at the scene before we ask you to read in front of the director and stage manager. We may ask you to read more than one scene or character. And that’s it!

Directions:

Acorn Productions is located in the Dana Warp Mill on Bridge Street in Westbrook. From Main Street, turn north at the traffic light onto Bridge Street. Portland Pie Company and CVS are at this intersection. Cross the river on Bridge Street. Acorn Studios is located in the first entrance on your left under a green awning.

Camp Ketcha is located at the intersection of Black Point Road and Spurwink Rd. (Rt. 77) in Scarborough. From Portland, take Rt 77 across the Casco Bay Bridge through Cape Elizabeth, until you see Camp Ketcha on your right (about 9 miles from Portland). From Gorham/Scarborough, take Rt. 141 to Rt. 1 in Scarborough, cross Rt. 1 and continue on Black Point Rd. until you see Camp Ketcha on your left (about 3 miles).

Introducing Gregg (Jennie)

2011-07-27T08:10:00.000-07:00

Over the course of the next few weeks, I'll be introducing the members of our production team. We are just beginning the process of designing sets, lights, costumes, props, and sound for our production at Camp Ketcha in October. These are some of the artists who will be bringing our play to life through their considerable expertise, and I am incredibly excited to welcome them to our project. To begin, I'd like to introduce our Production Manager, Gregg Carville. Or rather, I'd like to let him introduce himself:

Turn the Page, Make a Change (Claire)

2011-07-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

Whenever we get a new script draft from Cory, it always reminds me of the feeling that came with being 10 years old and opening that last big present on Christmas morning. We've anticipate it for months, talked about what might or might not be included in it, shared ideas that we think might be helpful or interesting, and then we finally get to tear into it and get to see what's there.

There's the blissful free-fall of the first read- usually for me it's done binge style- an hour or so of straight reading with as few interruptions as possible. This usually quickly followed by a brief period of mourning for some of the scenes that didn't make it into this draft and then a second, more careful bit-by-bit reading when I begin to explore this new world of the play.

As the project's dramaturge, its my chance to jump in and ask questions that help us focus our ideas and make sure that we're cleaning up things that might be left from previous drafts. It also means that as we get new drafts, I can see the results of our conversations play out in the conversations our characters have. Now- I know we've written a lot lately about our brand spankin' new second draft, but I wanted to share with you how this process happens in the space of just a few days last week when Cory was here visiting us and how it completely changed the fate of one of our characters, Uncle Ed.

(NOTE: I'm really not trying to give anything big about the script away, but I probably will by mistake. If you are invested in being completely surprised about it, you probably should avert your eyes.)

As of our working draft last week, we know these things about Uncle Ed:

He's a ghost.
He helped to build the old barn that stands on one of the farms in the play.
For most of the play, he only exists for one other character- his descendant, Mitch, the farmer who is currently farming his land.

This character was inspired by the family histories we heard from the farmers we worked with last summer and some of the historical research that we've done, and has been a favorite of mine throughout the various drafts we've gone through. Anyone who has spent any time in Maine can attest to the power of tradition here in the pine tree state, and its been a joy to do readings of the play and watch our actors bring out the voice of this true old timer. He's like everything I love about "Burt and I" rolled up with a healthy dose of the realities of farming in 19th century Maine.

When Cory was here, Jennie and I got to sit her down as ask about some of the changes she had made to the character in the newest draft. A lot had changed especially for Mitch, the character who sees him. We talked about the different stratagies that Cory had tried out to show how those changes would effect Uncle Ed, but they weren't quite... sticking.

Heres one piece of text where Uncle Ed is talking to Mitch:

And so we started talking about ghosts- how our memories of people can change how we remember them, how what we want to remember about people could end up creating a really different idea of who they were than their actual character..... and eventually we asked the question- How is a real person different from their ghost? How do we change someone when we imagine their presence in our lives?

And the next night, at the reading we did with our farmers, I was thrilled to discover that all of a sudden, that portion of the script had morphed into this: (sorry for the blurriness!)

Ta-Da! Dramaturgical process at work!

Thats how it happens, folks. Its details like this that will make our finished product the complete and well developed story it ought to be- and its not even done yet! Will this idea still fit in a week? Who knows! We'll have to evaluate when we get there, but it certainly gave my heart a little pitter-patter when we read it.

Thanks for reading- we'll be in touch soon, but for the mean time, if you're in Portland ME, make a plan to stop in to the Public Market House in Monument Square and check out "Growing Stories; Photos and Writing From the Of Farms and Fables Project" show that will be hanging on the second floor for all of August. See you there!

Being There (Cory)

2011-07-24T14:30:00.000-07:00

At the farmer reading of the first draft of our script, back in April, this screenshot captures what my view was like:

I was in the room on Skype, and so I got to see some of the faces (depending on what portion of the circle I was aimed at), and hear the voices (sometimes missing words here and there), and even get some live feedback (though to respond, I had to shout).

At the second farmer reading, on a toasty July evening, the view from where I was sitting was a little fuller:

The difference is really profound. Feedback can be written down and emailed, interviews can be recorded and uploaded, but the energy that's there when you're all in the same room, breathing the same air, eating slices of the same pizza - there's not yet an app that can bottle that. When it comes to a play reading, spoken feedback is really important but so is that feedback that can't be thought out or planned: spontaneous reactions to a line or a scene that happen in the moment, that come from the gut, that are expressed not in words but in a sigh or a shift of the body or a chuckle or a glance. Being back in Maine after 11 months of working long-distance was a powerful reminder of the importance of the little things.

When I started writing the first draft, I felt like I was taking a jump into the dark. Working on the second draft was even scarier: for a long time, it seemed like I was writing a completely new play, and I felt there was no guarantee that it would constitute a step forward. The energy of support in the room during our reading last week, and excitement about the new draft, was something I was thankful to be in the room to feel.

I wanted to share some cool resources I found this week:

Transferring the Family Farm: What Worked, What Didn't for 10 New Jersey Families - This document, available on the NESFI website here, gives 10 fascinating case studies of New Jersey farms transferring their property and business from one generation to the next. Working through them is really helping to give me a better understanding of the issues, tensions, and concerns involved in farm transfer, which has become a central concern of our script. Biggest lesson: Farm transfer is a REALLY involved process. It takes years - sometimes decades - to do it right.
DACUM Occupational Profile for Northeast Small Scale "Sustainable" Farmers - Also found on the NESFI site; this is a profile, developed through farmer focus groups, of the skills and duties it takes to be a "small scale sustainable farmer," but they're definitely widely applicable, for the most part, to all types of farmers.

Flash Back! (Jennie)

2011-07-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

My blog assignment this week is to share something from the past . . . in a "visual" way. I've been thinking a lot lately about the VERY BEGINNING of this project. For Penny Jordan and I, that's way back in the winter of 2008. Penny is one of our partnering farmers and she was also the first champion of the project, our first Community Partner. Here's a little collage documenting Of Farms and Fables' first year (or two), complete with the very first e-mail. There are currently 1,380 conversations that are tagged "OFAF" in my e-mail account.

Click on the image for a larger version.

And now, to flash forward: Cory left us today after a whirlwind four-day visit. Here she is and off she goes! We'll chat soon, for there's lots of revising to do, and we'll see in her back in Maine in October. Happy travels, Cory!

A day in the life of "Of Farms and Fables" ...in JULY (Claire)

2011-07-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

This past week has been a very eventful week for the Of Farms and Fables crew. Summer, with all its humid heat and tourists and hustle and bustle is very much upon us in Southern Maine and our farmers all have that crazed look in their eyes that pants "Its JULY. HELP!"

At "Of Farms and Fables" HQ, We've been feeling the heat and the pressure of putting together all the details of our upcoming production and trying to fortify ourselves as best we could, but we were very very pleased to welcome Cory back from Germany this week for a little visit! We kept her to ourselves for a little while, but after we caught up and worked through the script (a meeting that ended at the beach more out of necessity than anything) we decided we ought to share her with the rest of our collaborators and friends.

The next day we all piled into the car:

And headed out to catch up on all the happenings with our farmers. First stop: Jordan's Farm.

Where we caught PeeWee and Tali having lunch. It was so nice to feel like this was such a familiar scene- we lived it all last summer and wrote back and forth about it all winter long as Cory was developing the script.So we took a seat at the picnic table, chatted about PeeWee's upcoming anniversary and speculated about the rain, and when the guys had to head back out to work, we piled back into the car to check out our performance venue, Camp Ketcha.

The Camp was FULL of summer camp kids (on "rainy day schedule" so the great hall was a little busy with a particularly rousing game of Simon Says.) so we took a little look around and then made our way out to see everyone at the Benson Farm. Not suprisingly, things there were bussiness as usual too- Ryan was helping to get a dry cow's hooves cleaned, Eddie wanted to show us his iphone and newest hunting trophy ("We like to call it "Tacky!" he announced to us as he towards the largest stuffed deer head any of us had ever seen.") before heading out to supervise getting in the hay.

Broadturn Farm was also buzzing when we got there- two weddings this weekend, plus all the regular CSA responsibilities... But we were very excited to get a little peak at the nearly-ready-to-open farmstand they have been working on and the very tail end of farm camp. After catching up on the gossip and goings on in the dooryard, we again motored on to pick up the fresh-off the press copies of the our second draft of the script!

So naturally, back to Jennie's house for a bout 10 minutes to change, pick up dinner and on to the Cape Elisabeth Lion's Club to read it with our farmers, members of the Cape Farm Alliance and our new costume designer! (Welcome, Renee!)

Not bad for a day, eh? Many thanks to all those that took a break from their work days to

say hello and even rallied to come to a reading after a long day. Jennie and I will be keeping in

touch until Cory comes back to us in a few weeks. 'Till then- a little mini photo album of our day

on the road.

-enjoy!

Claire

Giant Broccoli Visions (Cory)

2011-06-16T03:14:00.000-07:00

Originally posted in my personal blog on June 4, 2011: reflecting as I work on the second draft of our play.

Used to be I was fond of saying: I don't "see" what I'm writing. The writing is about the words. "Seeing" is for the director, the designers, actors.

Today I have spent the last five, six hours fighting with a new draft of what I tend to affectionately term "the farming play." I pace. I move between desk, balcony, bed, kitchen: desk to type, balcony to breathe, bed to scribble in my notebook, kitchen to distract myself by cooking more vegetables (it has to be done, I tell you! Märkische Kiste flubbed, doubling the weekly CSA-style vegetable box I get from them, and if I don't cook cook cook, the surprise bounty will go bad). I look through notes from yesterday, from February, from last June; I pore through email correspondence. What would I do without my OFAF Gmail label?

As I think about what's to keep, to throw away, and to change, my head's unusually full of imagery. Today, dominating is a giant table bisecting the stage, the table itself cut through by a fence, both entities assailed by weeds that never stop growing.

A table for the food cycle, that most fundamental building block of agriculture; for family, an important element of our particular farming community.

A fence for control of the land. For the boundaries we make within ourselves, and between ourselves and others. Make, yes, an important word, as in create, as in imagine, as in the boundaries are what we build, nothing more.

The weeds for the land talking back and jealously taking back. To remind us that there's no "done." Today we weed and tomorrow we weed again.

And in the background there is, as always, the barn: what came before, something to honor, to remember; but so big it blocks the sun; old and dry, and certainly, somewhere, there's rot, and there's danger, but it's hard to say where. We don't want to look too closely. If we do, we might have to tear it down.

In this unusual image-abundance I'm seeing the mark of the past nine months, of seeing theater where the visual often overpowers (I don't necessarily mean this negatively) the verbal. At the least, it's raised to the same level. You are what you watch as well as what you eat. Meaning I may well soon transform into a giant broccoli, but one with some very colorful dreams.

A Couple of OFAF Videos

2011-05-18T08:46:00.000-07:00

1) From the April 14 Public Reading of our first draft at Space Gallery in Portland, Maine. This is the first ten minutes of the play, read by: Erik Moody, Christopher Reiling, Brent Askari, Bess Welden, Keith Anctil, Gus Febles, Mohammed Kebdani, Claire Guyer, Jane Ackermann, Virginia Collins, Pat Mew, and Jeffrey Roberts. Video by Wade Brainerd.

2) From the May 6 opening of "Growing Stories: Photographs by Claire Guyer" at Maine Farmland Trust Gallery in Belfast, Maine. Video by Erik Moody.

Which Bricks? Ag Trade Show Part 2 (Jennie)

2011-05-11T09:47:00.000-07:00

Three weeks ago, we read the first draft of our play with many of the farmers who hosted us in the Work Exchange last summer. We received a lot of excellent feedback. We learned that we are in a very good starting place and that Cory has built us a strong foundation. We learned that we have a lot of work to do to ensure that our play reflects the stories we have heard from farmers, and to create a compelling and coherent piece of theater. We have a lot of work to do, but it is productive, challenging, and joyful work, and I could not be more excited. I can feel the way that the ground has shifted under our feet. The nature of our work is changing. Now, we are not merely collecting materials, we are beginning to build. We are laying bricks. And already, we have many hands participating in the work. Stacy says: “I’m not sure this brick fits here.” Penny says: “What about this one? Could we use this brick?” John Sr. says: “I really like this brick, but it needs to be turned this way.” And Cory says: “Are there too many bricks?!” “Yes!!” we all say. “There are too many bricks!”

One of the responses we have had from those who participated in our readings last month is that we have included so many themes and questions in the narrative of our play it is difficult to tell what the heart of the story is. As Cory mentioned in a recent post, our topic has a BIG PICTURE and there are many cans of worms that could be included in a discussion of Maine agriculture.

Back in January, when I was at the Maine Agricultural Trades Show, I stumbled into a lively discussion of one of these worm cans, and I learned a lot about the complexity of the idea of farmland preservation. Access to land is a topic that plays a large role in the lives of Maine farmers, and as an outsider it is easy to oversimplify the problem and its solutions. While there is not a lot of time in our play to focus exclusively on the politics of land use or the idea of farmland preservation, human relationships to land to play a central role in the lives of our characters. So - these are some of the things that I have learned:

Location Matters. A prominent element of the farmland preservation movement is a response to the rapid development of low-density housing communities across land that was formerly used for production. Once the land is developed, it is no longer available for the production of food or other natural resources. This creates a competition for land between farmers and developers. The market currently favors the developer. According to John Piotti of the Maine Farmland Trust, the market hasn’t yet figured out what the value of farmland as farmland is. All land value is assigned based on real estate development potential. In any given community, the “cost” of preserving farmland will depend on the real estate values and demand for housing in that particular area. In many areas of Maine, those not adjacent to urban/suburban centers, development pressures do not exist. In these areas, the preservation tools that have been developed for population centers do little good to preserve working farmland. Preservation attempts in these areas must address successful land transfer between generations and business support for farmers who cannot afford or manage to keep their land in production.
Value is subjective. A common tool of the farmland preservation movement is the “agricultural easement”. The farmer gives development rights on some portion of his/her land to a third party (a land trust for instance). The farmer either makes a full gift of the rights, receiving tax benefits for the gift, or they receive payment for the rights from the third party. Unlike most traditional conservation easements, in an agricultural easement, the land may continue to be farmed. Ideally, the third party receives the assurance that open space will not be lost, the current farmer receives some capital to maintain her business, and future farmers are able to purchase the land at its agricultural value (rather than its real estate value, which is often financially prohibitive for farmers). The challenge is that the value of the land, and of the easement, will look different to each of the stakeholders. Many easements fail to clearly define every detail of the agreement up front, leaving questions of ownership and responsibility open to interpretation and conflicts to be resolved after the fact. One attendee of the Ag Show stated: “an easement is what the best attorney and the biggest bully says it is.”
We are learning as we go. Because every piece of land is different, every farm family is different, and every business is different, no instance of farmland preservation will be exactly like another. The central players involved in multiple preservation transactions (the Dept. of Ag, the Maine Farmland Trust) are learning from past experiences and carrying the knowledge they’ve acquired into new arrangements. However, each new project presents new challenges. These are some of the questions that must be answered when planning an ag easement:

How much land will go under easement?

Will the land be protected in one piece, or can it be divided? How big can each of the pieces of be?
Can buildings of any kind be developed on the land? Where? How many? What kind? (Housing for farmers, storage facilities, retail spaces . . .?)
What kinds of improvements (roads and drainage, infrastructure changes) may be made on the land?

These agreements are quite binding and can be very difficult to change. The details can also have a lasting impact on the individuals that own, rent, farm, and use the land. The land that John and Stacy rent from the Scarborough Land Conservation Trust is more than 400 acres large and it was preserved in one piece. It cannot be divided and sold to multiple landowners. John and Stacy are interested in purchasing the land that they farm, but the cost of purchasing 400 acres in Scarborough is prohibitive for them, even with the development rights removed. 400 acres is also more land than they want or need to manage. Stacy has told me that changing the easement to allow the SLCT to sell a portion of the land would require an act of the U.S. Congress.

The central challenge of farmland preservation, as with all community planning, seems to be the requirement that we look forward with eyes that are firmly planted in the realities of today. It seems evident that our individual and community needs are changing. The agricultural policies and regulations of our government, the education and communication programs that have served previous generations need to change in order to serve our communities today, and presumably to serve those of the future. The question is: who should decide? Which perspectives will be honored, supported, and reflected in our laws and policies?

Each person with a stake or concern in a problem will approach that problem from their own perspective – bringing to bear their own experiences, hopes, and fears. It is only human, and only natural, that an individual cannot see all of the pieces of a picture by him/herself. By making a choice from my perspective, I am likely to inadvertently impact those around me. One farmer claims that the result of land trusts preserving farmland in his area is an increase in the value of his land that raises his taxes. “How do you build things,” another farmer asks, “without having these kinds of negative impacts? Am I making my neighbor’s taxes go up?”

How do we make choices for our future as a community? How do we move forward, learn from our mistakes and our successes, face our current challenges, and prepare for the unknown as a community? I would like to hope that some part of the answer lies in the act of telling and hearing stories. If we can begin by acknowledging that we are blind without our own stories and the stories of our neighbors, if we can practice our ability to listen and to tell, maybe we can learn to think from another’s perspective. Maybe we can begin to understand the big picture.

There is a lot of work remaining for the artists, farmers, and community partners of OFAF. But regardless of the form our play finally takes, I am grateful for the process we are now engaged in. I am grateful for the opportunity to hear, retell, choose, and shape multiple stories. It is the process of choosing and shaping these stories with the diverse members of our project’s community that is the greatest gift to me, nurturing my understanding, supporting my growth as an artist and a human being.

Updates from German-Land

2011-03-31T02:23:00.000-07:00

1. Spring is here!

I have a bike. There is sunshine. I joined a Berlin CSA-type dealie a few weeks ago and have been getting cases of vegetables; I have to figure out what to do with this week's fennel. (Any suggestions?)

2. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra just played a concert for a bunch of plants.

Weird -- but true. So very true. You can see video evidence below. The video host is a cheeseball, but I liked the idea. And you can download the music they played to the plants here, for free. In case you are looking for a springtime growth spurt.

3. I wrote a play.

Oh right, I finished the first draft of the OFAF play. So there's that. I am relieved and happy and nervous and all sorts of things. Responses from Jennie and Claire and my usual trusted posse of script-readers have been, so far, encouraging. I am working on having a First Draft, Version 1.2 (or should it be 1.1? I shouldn't use nerdy lingo that I don't understand) in time for our first public reading (!!!!!) at SPACE Gallery on April 14. If you live in Maine -- you should go. I'll hopefully be there via Skype. You'll have to attend the reading to see the whole script, but click here for a teaser.

We Are Reading a Play!

2011-03-30T07:27:00.000-07:00

On March 22, Cory delivered the first draft of the Of Farms and Fables script. It is a monstrous 97 pages long, involves about 25 different characters, 2 farms, lots of family, Puerto Rican fables, fantastic dreams of dancing cows, and a GAP certification game show. On Thursday, April 14, we will be reading this script at Space Gallery with an excellent ensemble of local actors. Presented as part of the annual sustainable food event, Food & Farm, the reading will be followed by a Q&A. An integral part of our script development process, this event will help us shape the play through subsequent drafts. Please come, enjoy the script, and share your feedback!

Food+Farm: Of Farms and Fables

Thursday 04.14.2011, Doors at 7:00 PM, Starts at 7:30 PM, Ends at 9:30 PM, FREE, All Ages

Space Gallery, 538 Congress St., Portland ME 04101 (207) 828-5600

http://www.space538.org

Growing Stories: Growing A Photo Show (Claire)

2011-03-16T08:26:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, I pitched an idea to the Maine Farmland Trust Gallery in Belfast. I had been looking over some of the photos I took last summer and began to notice that some of them were actually pretty good. What if I took some of those pictures and put them together with blog posts we have accumulated over the past months (yikes! almost a year now!)? Do you think we could make Farms and Fables into a gallery show?

Fortunately for me, they were just as excited as I was and their wonderful gallery director, Anna, helped me focus my ideas and booked us to open Growing Stories: Photos and Writing From The “Farms and Fables Project” on May 6th. (Mark your calendars!)

Ever since then, I’ve been looking back through the blog, through the thousand or so photos I took... Its been quite an

adventure. Let me tell you.

First of all- I’m not a trained photographer, nor have I ever organized a gallery show. So

when the deadline I had set for myself started looming large in my mind, I gathered my ruler, tape and cardboard and built a scale model of the gallery. Its cardboard walls are scarred from tearing off and re-taping little paper scale sized “photos”.

Most of the time, it sits under the coffee table and holds the 70 or so photo kiosk prints that comprise my “rough draft” edit of photos. When it’s in action helping me plan out just how many pieces can fit where, it often hosts gallery patrons collected from the shelves of the apartment. (see 'em? Its like the beginning of a bad joke: the little mermaid, a flying pig, The Buddah and his african finger puppet girlfriend go to an art gallery...)

When I’ve got an hour or two, I pull it out and start laying out the sets of photos I’ve already chosen and commence playing a complicated game of mixing and matching to help me figure out which piece of this puzzle comes next.

Fortunately, I’ve had the good luck to be able draw on the incredible eye and generous spirit of my friend and roommate Lizzie. Thank god she doesn't mind coming home to find me sitting in the middle of a flurry of photographs having minor breakdowns about which picture of a cow I should choose.

She’s also one of the smartest people I know. After mulling some images over with me yesterday, she said, “you know- you’ve got a pattern here. There’s the people who do the work, the work being done and the stuff you work with. Try thinking of it that way”. Clouds part. The sun shines down on me. All is clear. I think, “Its as simple as beginning, middle and end. Close up, middle distance, depth of frame. Worker, work, worked on”.

For a moment- I am enlightened. Then I get caught up in the cow picture conundrum again.

I’m getting down to the wire. I’ve given myself until April 1st to get all my ducks in a row- to get from 1000 photos to 18. To condense almost a year’s worth of journaling, blog posts and essays in 8 8x10 inch plaques.

On that day, I’ll pack all these things up in a big digital package and send it out to a printer. And when they come back I’m pretty sure it will be better than Christmas. I’ve had dreams in which I’m holding the large print (18x24) of Jennie chasing a cow and I can feel the weight of the gatorboard in my hands.

By then, I’m sure I will have gotten used to the idea that all my favorite photos can’t be in the show, but right now I’m haunted by them. Every image that is eliminated feels like such a betrayal. I don’t just betray my longtime favorites, but also the images I’ve grown to love as I go through the process of evaluating them. There are so many more favorites I didn’t know that I had- making it even harder to turn them face down on the carpet and move on to the next one.

In their honor, I’m dedicating this blog post and maybe a few more to come to show off the really great images that just don’t fit into the big show in Belfast. Maybe this can be their moment in the sun they so highly deserve.

Real plow, pencil plow (Cory)

2011-03-03T17:28:00.000-08:00

My connection to the farming world is very different than it was five months ago at the end of our work exchange. During the work exchange it was physical, it was experiential, visceral; it was personal and interpersonal, it was tangible, it was about particular stories and memories and opinions. It was this farmer and that intern and this potato beetle and that cow and this CSA member and that hot sweaty day of tossing hay or misty morning weeding.

Maybe it is a strange order of things, but I started -- through the work exchange -- with the effort to understand the smaller elements of the picture; and it's now that the work exchange is over, in stepping back from that tangible experience and from Maine and from the United States, that I am for the first time really trying to get a sense of the picture as a whole. Reading articles. Listening to radio programs. Checking out documentation on every website from MOFGA's to the FDA's.

It is overwhelming.

It is a big picture. BIG. It's over a year ago that I first started talking with Jennie about working on this project and it has been a year of being constantly surprised by how much I didn't know about the issues of food production and processing and consumption, and land use and preservation, in the United States; and how much there always is, still, to learn. It is a puzzle. It is a very complicated puzzle. And it's possible we bought it from Goodwill and don't even know whether all of the pieces are there at all, or maybe some pieces of another puzzle are mixed in. Seems like every time I turn around, there is a new can of worms to open.

A Partial Listing of Opened Worm Cans

The Big Guys vs. the Little Guys (GAP certification, farm subsidies, federal price of milk) -- how government ends up getting skewed towards making things easier for big industrial farmers, exactly the guys who don't need the help of, say, subsidies
Environmental issues: carbon footprint of food transported from one side of the country to the other, animals bred for their meat consuming massive amounts of grain
Is the "slow food movement" or the "local food movement" classist? Affordability vs. health vs. capacity to feed everybody vs. people just wanting to eat what they want to eat, damn it...
Health issues: is it healthier to eat organic? How can we avoid major food-related health scares related to food production/processing (that GAP certification thing is tied up in this)? Does the subtherapeutic use of antibiotics do more harm than good?
Community: is the American community deteriorating? What are the negative effects of globalism (I know, getting SUPER big picture here) and how can community-building, buying locally, and creating locally fight those negative effects?
Land use: small farmers often can't compete with certain buyers who are able to pay much higher prices for land; how do we even things out? What are the benefits and drawbacks of land easements?

There are more. There will always be more. Point is, this stuff wasn't even close to being on my radar a year ago. And what put it on? This farm. That farmer.

It's hard to be away from those individual farms and farmers, far away, quite far, working on a play for them. Distance lends perspective, but drama is in the details. The big picture isn't theater. Theater is pink crocs, memories of an old barn, a cow dodging a rope halter, hustling to get CSA shares ready, chatting with an old blind woman in floral print on the farmstand bus.

I don't know what the context of this quote is, but I'm sure you can see why it speaks to me: "Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the corn field."

Dwight D. Eisenhower wasn't writing a play, but I can read a wealth of encouragements and cautions in what he says. At the heart of it is an exhortation not to simplify, not to forget what it's like to be much closer -- to be there.

One way that theater can be a vital part of the conversation about the future of farming: It can help people be there. Remove that distance. Help us remember there's a woman behind that head of lettuce, a man behind that gallon of milk. That a farm is more than the tangible consumables it produces -- it is a part of the delicate and endangered ecosystem of the American community.

The Ag Trade Show: Part 1 (Jennie)

2011-02-10T13:42:00.000-08:00

On January 12th, I drove to the 70^th Maine Agricultural Trades Show in a blizzard. When I arrived at 10:30, the parking lot of the Augusta Civic Center looked like this:

And when I returned to my car at four o’clock in the afternoon, it looked like this:

And what happened in the intervening hours of relative warmth amid the fluorescent glow of stadium lights? Well, the show was sparsely attended, to say the least. This is in sharp contrast to Tuesday, which as I heard from one exhibitor was “mobbed”. Organizers were expecting roughly 5,000 attendees at this year’s show, and I’ll bet a good number of them made the trip on Tuesday. One highlight of my trip was a chat with Bib and Jodie Jordan. Bib said he thought most people were attending on Tuesday or Thursday, due to the weather. He implied that I probably should have made the same choice, and I can’t really argue. “Whatcha doin’ here?” he says. “Just crazy enough to come out in a storm?”

That day, in the quiet and the lull, leadership of convening organizations were filling in for missing presenters, “winging it” through lecture schedules missing half the key players. And yet talks were given, and productive conversations were had. I got to see some really, really shiny tractors. People nervously checked the front doors at regular intervals to see how the storm was coming, conferring about the safest plan – stay until it slows, or get out before it’s worse?

I attended one talk at the Maine Grass Farmer’s Network Annual Meeting. It was about a trial in “direct-cut silage” and was given by Rick Kersbergen of the Cooperative Extension. Apparently, “direct-cut” silage systems are not heavily used in the US, nor have they been generally recommended by the Extension in recent years. I have difficulty following the details (and there are many details), but it has to do with the water content of forage immediately after cutting, and subsequent moisture loss from seepage during storage. The wetter it is when you store it, the more likely it is to seep. Here’s what I find on the North Dakota State University website:

“The high moisture level in direct-cut silages can cause an abnormal low-temperature fermentation producing conditions favorable for undesirable clostridial organism growth. This produces silage that has an unpleasant sour, butyric-acid smell which severely reduces livestock consumption.”

What most Maine dairy farmers use is a “wilted silage” system – forage is left to dry a bit in the fields and then either wrapped in round bails or chopped and pressed in a bunker (the Bensons do both). The stated concern for small operations farmers (those with a small herd of sheep, for instance) are the costs involved with wilted silage systems. The machinery involved in cutting, gathering, baling and wrapping the feed is expensive. With the machine that was the object of this trial, a farmer can cut, gather and store the feed in a single pass through the field. The machinery looks like this:

A full description of the results of the trial would be lengthy, and coming from me - inaccurate. The primary goal was to compare the nutrient content of feed produced with this direct-cut system to that produced with a traditional wilted silage system. Though not completely sold on the system, Mr. Kersbergen seemed pleasantly surprised by the results. Though the direct-cut feed from one field of alfalfa was effectively butyric to the point of poison, a sample of direct-cut ryegrass (I think?) compared favorably to its wilted counterpart. There’s more information about the trial here.

I was fascinated to hear and to partially absorb the details of feed testing and optimum fermentation conditions. However, what was most exciting for me about this presentation, and the photos from the trial, and the comments from the farmers in the room was the sense of curiosity, experimentation, and problem solving that drove the conversation. While the fairs serve this purpose in a competitive environment, the trade show gives farmers and leaders and educators and advocates a chance to sit down and share what they’ve tried, what they’ve learned, and how they’ve failed. The farmers in this room were eager to compare practices and commiserate over frustrations. Observing the easy manner in which this community laughs and marvels together gave me a chance to see that famed farmer ingenuity in action.

There have been other examples for us. Eddie and his boys fashioned a travel milking parlor from a neighbor’s old compressor so that Dolly and the other show cows can be milked right in the stall when they compete at the fairs. I learned at the trade show that it’s fairly common practice to control weeds with a propane weed burner. Pictures showed one Maine farmer’s home-built propane-holding backpack. The farmer that ran the direct-cut silage trial designed and built his own trailer to collect the feed. John and Stacy haven’t got a lot of irrigation built into their fields, so in the drought last summer they loaded water-filled tanks onto a tractor and drove to the parched cabbage beds, distributing water to thirsty plants through a garden hose. Techniques among farmers may be similar, but individual approaches will depend on the farmer and what he/she has in front of them. Watch out, industrial designers, farmers have been solving their own problems for centuries. Farmers are industrial designers. Farmers are inventors.

Some related thoughts from my brother (a designer) in a slightly different context: mhahndesign.

That’s all for now. Look for a lively discussion of farmland preservation practices in the upcoming Ag Trade Show: Part 2.

What's For Dinner? (Claire)

2011-02-02T07:55:00.000-08:00

From my dining room table I have a lovely view through bay windows looking out over the city of Portland. As the sun shines down on our latest accumulation of snow, the largest per-capita collection of restaurants and bars in North America (or so I’ve been told) ready themselves for another busy night of service. Its getting to be dinner time and since I have the night off from my job waitressing at Silly’s restaurant, I have no food in the house. There are three different large supermarket chains in my view, two convenience stores, and a local grocery store chain just out of sight, but my pallet is just not convinced any one way or another. I know I have some pasta, and rice... I could try that thai place down the street? Through the drafty heating ducts that run between my downstairs neighbor’s apartment and mine, I hear the echoey instructions from their television, perpetually tuned to the Food Network. In a TV studio somewhere, someone is making pot roast.

From my spot on the hill, its easy to see Portland as the food- filled bonanza it sometimes seems to be. Thanks to press attention, (especially a lengthy New York Times Feature I’ve heard a lot of descriptions of our fair metropolis as a “foodie town”- and for good reason. With a relatively small population, we boast an impressive collection of chefs and a very active “slow foods” community devoted to the use of locally produced foods. Heck- we even have a winter farmer’s market these days. With this heady vision of abundance, the view from my snowy dining room table begins look like one of Carl Warner’s fantastical all-food landscapes. (www.carlwarner.com)

As I try to recover my senses, I think back to my summertime in the fields and remember listening to the Broadturn farm interns talk about what they would have for dinner. “Are there any pork chops left?” “Yeah- and we’ll grab some zucchini before we leave the field.” “And there should be some lettuce left out there too.” - in the dead of winter, that sort of decision making is appealing for a number of reasons, (Salad! With real tomatoes! That you can just go outside and pick!) but unfortunately, the crop from my apartment's little raised-bed garden was used up long ago, and -seasonally speaking- I am just about as far from fresh tomatoes as a person can get.

The thing I find I’m longing for the most is being able to look around and find out what’s for dinner in the land rather than on a grocery store shelf. Alice Waters, the owner of legendary “slow food” restaurant, Chez Panisse, wrote about this in her essay, “A Delicious Revolution”. In her mind, this connection between the land and our tables is imperative to living a full life.

“When you understand where your food comes from, you look at the world in an entirely different way. I think that if you really start caring about the world in this way, you see opportunities everywhere. Wherever I am, I'm always looking to see what's edible in the landscape. Now I see Nature not just as a source of spiritual inspiration — beautiful sunsets and purple mountains majesties — but as the source of my physical nourishment.”

(You should really read the rest of the essay here: www.ecoliteracy.org/essays/delicious-revolution its lovely.)

Eager to find opportunities for eating in my wintery food landscape here in Portland Maine, I took it upon myself to heed these words and really use what I've got right in front of me. A few weeks ago, I pulled on my boots and set out through the constant deluge of snow to make such a meal for my roommates and me. I wasn’t alone in my quest- Keith had proposed that each member of the artistic team make an attempt and share their successes and challenges with the rest of the group.

In the summertime we were in the practice of making dinner for each other so we could eat together during our Tuesday night meetings. Most of the time our food came from the farms were working on. There was always salad- and always desert. For me, a full-time waitress- it was my one meal a week I could count on eating while siting down and having time to fully finish. I always looked forward to our little Tuesday rituals. When I started planning this wintertime meal, I wanted to bring that kind of meal to my house- where all my busy roommates and I could come together and really share in eating a meal.

For me, the meal started with Kale. One of my roommates happens to be dating a farmer from Durham, and he had brought us the last of the sweetest, latest Kale still left in his cold-frames. She offered up the whole bag when I first proposed the idea, and I was very happy to have it. After Kale came some turnips and Rutabagas from our friend Leah's garden down the street. With my side dishes taken care of, I started thinking about what I could get for a main course that would be really fresh and from somewhere very close by... and then, on a walk on the near-by eastern promenade, I thought, of course! Fish!

At the Harbor Fish Market I found bags of shiny black Muscles harvested from Bangs Island- a little slip of land just off the just a mile or so off the eastern coast of Chebeague Island and the same hop skip and jump from cliff island, right on the edge of Broad Sound in Casco Bay. All in all, about 10 miles straight out to sea from my house on the hill. (Look for the tiny point A and point B on the map below. My house is point A. The muscles were living at point B)

After I had my muscles, I found onions, garlic, shallots and carrots (from Durham, Union and Freedom) to add to a broth of "Villager" white wine, grown and bottled in Warren Maine. Add to that a little thyme and rosemary we grew in our little window boxes this summer and some bread made with stoneground wheat flour fresh from Houlton, and we were well on our way to a full meal.

While I was visiting my roommate at her workplace, the lovely Rosemont market, the day of our feast, I picked up some "micro" salad greens and hot house tomatoes grown in New Glouster to round everything out. I spent most of the day working at the restaurant and ended up telling my boss, Colleen, about the mission. She loved the idea and donated two bottles of a blended red wine from Falmouth, known as the "Scarborough Beach Series" on the spot! What a treat!

That evening, my roommates Liz and Seren gathered around the kitchen table for a meal consisting of the following:

Muscles from Bang island (10ish miles from where I live.)

Wine grown and brewed in Warren Maine (70 miles or so)

Shallots and carrots from Freedom Farm (84 miles)

Onions and kale from Durham (25 miles)

Garlic from Union (74 miles)

Flour from Houlton (247 miles)

Greens and tomatoes from Olivia’s (19 miles)

Turnips+rutabagas from Lea down the street (.25 miles)

Rosemary and Thyme from our gardens (no miles)

Wine grown and brewed in Falmouth (8 miles)

Sea salt (the ocean is .5 miles from my house, the store it was purchased at, 1 mile)

average distance of this feast traveled: 49 miles

Here's something that I read on the Maine Coast Vineyards website (makers of the Scarborough Beach Series wine we enjoyed that night): “That is what wine is all about anyway, creating a beverage from a product grown on the land that goes with the native foods of that land. And that is what we are doing.” That kind of holistic approach to eating- choosing food that is grown here and pairing it with other foods with a preexisting geographical relationship to each other seems like the way to honor the place you are in. As Alice Waters puts it, "How can you marvel at the world and then feed yourself in a completely un-marvelous way?"

Let me tell you- it is marvelous to sit a at table with friends with fragrant muscle broth steaming up the windows and feel like you've pulled the snow right off the city and discovered all the delicious secrets it was hiding all this time. The snow is flying down now- but knowing that the food I eat can connect me to the sunny fields I remember from the summertime feels like I'm loosening this winter's hold on me. Tonight I might have pasta with butter or whatever is hanging out in the freezer, but the memory of my Local dinner and the planning that went into it will stay with me long after I've eaten a million other dinners, and keep me planning more of them.

If It Be Now: Some Old and Even Older Words (Jennie)

2011-01-06T12:37:00.000-08:00

I began writing this entry in July, shortly after the collapse of the Benson barn. I had difficulty completing it at the time; the event was overwhelming and raw and I struggled to write clearly. I have been meaning for some time to finish what I started. This was a momentous event, and I feel that it is important to include a description in our log:

“Well, Jen, what do you think?” Eddie Benson has disembarked from the house-sized front loader he was operating and is crossing the drive toward me. I am peering into a concrete and stone-filled hole in the ground; the last remaining evidence of the Bensons’ beautiful century-old hay barn.

“I don’t know, Eddie.” I say, sadly shaking my head.

“Just another day on the farm!” he replies.

It has been an ongoing manifesto of Eddie’s, and a personal project of his to impress this awareness upon us, that a farmer must be ready for anything. You can’t plan too far ahead, and there is no “control”. Every day is a new day, every hour a new hour. A farmer is someone who rolls with the punches, and is prepared to fix any problem, or to spend half the day trying.

When I drove to Kay-Ben on Thursday morning, two hours after learning of the barn’s collapse in Wednesday night’s freak windstorm, I could hear my pulse in my ears and I was afraid. I knew which barn had fallen and that two cows had died, but I didn’t know which two cows and I didn’t know how the family was holding up. From my brief conversation with Becky, I could only tell that things were very hectic.

When I pulled up to the Bensons’ yard, parking on the road because there were so many cars in the driveway, the energy was vibrant and hopeful. The yard was full of people, community members who put their own agendas on hold to pitch in and help the Benson family save their animals and clean up the colossal mess. In the center of the yard, folding tables were piled with donuts and sandwiches and water. Near the barn site, fifty or more people were picking up debris and waiting to move hay, once the loaders managed to gain access. Some of them had been at the farm well into the night and returned early in the morning to continue the family’s efforts. I grew up in a small Maine town myself, and recognized from my earliest consciousness this scene: women chatting and organizing food, men and women lifting and hauling, children scampering about through legs and under tables. Pitching in. I found Becky, ascertained that none of the most valuable cows had died, and hopped into a truck full of strangers to help bring additional picnic tables from a neighbor’s yard.

It was reaffirming to be on the Benson Farm that day, to see and to participate in the community support of this generous family. It was heartbreaking to see the barn caved in on herself, thrilling to hear the tales of heroics that brought seven buried calves to health and safety. It was dreadful to imagine Janice, a dry cow who was standing alone in the basement of the barn when it fell, and infectious to hear the stories, over and over again, a community cementing this event in the collective memory. Generations from now, the children will hear: “Remember when the Benson barn fell . . . I couldn’t even see my truck through the rain . . . I looked out the window across the yard and I just knew . . . they were standing in the sunshine, with the barn collapsed all around them . . .”

It was an overwhelming day full of myriad mixed emotions, but what most surprised and impressed me was that the predominant feeling on the farm was one of gratitude. Gratitude: that none of the family was hurt. Gratitude: that none of the most valuable cows, representing significant financial investment, had died. (Just two days before the collapse, I had helped to move all of the show cows, $60,000 worth of heifer, across the road from the basement of the hay barn to the heifer barn). Gratitude: that nothing worse had happened. “Eben had been planning to go over to the barn with his friends, before the rain.” said Eddie. “How lucky am I?”

Nevertheless, the event did represent substantial loss. Saying goodbye to a century-old icon and a space full of memories for generations of family members is not easy. Replacing the much-needed storage and housing facility is emotionally and economically stressful.

“It was a beautiful barn”, I say to Eddie.

“It sure was.” he agrees.

This cornerstone of farm life, that you must be adaptable and prepared to chuck your plans out the window whenever nature throws you a curve ball, must manifest in both large and small ways. Some days it’s an unanticipated rainfall or a tractor that won’t start. This summer, we observed a mammoth demonstration of farmer adaptability. “I can’t believe you’re writing a play about farming and a thunderstorm flattens a hay barn” said a Broadturn intern. “It’s your fairy tale ending for the play,” says Ryan.

“You know, Eddie,” I say. “We’ve all noticed that each week, you somehow manage to make our visits to the Benson Farm more unique and dramatic than the last.” I indicate the absent barn with a nod of my head. “There are four weeks left in our project!”

“There are, huh?” Eddie pulls at his chin and nods. “We’ll think of something.” He says.

Flexibility. Adaptability. Preparedness. Acceptance. I have only observed, but to me it seems that farming teaches a person how to live with wisdom and grace in a way that few other vocations can. On the other hand, perhaps this is one of those ways in which farming and theater aren’t so very different after all. I find myself mulling over Hamlet, and a few of my very favorite lines, ever:

“ . . .There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come - the readiness is all.”

Two very different albums that have to do with farming

2010-11-15T02:22:00.001-08:00

1. Dirt Farmer (Levon Helm)

Dirt Farmer is good ol' folk music. It won the Grammy for Best Traditional Folk Album in February 2008. The music video for "Poor Old Dirt Farmer" also has interviews with farmers interspersed with it -- definitely worth a watch:

2. Heartland (Owen Pallett)

Heartland is the third album by Canadian indie rock artist Owen Pallett, released January 12, 2010 on Domino Records. The songs on Heartland form a narrative concerning a "young, ultra-violent farmer" named Lewis, commanded by an all-powerful narrator—named Owen. It is set in the fictional world of Spectrum. According to Pallett, the songs are one-sided dialogues with Lewis speaking to his creator. Pallett commented that the idea behind Heartland is "preposterous. I wanted to have this contained narrative that has the breadth of a Paul Auster short story." The lyrics raise all sorts of theological questions about believers’ relationship with a deity and the nature of fate, but the construct is just a blank canvas. Pallett said, "Really, it's just all about me. All records are about their singer. I was trying to play with that." (Thanks, Wikipedia!)

What Concerns Everyone (Cory)

2010-10-19T03:40:00.000-07:00

Last time I saw Eddie, he told me to look out for Benson cows in Germany. They're here, though he says even he wouldn't know how to find them. I haven't run across one yet, but this summer's experience on the farms continues to resonate with me in many ways even all the way across the pond.

When I walk down the produce aisle in the German grocery stores I frequent, in Netto or Lidl or Aldi, I am very aware of the Ursprung of the potatoes and the tomatoes, the peaches, the onions. Germany? Italy? New Zealand? It doesn't mean that I stick with only German products, but when I do buy nectarines from Spain, that's a choice of which I am conscious. It's clear that the local/organic fad is here, too, and it's similarly complicated (people tell me, for instance, that you can't necessarily trust a food item marked "BioBio" or "Ökologische" to be organic, due to wide disparity in controlling and evaluating organic farming). I've had a surprising, to me, number of conversations in Berlin about eating locally and eating organically -- are people here more aware of some of the food-related issues the OFAF team started to consider this summer? Or is it just that I'm more aware? It's hard to tell. But I am definitely more aware. And I feel that my perspective on food, the way I think about it, purchase it, and prepare it, has changed. Permanently, if not massively. As someone who as of six months ago saw nothing but price tags in the grocery store, I feel excited about this change in myself because it seems to me an indication that just opening the dialogue is a big step. I mean, really all that did it was getting to know some farmers and hanging out on some farms for a while.

From two months' distance, these themes and surprises rise to the top for me:

Farming is a job. A farm is a business. (Small farms have to find their niche to survive.)
For a small farmer, farming must also be a lifestyle. (No vacation, or not REALLY.)
Tradition is significant, as is the breaking of tradition. Farmers are not stuck in the past, but they are certainly in dialogue with it.
Working extensively on or owning a farm gives you a close and unique relationship with the life cycle.
There is no set definition of "farmer." (Pride.)
Farming is a rollercoaster of emotion.
Each generation on a farm has a tough decision to make.
Farming is about family. Growing up on a farm is something special.
There is no easy solution to the difficulties these farmers face. It's all complicated.

And these images: Bright vegetables and faded clothing. Early morning mist and dew so that everything looks old or like a dream. A July afternoon when everything sticks to you -- straw, your clothing, sawdust, cat fur, the smell of dung -- and small blisters pop out on the palm of your hand under the hoe. When it's too hot to talk. White shirts showing scrubbed-in dirt. Picking a lemon cucumber and eating it, in the field, with its prickles and its cool watery insides that quench thirst. (Cool as a cucumber. How is it that cucumbers really are still cool on a ninety-degree day?) A sick cow, the way her eyes turn glassy, the way the fight comes back into them after an IV. Or the deep sleep of cows -- a cow passed out with her tongue lolling from her mouth, Ryan pulling on it, the cow sleeping on. Tali in his hooded sweatshirt and thin plastic gloves. Huge sudden welts from afternoon mosquitos layered over a rash of tiny bites from early morning invisibugs. Stout geese running, wings spread. The absence of the barn as strong as its presence. Clothes that people wear every day or almost every day, like Penny's polka dot boots or John's feminine straw hat or Trey's orange rubber apron or the Crocs that abound in Broadturn in the morning -- like costumes or uniforms. Flora's porcelain-doll face smeared with homemade cheese spread, white and peppered with fresh herbs. A field full of weeds bigger than the fragile salad greens sprouting underneath.

For me, theatre, indeed art in general, is about asking questions -- not providing the answers to them. Artists alone don't have the solutions for the things farmers are facing. Neither do the farmers, alone. Neither do the scholars who study agriculture, alone. Friedrich Dürrenmatt wrote 21 "points" to accompany his play The Physicists which I find to be absolutely lovely, and a few are very pertinent, I think, for us:

15. [A drama about physics] cannot have as its goal the content of physics, but its effect.

16. The content of physics is the concern of physicists, its effect the concern of all men.

17. What concerns everyone can only be resolved by everyone.

18. Each attempt of an individual to resolve for himself what is the concern of everyone is doomed to fail.

Strongly worded for sure, but what I like about it/take from it is that it's our job to identify important questions, and to start helping to ask them. So, some questions that I've thought of:

What role does farming play in our world? What role should it play?
What role does it play in Maine?
What is going to happen to farms like our three farms in the future? What should happen?
What are the sacrifices and rewards that farmers make/receive? At what point do the sacrifices outweigh the rewards?
Why should non-farmers care about farmers/farming?
What is the role of tradition in farming?
What is a farmer? (SURPRISE!)

The question for us, then, is not how to answer the questions we come up with, but how to dramatize them. And, also, how to craft a story out of farm life that will be dramatic and at the same time not seem to the farmers played up, overblown, unreal.

By Intelligent Experiment (Jennie)

2010-10-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

Describing the role of agricultural organizations and fairs in 1870, Grange Master Daniel H. Thing had this to write in his annual report to the Board of Agriculture (Reznick, T.):

When a large number of individuals combine together for the purpose of accomplishing a certain object, there are just as many minds at work and just as many intellects laboring for the same object as there are individuals in the association, and among persevering, progressive men, there is always a noble contention or rather emulation to excel, which is continually spurring them on to greater exertions. Again, it is essential in order to make the greatest improvement, that these associations come together and compare notes and products, that they may know who excels in any calling or department, or in regard to any particular animal or article, and how they do it; whether by chance or by intelligent experiment.

For most of us, the succession of county fairs that mark the passage of mid-summer to deep autumn recall sticky hands filled with fried dough and the nausea of one-too-many trips aboard the almighty Gravitron. We might remember blueberry pie contests and big trucks smashing smaller trucks; we may even look forward to the ox-pulling. But with the distractions of the midway, it can be difficult for the average fair-goer to remember the original purpose of the county fair: agricultural education.

I recently attended the Northeastern Giant of ag fairs, FRYEBURG, with my family. I insisted that we travel to the fair on Thursday, not Saturday, so that we could see some part of the Open Dairy Show. Shows of this kind have been an annual tradition in Maine since the Somerset Agricultural Society held their first fair in 1819. At that time, the animal deemed best cow was awarded a premium of $5. (Reznick, T.) I don’t know what the premiums are these days, but Eddie could tell you. Eddie could tell you because the Bensons’ prize milk cow, Dolly, was named Grand Champion in the Holstein show at Fryeburg this year.

The Of Farms and Fables artistic team attended a smaller fair, the Ossipee Valley Fair, in July. At Ossipee, I developed a bit of an addiction for watching the Bensons compete in dairy shows. This addiction was in no way mitigated by my attendance at Fryeburg. First of all, the cows look gorgeous. They are carefully clipped and brushed and primped and pampered before each appearance, and the result is stunning. Second, the entire Benson family is on hand to do their part – prepping animals, showing in the arena, texting results back to Ryan at the farm. I have never seen Eben show, but Erica and Kati exhibit the utmost professionalism in their work; neat and trim in bleach white pants and bright blue Benson Farm shirts, they are graceful, poised, and attentive. And then, it doesn’t hurt that the Bensons tend to do really well. It’s kind of like I’m a Benson groupie; I know the stars of the show, and I get to hear praise lavished upon them (“the best udder in the show”!) and then sit in suspense as the judge walks down the line, trophy in hand . . . and then this cow – this cow that calved in my first week on the farm – wins Grand Champ!

Dolly (with Kati) wins her class at the Fryeburg Open Dairy Show.

Eddie and Becky both have described to us the role that the fairs play in the vitality of their farm. Doing well in competition helps them market the herd, and participating in the events helps them improve the genetics of their animals. Just like at the first fairs, it keeps them informed. And it is not without contemporary relevance that my opening quotation refers to "intelligent experiment"; science is a discipline increasingly embedded in a dairy farmer's lexicon of required knowledge. From individualized feed blends to embryonic transfer, experimentation and awareness of the latest trends keeps small dairy farms afloat in an industrialized agricultural world. The Bensons' herd of 60 cows in milk is average in Maine, but compared to some state averages of 1,000+ it is small. (National Agriculture Statistics Service) The Bensons remain competitive because of the quality of their animals. I’ve heard multiple stories about the friendly (and sometimes not-so friendly!) competition between Benson Farm and other area competitors, and I know that it means a lot when their animals are selected as the best of the breed. It is abundantly clear upon one’s first visit to Kay-Ben that the Benson family are experts in their field and that they are constantly working to improve their knowledge and approaches. Despite the fact that for many who attend them the fairs are all about rides and cotton candy, it is heartening to witness the core of their original purpose in full and thriving good health.

The Process of Gratitude (Jennie)

2010-08-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

“What’s the matter, Jennie, you lost?” Pee Wee calls to me from across the rows of green beans. It is just after lunch. I am standing with an empty 5 Gallon bucket in one hand and a vague expression of doubt displayed across my face. I am looking for the last plant I picked clean during the morning. I check one plant and move forward in the row; I check another and move back again.

“I’m lost.” I say with a sigh. “I don’t think these have been picked.”

“What do you mean, not picked?” he asks me.

“There are still beans on them.” I say doubtfully.

“Nah.”

Pee Wee brushes past me and strides down the row; he is merely glancing at the plants below him as he moves. Stopping suddenly about twenty feet along, he bends to part the leaves of a plant at his knees.

“Here.” He says.

I shake my head. “How do you do that?”

In my final rotation on Jordan’s Farm, Penny has deliberately assigned me to work with The Guys as much as possible. I have tagged along in the fields, nervously wielded a hoe, and bumped about on the tailgate of the truck like Winnie-ther-Pooh on the stairs. I have harvested beets, cucumbers, the first of the season’s peppers and cherry tomatoes, and I have harvested beans. Lots of beans. Flat beans, amarillo, and green, green beans.

In the cucumber patch on Wednesday, in the heat, I find myself comparing this work with four jovial Puerto Rican men to the work I have done with the women at Broadturn. Here, I am generally just trying to keep up. Here, I am always trying to understand. And here, I am gently absorbing the wisdom of Pee Wee.

“What’s next, Pee Wee?”

“Cucumbers.”

“Same as yesterday?”

“No, the new ones. Have to be careful.”

Making our way through the rows, I can see what he means. We stomp straight across the rows of yesterday’s harvest – picked multiple times and succumbing now to weeds and rot. After six or eight rows we come to an expanse of vibrant and virile cucumber plants; these have broad, fresh leaves spilling across the rows and a look of being untouched. Pee Wee instructs me further that this time, the ripe fruit will be in the center of the plants, because the plants are young. “Take only the biggest ones.”

And this sets me to thinking, once again, about an awareness of life’s process. Somehow, never having gardened and knowing very little about plants, I always picture the strong, beautiful, and actively producing version of the plant. (Is this influenced in some way by our culture’s preoccupation with the “youth and beauty” phase of our own life process?) It affected me to fully realize that the cucumber does not go directly from strong and virile to dead. It continues to produce, only not as much and not as well. It begins to rot at one end while stubbornly creating new fruit at the other. And from the farmer’s perspective – less care is given once those plants have reached a certain point. One needn’t be so careful of accidentally treading upon the leaves; weeds are allowed to stake their claim upon shared ground. Fruit is harvested, but quickly. No time is wasted searching among the sub-par for the perfect fruit that likely is not there. The plant is no longer worth the extra work, but this transition is a gradual process.

On so many occasions this summer, I have felt a subtle expansion in my awareness of life cycles; in portions of conversation, in certain striking visions of bolted lettuces, in the endless repetition of particular physical actions I have noticed again and again – aha! This is life at work. In our Story Circle with the work share members at Broadturn last Tuesday, we asked what they see of the farm that the average CSA member does not. To clarify: work share members help to harvest once per week in exchange for their vegetables; most CSA members simply pay for a share and visit the farm each week to pick it up. The predominant answer we received: the dark side. The completeness and the complexity of the cycle. A paying CSA member won’t see the vegetables rotting in the fields, the eggplants destroyed by potato beetles, or the chicks that die in the night. Bea and Megan broadened this observation to say: without these experiences, one’s knowledge of the food is incomplete. Because of this, the perception of value attached to the food is different.

Work Share Story Circle at Broadturn Farm

Beyond simply expanding my recognition of life processes at work, the summer has taught me about the truth in cultivation: a practice of growing food for human consumption. A miniature example: I was harvesting cherry tomatoes at Broadturn Farm last week. Despite all efforts to the contrary, I discovered a large tomato hornworm munching his or her way across a vulnerable leaf. The protocol here is to snip the caterpillar in half with a pair of scissors. Shockingly green guzzles of hornworm innards can then be expected to erupt forth from the offending pest, bubbling their way toward earth as the worm’s legs wriggle through the throes of death. I asked Sam about the hornworm. A moth, she said. The moth lays her eggs in the tomato house; the soft green caterpillars are born, and they are poised for a delightful feast (they really like tomatoes). Caught between revulsion toward the hornworm’s insides and a sad appreciation for the beauty of the life it aspires to, I was momentarily immobilized. As I stood there with my open scissors arrested inches from the worm, my thoughts were something like: “Here is a life that I am choosing to end for the good of my own kind. Hornworms must be destroyed if I am to enjoy the fruit of the tomato plant; the interests of the hornworm are directly in conflict with mine.” It was the diminutive nature of this event that had the most profound effect on me. For I suddenly realized: every time I put anything in my mouth, every time I seek to sustain myself, I have at the very least killed a hornworm. The fact that I buy my tomatoes at the farm stand or the supermarket and never see the hornworm does not change the fact that legions of hornworms have been destroyed for my benefit. What was most striking was the realization that so many exchanges of this kind are part of my own sustenance, and for the most part I know nothing of them.

We can intellectually grasp the idea that our lives are built in relationship to others, and that we must kill and eat what was once alive in order to survive. To understand those relationships as a whole being, physically and mentally conscious, is another matter. There has been so much writing and reading in recent years about the divorce our society has created between the consumer and the sources of our food. Many people feel that if they had to kill a cow, they wouldn’t be able to eat it. But what John, and Stacy, and Bea had to say is that it is the Knowing that makes the whole process okay. By knowing the animal or the plant, by taking part in the process of choosing that life for mine, you take responsibility for yourself and for your natural place in the order of things. By adding your own labor to the equation, by working to protect the eggplant you will later eat, you are more likely to highly value that eggplant when you eat it.

Called up from vacant grasslands in the back of my mind, I glimpse the watered-down teachings of various Native American peoples as they were presented to me in early grade school. There is a picture here of a barefoot man kneeling by the deer he has just felled. Some words pass between the man and the deer in the final moments before all light passes from her visage. I don’t know the details, but I know that the man has said: “thank you”. As this image fades through my mind, I find another in its place: a family around a table with heads bowed at their plates. And so I wonder, in a culture divorced from knowledge of our food, what has happened to the mechanics and the rituals whereby we place our thanks? When we do take the time to say thank you, do we know what to be grateful for? Have we successfully abstracted our “thanks” to fit a weak understanding of the gift? Where now do we find the lesson: In knowing the sacrifice of our nourishment, may we aptly express our gratitude. In being truly grateful, may we humbly fulfill our purpose here on Earth?

Tradition, Tradition (Cory)

2010-08-13T11:35:00.000-07:00

Speaking of a pair of mutual acquaintances at Thursday's lunchtime workshop with the Benson family, Eddie and Becky's oldest daughter Kati said to Jennie, "Oh, they're wonderful. I'd have loved to have them at my wedding -- if only my family weren't so big..."

Our lunch meeting (Eddie: "It's a good thing you girls are pretty and bring lunch. I've never had so many meetings in my life!") involved only the very tip of that family iceberg, but with three generations of Bensons represented, the dining room felt quite full. The conversation took on a life of its own, with Eddie's mother's opinionated quips, Kati's high-spirited curiosity, and, of course, Eddie's bottomless supply of stories, advice, convictions, facts, and jokes. Even Allison, one of the 4H-ers we got to see compete last month at the Ossipee Valley Fair, got a couple of words in edgewise.

We heard the tale of Kati letting the cows back out one night in the hopes she'd be allowed to help the second time around (a natural desire for a little girl growing up in an environment where the most talked-about -- if most loathed -- job is "gettin' in cows"). We heard from Kati and her brother Eben about playing Search and Rescue with their dad in the sand pit ("Ever hear the expression 'land rich, money poor'?") and spinning around in the middle of a cornfield to get lost. Eddie's mom explained old methods used during haymaking and hay storage. Naturally, the tension between old and new was a topic that surfaced and resurfaced. It's on everyone's mind, anyway, since the collapse of the barn.

The Benson Farm Barn, about a month ago.

"What's something you hope you'll be able to pass on to your children?" we asked.

"Well, the barn was something," Eben joked, and everyone laughed but shot him a look. You could feel that one hit a bit hard. The barn had been a symbol, a presence, a physical reminder of the farm's and the family's proud and intertwining histories. Kati said that when the barn collapsed a flood of emails circulated among family members carrying memories of the old building. A mad rush ensued to get us a copy of The Benson Farm Barn Retrospective that Eddie's sister, Mary Benson Emerson, wrote for the Gorham Times in the wake of the collapse. The loss is something that the family feels deeply.

But the barn was also a real, functioning part of Benson Farm. It held hay and cows and Whistle, the pig, on top of all those memories. Its presence and its function influenced day-to-day farm operation immensely. I remember at our first Kay-Ben story circle, we asked Erica what had stayed the same on the farm over her lifetime. "Nothing," she answered. And yet, the barn was still there. Maybe the way it was being used had changed, but not completely. The factors of size and location, of the building's age and architecture, were limiting ones. Now the family has to figure out how best to replace that barn and the functions it served. Just watching Becky spread a map of the farm out on the table and shift a piece of paper cut to show the size and shape of the barn in the correct scale (a method I can't help noting that designers use in creating theatre sets) reveals the endless array of possibilities opened up by the collapse.

A commercial being shot on Tuesday, right where the barn used to be.

Tradition is a powerful thing, especially in a profession as historically generational as farming. Taking over a farm means inheriting the results of all the wise and unwise decisions made by its past owners; inheriting a relationship with consumers, community, and land; inheriting any debt, stigmas, and quarrels; inheriting the farm's limitations (in space, architecture, resources) as well as its potential; inheriting "the way it's been done." And if you're taking it over from family, you're that much more likely to be influenced by the ideology of the preceding farmers (likely your own mother and father!) about farming and, heck, life.

At 18, Phil Jordan, Bib's son, already knows he wants to eventually take over from his dad. The main concern he shared with us: not being sure of the right times to plant and harvest everything. He's got to gradually learn the Jordan's Farm cycle from Bib, over time. And one very strong tradition on the farm: Corn harvesting. Phil and Bib are almost solely responsible for harvesting corn, with a little help from Miguel when there's really a lot to pick. Bib did it himself until Phil got old enough, and Bib's father did it before him. The Guys harvest everything else on the farm, but for some reason, Jordan's corn is harvested by the farmer and it's been that way for a good long while.

In contrast to the other farms, John and Stacy, on Broadturn, have a greater share in helping to create tradition -- in more ways than one -- than they do in continuing it. They're first-generation farmers and their farm was little more than a run-down building amidst some fields and trees before they took it over. They've gotten to build a farm largely from scratch. They are also participants in a very young food/farming movement (Community Supported Agriculture), so they, along with other CSA farmers, are working to define this new tradition rather than figuring out how to continue an old one. But the ultimate success of the CSA movement will have a lot to do with its longevity -- its ability to be passed on to a next generation of farmers, and then a next...and that's all about tradition.

Tradition sustains. It also confines. It's a comfort, and that means it can be hard to recognize the benefit of change or re-evaluation. "Why do we do it that way?" "Because that's the way it's always been done." Hold onto something too long, and you run the risk of turning your life into the box stalls in Doc's barn we were clearing out last week to store Benson hay: full of crumbling legal-paper-stuffed boxes, dusty disassembled spiral staircases, metal typewriters, cracked claw-foot bathtubs, drawer-less chests of drawers -- once-useful things now meaningless.

The loss of the barn has forced the Bensons to re-evaluate in ways it's otherwise unlikely they would be doing right now, opening up options for change, and the creation of new traditions -- which will also, sooner or later, be broken and replaced. Because that's the way it goes: respect and learn from generations past, take what you can from them, and figure out the rest yourself until it's your kids' turn to try. Working on Kay-Ben last week, I noticed plenty of reminiscing; the mourning process certainly isn't complete; but there is also a sense of potential, of curiosity about the new and what's to come. Tradition's a powerful thing, and without it change wouldn't be nearly the thrill it is.

sun gold, sun hot, sun killer (Keith)

2010-08-10T18:15:00.000-07:00

Back on Jordan's, it is amazing how much things have grown. This summer has been a farmer's dream (so long as they can keep irrigating). Long days of bright, hot sun have all the crops ready to harvest several weeks before normal. Today, I was in the field picking tomaotes.

Here, as on Broadturn, there is a wide variety of veggie products. For instance, today I harvested 7 different types of tomato, 4 cherry varieties and 3 slicers. First up on the cherry list were the bright yellow sun gold tomatoes. These sweet little beauties turn a lovely golden yellow-orange when fully ripe. And they ripen FAST! Gabe and Peter swear that they picked all the ripe ones yesterday, yet today we have no trouble filling three more buckets.

I remember Stacey from Broadturn talking about the high points of the growing season for her. It went something like this, "Peas, strawberries, sun gold cherries. . . candy, candy, candy". I found a few choice sun golds to test Stacey's theory, and I have to agree. They sure are sweet as candy. My guilty confession is that to confirm this I had several more, you know, just to make sure the first few weren't abnormalities. Everything you read on the internet is true, so I had to make sure.

After the cherries, we moved onto the slicing tomatoes. By then, the morning sun was beating down on us severely. I had great respect for these plants. The dirt in the rows was as dry as desert sand and as dusty as the Great Plains in an earlier era. I knew that if it wasn't for the drip hoses running between the roots of these fruit bearing plants, they wouldn't last more than two or three days without water. I felt myself starting to wilt.

We discovered something disturbing as we starting to pick the slicing tomatoes. No, I don't mean tomato horn worms, though I admit, those are disturbing. What was disturbing was that the bottoms of 90% of the ripe tomatoes were rotten at the bottom. It was sorta sad to see what looked like a beautiful, ripe tomato, only to have your fingers sink into a mushy, rotten bottom upon picking. Penny said it's because when those tomatoes set on the vines, it was an incredibly hot day. It was more than sorta sad to have to throw so many tomatoes to the ground. The paths in between the tomato rows were littered with bright red and yellow half rotted fruit.

So, what I took from my day back on Jordan's was that even in the best circumstances, even when you do your best to control the environment as Jordan's does, when you fertilize, irrigate, remove pests, you still can't control the weather. I suppose with irrigation you can make it rain, but the temperature is the temperature and the sun is the sun. If it's bright and hot, there's nothing you can do about it except put on your shades and bear it.

On the bright side, there's a pretty good chance that there will be snow in the mountains in less than 90 days from now. . .

You Say Goodbye, I say Hello Part 2 (Keith)

2010-08-10T03:44:00.000-07:00

Kay Ben farm sure does look different without the hay barn. When I arrived at 5am for morning milking, the first thing I noticed was the light from pre-dawn. On previous trips to the farm, that pre-dawn light back light the old hay barn, creating a large, dark shadow with a halo of purple, blue and pink around it.

Without the barn there, the light just spills over the entire farm. It was quite breathtaking in an odd, natural disaster sort of way. The old hay barn got blown down in the big storm we had last month. It was a terrible thing, but like Eddie says, these things happen on a farm. Everyday it's something new. So, they pick up and move on.

Now what? Well, they aren't sure at the moment. They are conflicted about what to do and how to rebuild. There are several options on the table, and they all have their pros and cons. We discussed them last week while watching a giant pneumatic hammer attached to the end of an equally giant excavator pound the remaining foundation walls of the old hay barn into rubble.

They are thinking of extending the barn that was connected to the hay barn to hold more dry cows in the winter. Then they could build a separate, smaller hay barn for feed, hay and machinery. They have also considered building a completely new milking parlor. But that would cost a lot more than what they are likely to get from their insurance settlement. Eddie sometimes jokes about selling the herd and converting the farm into a golf course. The footprint of the old hat barn would make a swell starting place for a clubhouse.

I had another suggestion that I thought was really good. Since cows produce the most milk when they are happy, I thought, what better way to make cows happy than with a spa. They are hard working ladies, right? What hard working woman wouldn't like a regular spa day built into their weekly schedule. There could be a cow sized jacuzzi/sauna. Perhaps Erica and Becky could run a pedicure station? Seems like a wonderful idea to me.

Eddie said he'd think about it. He hasn't ruled anything out yet.

What I took from my last 2 weeks on Kay Ben was how they picked up and moved on and adjusted after the terrible results of the storm. Sometimes it's hard to let things go and move on, especially when they effect you on a personal level. But you have to. If you dwell in the past, you will never be able to see that sunrise for it's present day beauty. You'll just be thinking about how beautiful it used to be.

Alone, Together (Claire)

2010-08-08T18:02:00.001-07:00

I have always been a deeply devoted beet lover, so as you can imagine, I was extremely enthusiastic about picking them. Jennie, “the guys” (Peewee, Tully, Miguel and Orlando) and I had just started our day. The first order of business: scanning the ground for promising looking beet tops poking up out of the dusty soil.

I’ve tried to grow beets in the past- once in my little pocket sized garden when I was in high school and once when I was tending a kitchen garden for an inn. However, I tend to fall on the neurotic/ greedy end of the scale and couldn’t resist “checking on” my little beet-letts. This is not the sort of behavior that leads to good hearty full-sized beets and as a result I have eaten my fare share of gum-drop sized beets. This was going to be my first time experiencing a full grown beet “in the wild”.

What I didn’t expect was that they would stick together like they did. Beets tend to grow close together- we found that many of the bigger beets had little hangers-on that grew alongside them, carving out little nooks and crannies as they grew together. It was wonderfully satisfying to pull up these dark masses, shake the dirt off the roots and pile them into your arms until you can’t hold anymore. They made a certain sort of ripping pop as they came out of the ground- announcing their presence in this new, bright world.

We brought them over to crates, sliced the greens off and tossed them in, trading notes on which are too little to make the cut, the thunderstorm we all expect this afternoon- all the things you talk about when you’ve got a day of picking veggies ahead of you and bright beet juice staining your fingers. Then we head out again, each going a different way to load up: search, pull, rip, pop!, repeat.

Harvesting creates a funny conversational dynamic. There I was in the field with five other people, but I may as well have been alone for most of it. This was even true when we moved on to picking green beans- conversation lasts only as long as your pace matches up in a row with another harvester. As soon as you hit an already picked spot- you jump ahead. If a plant has a particularly heavy crop, you pick all you can and fall behind.

Mostly, you listen to your internal monologue: thinking through those friends who have not called you back, the things you forgot to do this weekend, etc. In the green bean field, I found myself making my usual mental lists, but also finding myself surprised to be in a different sort of dialogue with the plants I was handing: apologizing every time I ripped off a leaf or two- responding to the wit of a hidden clump of beans down by the root. This is another form of conversation entirely; the back and forth between our attention spans the the plant’s yield. In Jennie’s farmers almanac, we found a warning about always “keeping up with beans”. It seems that if you don’t pick all they have to offer, they’ll stop producing. For vegetables, they seem like quite the needy conversationalists. Before I realize it, its almost time for lunch and I’ve started to map out how to make a plant puppet that can fight back. (Remember those punching nun puppets? I was thinking they would be sort of like that.)

In the midst of all this picking, I remembered something Pete (another Jordan’s employee) said during one of our first story circles there. “People who think farming is really simple are dead wrong. The simpler the work, the more you have to have going on in your head to keep yourself sane.”

Oh, I totally agree.

At the farmers’ market on Saturday, Jennie and I spent some time talking to the lovely Jamie Berhanu of Lalibela Farm. She has been selling tempeh (if you haven’t tried it yet, I suggest jumping out of whatever chair you are sitting in and running out to go get some.) and veggies there for several years and says that one of the best things about it is getting to get out of the rhythms of her farm and meeting up with other farmers and people who don’t live their lives in those some patterns. “Its wonderful to be out in the fields and concentrating and weeding, buts its also really nice to take a break,” she told us.

In my life, the closest thing I’ve experienced to this phenomenon is not agricultural, but culinary. There is a wonderful story by Laurie Colwin called “Alone In The Kitchen With An Eggplant” that sums up most of my reasons why cooking alone is one of my favorite things in life. Her fascination with eggplants nearly equals my passion for beets- their universal usefulness, the many different ways both veggies can become almost anything without costing you much at all, not to mention the voluptuous nature of each vegetable... the list goes on. What really gets both of us excited about a night in the kitchen is the opportunity to retreat into that internal monologue and simply cook. Laurie says:

Certainly cooking for one’s self reveals man at his weirdest. People lie when you ask them what they eat when they’re alone. “A salad,” they’ll tell you, but when you persist, they confess to peanut butter and bacon sandwiches deep fried and eaten with hot sauce or spaghetti with butter and grape jam.

The only difference between this and my meditative harvesting experiences is that somehow cooking translates that monologue into an awfully revealing dinner choice rather than a crate of beets. Its a nice thought to cary around when you are stretching in the field and notice the other people picking around you, totally concentrated on their work. Maybe their thoughts are as normal and composed as a salad, but more likely their daydreams are more spaghetti and grape jam flavored.

Its not that I’m in favor of all solitude all the time. I’m with Jamie- Its wonderful to retreat, but its also great to end your day with full buckets and buddies to ride in the back of the truck with you.

PS: The whole time I was harvesting I had this song stuck in my head: The Beat Beat Stuff by Hannah Geogas. I invite you to substitute (as I did all day) the word “beat” with the word “beet”. I think you’ll find it turns the song into an anthem for love and root vegetables that is hard to “beet”. Get it? (sorry, I just couldn’t resist.)

Oh yeah! and PSS: I invited the group to try that Haymaker’s Switchel I wrote about last time. Here’s what Jennie thought of it:

She said that the taste of it stayed with her for at least three hours after trying it. I don’t think its going to be coming back into style anytime soon. Oh well- you win some, you loose some!

-C

To Market, To Market (Jennie)

2010-08-08T17:26:00.000-07:00

When I arrived at the Farmer’s Market this beautiful, fall-like Saturday, there were a number of things I did not know. I did not know that the Portland Farmer’s Market has been running for nearly 250 years. I did not know that the city manages the market, or that some of the vendors have been selling their wares in Deering Oaks Park for 25 years. I did not know that the only tempeh made in Maine is available at this market, and I did not know (though I should have guessed), that the farmers present are as diverse as Florida seashells.

The farms that we have been working with for the past ten weeks are notably varied. We have often rejoiced at the range of our experiences as we rotate from farm to farm. (“John found three baby chicks in the woodpile”, “We moved a lot of hay”, “I asked Miguel about his family in Spanish . . . and I understood the answer!”) We have often commented that this very diversity is critical to the success of our project. My trip to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday, however, was an extremely well timed reminder that these farms, these three farms that we have grown to know and to love, are only three farms among some 8,000 in the State of Maine (USDA 2008).

The two hours that I spent wandering with Claire among the many market stalls had the unexpected and delightful result of drastically broadening my view of farm production in Maine. As we conversed with first one farmer, then another, I became aware of various gaps in my own understanding slowly filling like plugs in a leak. Among the more fundamental of my discoveries: none of the farms directly collaborating on our project sell their products at market; therefore I have grossly underestimated the role of the farmer’s market in many a Maine farmer’s weekly routine and income. There are 90 farmer’s markets in the State of Maine. For many small vegetable farms, the market is the only place that products are sold. It represents the only time that the farmer interacts with a customer base. We heard multiple stories about the work involved in attending the farmer’s market; the crates and the tables have to be loaded on and off the truck; it’s a lot of heavy lifting; the bustle and activity of the market create a nice contrast to the solitude of work on the farm. And when I left, I understood a bit more about the choices that farmers make in the ongoing dilemma of how to bring their products to the consumer and how to make a living. I understood more about the choice between a CSA, a private farm stand, a farmer’s market, a co-op, and an agricultural production contract.

Our conversations with three of the farmers at the market were so lovely; I want to profile them briefly here:

Lalibela Farm

We talked for some time with Jaime, whom Claire has met on multiple occasions in her work at Silly’s. Jaime met her husband Andy while living and working on a farm in Oregon, and the couple chose to move back to the east coast five years ago in order to be nearer family. They rent their farmland and were originally matched with a landowner through the Maine Farmland Trust’s Farmlink program. After a season or two, they were approached by another landowner and moved to their present location in Dresden. When asked about the transition from working on a farm to running their own farm, Jaime took a deep breath and said: “We just . . . jumped in”. Lalibela’s products have been at the Portland Farmer's Market since their first season, and Jaime is now on the market’s Steering Committee. At the end of last season, after trying out a recipe for themselves, Jaime and Andy began selling their homemade tempeh at the farmer’s market. They sold out immediately and spent all of last winter making more. The Lalibela tempeh is now sold in 26 stores and restaurants throughout Maine.

Beckwith Gardens

As we approached the plentiful tables of the Beckwith stall, I introduced myself to a woman who had moments before been helping a customer. I explained our project, and that we were “hoping to talk with some of the farmers”. “Oh, I’m not a farmer.” She said. “That’s the farmer.” She pointed us toward a tall and thin man named Jim who was replenishing the summer squash. (We have had many conversations over the summer about the definition of “farmer” . . . what makes a farmer?) We got waylaid on our way to speak with Jim, but we talked at some length with his nephew. We learned that four generations of the Beckwith family were at the market that day, and that the farm recently opened its own farm stand in an attempt to increase the presence of their product in the Yarmouth community. The nephew we spoke with had been working on the farm off and on ever since he was six, and he hoped that we were planning to include something about the weather in our play. “That’s a . . . “ he shook his head. “A lot of farmers had a really hard time last year, with the rain. Lost a lot of crop.” Beckwith Gardens has been attending the Portland Farmer’s Market for 25 years.

L & A Farm

We had a lively conversation with Lester Jordan; it began this way:

Claire: “It’s a beautiful day.”

Lester: “Considering my age!”

Lester is related to Penny, of course, and he farms 2 of 22 acres on Davis Point Lane in Cape Elizabeth. Lester wasn’t sure how much we already knew about the Jordan Family in Cape Elizabeth and wasted no time filling us in. “We were originally from Italy,” he said, “The Jordanis. We were horse thieves. So they threw us out and we went to France. Where we became the Jordáns. But we were still horse thieves. So they threw us out of there. And we went to England. But we were still stealing horses. So they threw us out of there and we came here. Haven’t been thrown out yet.”

Lester told us that he started farming a piece of his father’s land over 20 years ago, when he “retired”. Before actively farming his own land, Lester was a commercial fisherman and a manager for UPS. When he and his wife began their farm, they were farming all 22 acres of their land. They’ve limited their production increasingly in the past few years; next year they may farm only one acre, and “just do herbs”. Lester says that way he can work in the greenhouse, harvest from a chair, and control the weather.

To close, I find this history of L&A Farm from the Cape Farm Alliance website both beautiful and poignant:

“Lester Jordan grew up in a farmhouse on Two Lights Road, a stone’s throw from the ocean. His father, Raymond Jordan, owned and worked the surrounding 100 acres. Like most other Cape farmers, the senior Jordan grew cabbage, lettuce, and squash for the wholesale markets – until the big grocers stopped buying from local farmers in the 1970s. Lester says his parents arranged to remain in their home, but were forced to sell the farm to fund their retirement. The Broad Cove housing development was built on the farmland.

Today, Lester and Audrey Jordan worry that ever-rising land values and the difficulty of making a livelihood from farming will result in the disappearance of the few remaining Cape farms, but their love and devotion to L&A Farm keep them planting, harvesting, and hoping that there is a future here for working farms.”

The Green Man: a vindication for talking rabbits (Cory)

2010-08-06T12:40:00.000-07:00

It's not my week for a blog post, but I spent the morning at the library and am full of thoughts.

The "fables" part of our project is still a bit of a mystery to all of us, but we've read and talked about a few fables over the past couple of months; and considering that the only sharply defined ethnic/cultural subgroup on the farms is that group of Puerto Ricans we call The Guys on Jordan's, we've wanted to take a look into Puerto Rican folklore to see what we could add to our working library. The University of Southern Maine library happens to have a copy of The Three Wishes by Ricardo Alegría, which I spent a pleasant hour reading.

A lot of the stories were more familiar to a girl raised on Hans Christian Anderson, Æsop, and the Brothers Grimm than I had anticipated. The book's intro cites the main cultural influences as Spanish, Mongolian, and African, and stocks stories with your standard princes and princesses, clever rabbits, evil stepmothers, good-for-nothings (Lazy Peter, here), and the town simpleton (the charmingly moronic Juan Bobo, on whom more in a moment). Religion is a relatively strong presence, with the Devil starring in a number of the tales and one young girl surviving live burial under a hot chili plant thanks to the blessing of the Virgin Mary.

One of the early stories features three equally strong, handsome, and brave princes, who are brothers and all in love with the same princess. She can't choose between them, so her father sends them out to bring back something valuable -- the one whose gift is most valuable will have his daughter. The princes (who bear no animosity towards one another, despite their romantic predicament) split up and each finds a valuable item with magical properties; when they rendezvous, they find out that the princess is dying. Each contributes his magical item to the cause, and the three of them together manage to do what none could have alone: save the princess's life. Because each of the brothers' items was equally instrumental in saving the princess, the king can't decide who should marry her, and everyone in his kingdom is split into three factions over the issue. The tale is open-ended; we never find out who actually marries the princess. In fact, we as listeners are asked to decide which brother we'd support.

Remarkable and relevant to me in this tale are the lack of rancor among the brothers (we're told, in fact, that they love one another dearly), and the spirit of teamwork it lauds. Most tales like this end with one brother ultimately turning out to be judged the cleverest or strongest or just, in some way, "best." But these three brothers are a symbiotic triptych. Having spent the summer with three dynamic families whose farms depend completely on the family members' willingness to contribute massive amounts of their time and their unique talents, that's a sentiment I can appreciate.

There were the usual "talking animal" stories, of which I've noticed I've grown extra skeptical since Eddie trashed Charlotte's Web and Disney movies at our last Kay-Ben story circle. But then there were Juan Bobo stories.

Juan Bobo is a Puerto Rican stock character. The first paragraph of "Juan Bobo, the Sow, and the Chicks" (Juan Bobo, el puerco, y los pollos) sums him up pretty well: "Well, sir, once upon a time, in a long-ago town, there lived a widow and her son Juan. As the boy did strange things and was a bit of a fool, people called him Simple John, or Juan Bobo."

In "Juan Bobo, the Sow, and the Chicks," Juan Bobo's mother goes to church to hear Mass, leaving him to take care of the animals. While she's gone, Juan Bobo hears the sow groaning -- and thinks she's upset because she wants to go to Mass, too. He also hears the chicks crying -- and thinks they're upset because they want to sleep in a tree. The havoc that results? Juan Bobo dresses the pig in his mother's fine clothes and sends her off to church, and he skewers all the chicks on a stick and hangs them in the tree so they can sleep. The sow heads straight for a mud pit to try and roll the uncomfortable clothes off of her, and the chicks, of course, are dead as doornails. "That day," the story ends, "Juan Bobo received a whipping that he still remembers."

That's a story that does just the opposite of Disney sentimentalization. Juan Bobo makes the mistake of attributing human motivations and desires to animals, and he -- or at least his bottom -- pays dearly for that mistake. That's a story I can imagine some of our farmers telling. But...the "talking animal" stories came from the same culture, a culture with a strong tradition of farming. I wondered for a while how to reconcile the Bensons' dismissal of talking Disney animals with the longevity of these tales. Their point about the way that turning animals into furry people causes all sorts of wrongheaded notions among laymen about animal feelings and animal rights is a persuasive one, but the staying power of old "talking animal" fables ought to indicate there's something pretty potent about them.

In the folklore section I happened across a book about the Green Man by William Anderson. I'm sure you know the Green Man, even if you don't know you know him, and no, he doesn't sell canned green beans. This is him:

and, this is him:

and, so is this:

He has a long history, during which he's made the transition from pagan icon to staple of church and Christian symbolism, and I found myself getting sucked into the book -- into page after page of Green Man images, into analyses of what the Green Man has represented through the ages and what he came to represent at different times. Encased in, and often regurgitating through mouth and even other orifices, leaves and vines and assorted greenery, he's (naturally) associated with nature, and man's relationship with it. But the relationship is far from simple for the Green Man. Is he "one" with nature? Tortured by it (as his expression, especially in regurgitating mode, sometimes seems to express)? At odds with it? Nurtured by it?

The Green Man is also a symbol of creativity. Writing of the connection between Khidr (a Muslim figure) and the Green Man, Anderson says:

[Khidr] is the voice of inspiration to the aspirant and committed artist. He can come as a white light or the gleam on a blade of grass, but more often as an inner mood. The sign of his presence is the ability to work or experience with tireless enthusiasm beyond one's normal capacities. In this there may be a link across cultures...

"The ability to work or experience with tireless enthusiasm beyond one's normal capacities," hm...another one of those things that both artists and farmers have probably experienced...

There's lots more to say (like a whole book's worth, at least) about the Green Man, but at the least he got me thinking about symbols. They're important and powerful things. And as we sit here and interpret a Green Man carved into a cathedral arch six centuries ago, hundreds of years before the name "Green Man" was even a twinkle in a scholar's eye, we are putting words to many things that the sculptor probably wouldn't have thought to name, though he was certainly expressing them. Symbols mean something to us, but it isn't always easy to express what. If it were, we wouldn't need the symbols.

So -- talking animals. When a rabbit and a tiger are friends, and what that means is that the rabbit's always playing tricks on the tiger because he's so damned clever and the tiger, after being duped every time, gets angry and tries (but fails) to eat the rabbit -- well, that's a little bit of a stretch to think that's the way a real rabbit and a real tiger would behave. The rabbit and the tiger in the story are symbols for certain kinds of people and for certain kinds of friendship. Like the Green Man that pops up in church architecture all over Europe and across other cultures, taking different forms and guises, with expressions varying from pensive to somber to downright threatening -- so, too, the clever rabbit/ant/coyote/spider of myriad folktales; so, too, the powerful but dull tiger/lion/wolf/bear. The meanings of these symbols aren't always clear, in large part because they're not always clear-cut. They express something inexpressible about human interaction, something perhaps a little too embarrassing or emotional or rooted in truth to people the tale with humans.

I think the Disney criticism holds. Disney animals aren't symbols. As you watch Thumper in Bambi or read Watership Down (which is, for the record, one of my all-time favorite books), you aren't revisiting a tried-and-true two-dimensional character. The narrative redefines for you what an actual rabbit is, instead of allowing you to interact with a nebulous accumulation of understanding around the symbol "rabbit" that has naturally evolved, gaining depth with each passing year, each telling of a tale. Disney animal characters are (or are meant to be) three-dimensional. The depth in a symbol isn't character depth; symbols are two-dimensional. The depth lies instead in the complexity of the symbol's associations. And those are cultural and develop organically over time.

And finally, this is the section that pulled me into Anderson's book.

We think of the Green Man as a visual image, as an object sculpted in stone or carved in wood, but the emotions he expresses transcend the form and their vitality is equally powerful when transmitted through the dance or the dramatic rituals of folk custom and in the rhythms and melodies of poetry and song. We do not only look at his leaves and blades of grass: we hear them singing and speaking to us; we touch and smell and taste his vegetation and his fruits. When an affection for a particular plant or tree is aroused in us we are linked through an emotional bond, more subtle and immediate than the effect of scent, to the greater world of vegetation of which the plant or tree is a part. It is a deep, wise world, one to which we can only respond because we possess it in our own natures and in the instinctive symbolism of the soul, in the tree of life that forms the spinal column, in the roots of our feet and legs, in the branches of our arms, and in the flowering and fruiting of our thoughts and feelings in the crown of the head.

It's a little hippy-dippy even for me -- and yet, yes; several times this summer I've felt a shadow of that connection with the growing things, the earth around me; and I hope that a touch of the Green Man graces next summer's play.

The Green Man goes modern: this is a recent interpretation, the Whitefield Green Man.