Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman

Oh man, did I fall off the wagon.  It was only partially my fault!  First, I had several Moebius graphic novels come in via ILL that I had been waiting weeks for.  Then, I admit to getting very sidetracked by Bruce Chatwin's incredibly beautiful and strange In Patagonia, which is part world history, part hitchhiker's memoir, part outlaw storytelling, part ships-at-sea tale.  It is right now one of my current top ten favorite non-fiction books, but let's see how it looks when memory fades.  Also, Cassie Coles very kindly noticed my rekindling affection for poetry in my posting about Out of the Dust, so she gave me an awesome poetry anthology to pick through and it distracted for a couple of weeks.  It's called Poetry 180 and its designed to offer high schoolers one poem to read per day that they will find not only meaningful but also accessible.  None of that obscure garbled nonsense that you can only get into if you live in a dormitory and/or you've decided to become "well read" to impress your friends.  I also had a personal connection to two poets whose work was in the book.

I took a poetry class from David Wojahn during my undergrad at IU, and I remember him being extremely kind and patient, which I guess you would have to be if you are going to listen to 18 year olds read poetry for the rest of your life.  One poem I wrote referenced the song "Rivers of Babylon" by The Melodians, which everyone else assumed was referencing the Bible but he got right away, which I thought was very hip (this possibly had something to do with my just having seen The Harder They Come for the first time). The other poet was Galway Kinnell, who passed through Crawfordsville, Indiana while I was in tenth grade or so to (I assume) give a talk at Wabash College, and he was awesome enough to come to my high school afterwards and talk to all the kids who were interested in staying after school to meet a poet that our English teacher promised us was worth meeting (there were four of us).

At neither time did I really realize who these people were and what they were really doing.  Here were two major poets that I had the opportunity to learn from and ask questions of, and if I knew then what I know now I would have spent less time worrying about how cool (or not) I looked in front of my friends and more time just hanging around those dudes.  But hey, such is life.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to Seedfolks.  Essentially, Seedfolks is a story about individual people coalescing into a community around a shared garden space.  A young girl plants a seed in a vacant lot, someone notices it and starts to tend it, someone notices him and brings their own plants, someone notices the group and soon people are setting up plots, bringing in irrigation, and just generally helping each other.  The characters are broadly diverse, and the garden helps them bridge gaps of race, gender, and especially generation.  Each chapter focuses on a different character, so the book takes the form of vignettes that come together to make a larger whole.  The chapters are short and digestible, perfect for minds that are used to rapidly changing channels.  It sort of sneakily paints a macro level picture while making you think you are reading about micro level stuff.  In other words, it is an extremely successful piece of writing.  This book is a hollow point, if you'll forgive the metaphor.  When it gets inside you, it rapidly expands and has a lot more effect than you thought it would.  If you can forgive the goofy, early-90s, after-school special way that the book deploys the concept of diversity (which I think is a very easy thing to do), I think you will highly enjoy this little book.

For readalongs, I would probably send patrons home with urban farming materials.  Storey's Basic Country Skills is a good one, full of farming instructions but also cool stuff like recipes and random things like building a barn.  There is also the classic Foxfire series of magazines and books about getting "back to the land."  Both of these works contain cool things that you can do yourself even with little access to open, rural space. If I were feeling bold, I might suggest some short stories by Maupassant or Maugham based on the structure of Seedfolks, whom I think are two of the better short-story writers to have taken up the pen.  If that one landed, I might put forward Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev, which is about bridging the gap between generations but is also about the rise of nihilism in 19th Century Russia and I think it might be a bit of a stretch, but you can't win big unless you bet big.

As of now, I am 25% done with the book that Charlou picked out for me, which is As Easy as Falling Off the Face of the Earth.  I solemnly swear that I will read this book before any other, fiction or non, graphic or text-based.  Unless one of my ILLs comes in.