Coming Home

It wasn’t always easy for me growing up on a farm. Three miles outside of the town of Bayfield and still too young to drive, I often felt lonely and isolated. I spent my days outdoors wandering through woods and berry rows, or indoors reading books checked out from the public library, drawing pictures, and writing poetry. I appreciated the summer harvest time when students from Northland College drove out to our place for work. I enjoyed the new faces and the conversations that came about while picking in the fields together. I looked forward to my own college days when new faces and conversations wouldn’t just be a seasonal occurrence.

It has been eight years now since I left the farm for college and then a life in the city and increasingly I have found myself missing the quiet, the time for reflection and creation, and even the hard physical labour of working on the farm. In the past few months especially, as I finish up a Master’s program in Creative Writing at Northwestern University and gain experience teaching writing to both peers and high school students, I’ve realized I’m ready to come home. But when I return I don’t want to just come back with books and memories from my life away, I want to bring the discussions from my Oberlin and Northwestern classrooms, Chicago coffee shops, and my dining room table back with me as well—into the blueberry rows and into the surrounding communities of the Bay Area.. I want to share this place of reflection and creation—the Bayfield farm I grew up on—with the artists I have come to know in my time away and in turn I want to share the inspiring work of these artists with the community within which I was raised.