The Long Fields: Essays
Anne-Marie Oomen's sixth essay collection, The Long Fields, celebrates rural life as she experienced it growing up on a farm and then into an adulthood marked by both wandering and homing. The three parts cover three phases of the author's life: moments of early farm life in "Childhood's Lamplight," building her own home (complete with Estwing hammer) in "The Heart of Place," and finally "Kuieren" (Dutch for "amble"), which delves into the wide swath of daily life. These three parts build a world that offers the vitality of living country. At its heart, The Long Fields voices the best of Midwestern rural living: a relationship to land, stewarding a place, and honoring the sacred quotidian.
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"If you want to know what it's like to grow up on a large Michigan family farm, if you want to study deep into the fields, the animals, the turning of the fall maples, if you want to find where the morel mushrooms hide, if you want to watch the strands of a beloved blue sweater unravel into the wind to nurture everything in sight, Anne-Marie Oomen's glorious essays will give you all that. What else they'll give you is intensely personal: the necessary tension of a writer as she steps back, pushes against the beloved soil that nurtured her, but can't completely leave it behind."
-Fleda Brown, poet Laureate of Delaware, author of Mortality, With Friends
"With such a fine chemistry of poetry, prose and even brilliant reporting, Anne-Marie Oomen takes us beautifully and startlingly up close to the details of life, and then transports us to places sometimes wonderful and sometimes dark in our own hearts and minds and worlds."
-Jeff Smith, author of Becoming Amish
"If Michigan had its own distinct literary footprint, its terroir, I think Anne-Marie Oomen's essays would be featured prominently on the menu. Her words and stories walk us through Michigan's seasons, our relationship with the land, and how this place defines us. I'll pick up The Long Fields when I crunch into my first raw asparagus spear in May, and again with the August sweetcorn, and again when canned fruits are exchanged as gifts near a roaring fire during the winter season."
-Jacob Wheeler, author of Angel of the Garbage Dump
"This book is stunning. With its compassion, reflection, and celebration, Anne-Marie Oomen's The Long Fields offers us a balm for our too-often battered hearts. In prose both lyrical and accessible, Oomen explores the idea of 'homing, ' the process-she tells us-of making a home. Here is a home remembered, another built, and still others found and made in her relationships to and love of family, friends, lovers, ritual, and this precious land. Oomen's essays are like an open invitation to step inside these pages, to find a place to settle, and to make ourselves at home."
-Patricia Ann McNair, author of Responsible Adults and Temple of Air
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