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Prairie Silence: A Memoir

Name: Prairie Silence: A Memoir
Author: Melanie Hoffert
ISBN: 9780807044735

by Melanie Hoffert

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Overview

A rural expatriate’s struggle to reconcile family, home, love, and faith with the silence of the prairie land and its people

Melanie Hoffert longs for her rural North Dakota home with its grain trucks and empty main streets. But like many, she followed the out-migration pattern to a more urban life. When she returns home during harvest to confront the silences that have kept her at arm’s length from her childhood community, she finds it’s not easy. When asked if she's found a “fella,” rather than explain that she dates women, she stops breathing and changes the subject. In this evocative memoir, Hoffert offers a deeply personal and poignant meditation on land and community, taking readers on a journey of self-acceptance and reconciliation.

About the Author, Melanie Hoffert

Melanie Hoffert grew up on a farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota, where she spent her childhood wandering gravel roads, listening to farmers at church potlucks, and daydreaming about impossible love. She has an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University, and her work has appeared in several literary journals. She received the 2005 Creative Nonfiction Award from the Baltimore Review and the 2010 Creative Nonfiction Award from New Millennium Writings. Since 2008 she has worked for Teach For America as managing director of TFANet, the online social-networking hub for their corps members and alumni.

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Editorials

Kirkus Reviews

A rural expatriate examines the pain caused by leaving the place she loved, the struggle involved in aligning her sexuality with faith and hometown values, and the devastation wrought by rural depopulation. Hoffert grew up in a tiny North Dakota farm town. From a young age the author understood she was gay. After attending college, she established a successful professional career and satisfying personal life in Minneapolis. Though the lure of home persisted, when she returned, she remained mute regarding her sexual preference. "There is something that silences the stories of lives," she writes, "…and something that pushes those who cannot stand the silence away from the beauty that was once their childhood home." Hoffert returned home for a month during harvest season, intent on exploring the stark, beautiful landscape, working on the family farm and discovering the root of the ingrained silence surrounding her sexuality. Woven into the author's personal exploration are startling and sad facts on the state of rural life in America, illustrating the "painfully irreversible population decline" that is leading to the extinction of small towns across the country. Hoffert ponders the meaning of this loss and whether she is a member of "the first generation to realize that the world of rural America--both the good and bad of it--will never again be as it once was." The author's mostly quiet narrative includes a wealth of haunting images and ideas that will linger long after the last sentence. A heartfelt love song to a place and its people as well as an honest and rewarding rendering of the author's interior landscape.