Book Discussion--The Land Remembers--March 4 at 10:30

Garrison Keillor with author Ben Logan (photo from LaCrosse Tribune)

Bernie Brohaugh will be leading a discussion of The Land Remembers, a memoir by Ben Logan, recounting the author's youth on a southwest Wisconsin farm.  For those of us who did not grow up on a farm but have spent lots of years in Wisconsin with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and students from rural backgrounds, the book provides insights into the farm life.  For those of you who grew up on the farm, you will resonate with many of Logan's experiences.  Come and join us!

The book discussion will be at 10:30 a.m. in the River Falls Public Library in the Meeting Room (as you enter from the parking lot on the right) on Wednesday, March 4th.

If you haven't had time to read the book, the Sept. 2014 obituary of Ben Logan might give you a good sense of his writing.  The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel also provides some good background on the book in its obituary as well.

Here is Michael Perry's tribute to Logan from the Wisconsin State Journal (5 Oct. 2014):  "The Land Remembers Requires Many Reads":

I received the news of author Ben Logan's death while I was in a hotel room many miles from my home. Naturally, I flashed back to his book "The Land Remembers," but more specifically I flashed back to a childhood memory of reading Mr. Logan's book as I reclined on an old bedstead wedged into a corner of our farmhouse porch. I recalled midday summer sun filtering through needled white pine crowns, warm breeze filtering through the screen door, and the chip-chip of sparrows echoing from the barnyard.

It is an overdue blessing of our age that simplistic cultural summaries no longer pass as sufficient, and so on those occasions when I am asked to address the Wisconsin experience (usually when outside the state), I try to point out that despite persistent images it's not all red barns, green fields, and black-and-white cows. The inner city Milwaukee experience, the suburban La Crosse experience, the Great Lakes shoreline experience—these are no less the Wisconsin experience than Alice in Dairyland scarfing cheese curds at a Friday night fish fry before the polka dance (I offer this with apologies to the real Alice in Dairyland, whom I have met and on my honor she was doing none of the things just described).

That said, if—as I was—you were raised in a world of red barns, green fields, and black-and-white cows, then you knew Ben Logan got it right. He evoked a people, a place, and a time with perfect pitch. No straining, no false drama, just clear beautiful scene upon scene. (As a guy known to use three pages to describe a shovel, I sometimes think of Ben Logan and a little voice inside my head says, Maybe just say it's a shovel. )

Perhaps the greater testament to Logan's writing was his ability to convey those things with which we were not familiar. I am thinking in this instance of topography: Logan's was a landscape of valleys and ridges; mine was swamps and flatland. And yet, Logan wrote of the land in such a way that I felt the Driftless Area long before I ever saw it— and when I did finally travel to the southwestern corner of the state, it seemed a reunion. I suspect there are thousands of readers out there who feel the same no matter from where they hail.

I did a lot of reading on that old porch of ours. My dad, who did not treat us like free labor but did expect us to pitch in, once said he lost more man hours to my books addiction than to "football, pickup trucks and girls combined." Even now as I recall myself lazing through "The Land Remembers," I have this image of my father hard at work and wondering when I was going to get around to cleaning the calf pens. And yet — I suspect due to some benevolent intervention by my mother — he allowed me time off from our farm to read about another farm. I had not the slightest inkling that I would one day turn to Ben Logan's work as a source of guidance in creating my own, but there I was, quite unwittingly preparing for the future with a book of memories.

I met Ben Logan once. I thanked him as a reader, and I thanked him as a writer. I tried to keep it simple and short. You know: call a shovel a shovel, and move on. He was gracious, but even so I was left with the nagging feeling that I had failed to convey the depth of my appreciation. How do you prove to someone how their work has affected you without descending into fan-babble?

Perhaps it is this: In my little office over the garage, there is a set of bookshelves. On one of the shelves is a well-worn copy of "The Land Remembers." I know its location by heart. I have read it many times.

And I am not done reading it.