On Blue Collar Storytellers

And formally interviewing my dad.

My dad, a dryland wheat farmer, is one of the best storytellers I know. He can hold an audience, knows when to add detail or dialogue, and wields hand gestures like grand punctuation. (“The people in town do not,” he might say, drawing a line across his chest to convey emphasis, “know how to leave room on a corner for a semi truck.”)

Someone recently asked me if there were any artists in my family. I said yes, though I told them it probably wasn’t the kind of artistry they were thinking about. Oral story being an art. Planting a crop being an art. Building things with your hands being an art. The art and stories of the blue collar world are not always readily packaged for the outside world.

What I do know is that I’ve been to a lot of fancy literary events, and I’ve met blue-collar workers who can spin a narrative that’s just as elevated. The vernacular will be different. But if you listen for the momentum of story, it’s there. It’s just as powerful.

The stories they tell? They’re about deer with antlers like branching trees that come and go like ghosts through the sage. They’re about cougars doubling back on them in basalt canyons as they track their prints through the snow. They’re about black widows blowing in on tumbleweeds. About flash floods that scour the fields, turning up deer bones, taking out crops. They understand tension, the hard losses of nature and death, the arc of hoping and failing and trying again.

New winter wheat on the week of Thanksgiving, waiting for snow cover.

I bounce between story types (oral and written), and the art in one does not always translate to the art of the other. Neither does the culture. I still code switch when I talk to friends and family from home and when I speak in a classroom or at a networking event in the city. Language makes story. Written words make books. Yet there was something about spoken story that kept tugging on my sleeve.

In an effort of story-collecting, I asked my dad if I could interview him when I came home for Thanksgiving weekend. Part of this was prompted by my grandmother’s death: I had written down a list of interview questions to ask her this spring. She died in early September. My unasked questions are engraved in a Field Notes notebook on my desk.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people professionally for my job as a journalist and writer, but I never broke the casual line of my visits with my grandmother to interview her. I wanted to ask her potentially prickly questions, like, Did you ever feel lonely while living way out there on the farm? While being a mother to three young kids? While pulling all the weight of homemaker as your husband worked the field? I wanted to ask her everything: about what it was like to be a woman in that place in the 1950s, about baking under the sun in a wash of summer days, about turning sun-bleached sepia.

Her death made me double down on the story-catching of the practice that was leaving my family. My father and uncle were both retired. No one in the family was taking over the farm. It was a place I was losing. I knew I’d lose my dad one day too.

There’s a sort of chemistry between interviewer and subject that has to happen for good stories to emerge. I was curious what it would be like to interview my dad, to break that barrier of familiarity. Could I prompt those bigger-than-life tales I’d grown up with in a more formal setting, one I’d learned in a different world, in academia? The answer was, sort of. I pitched a practical framing question, something to break the ice: Would he give me a month-by-month breakdown of every task he did on a dryland wheat farm?

A photo from the summer I drove wheat trucks: heat, grain and cloud drama.

If that seems like something I should have already known, let me say it straight: I was a kid on that farm, and experienced everything through a kid-lens. I knew my dad was in the field when he was gone before I woke and gone still at bedtime, but I didn’t know what he did on the tractor all those hours. I was also a young girl in that place; I was not expected to take over or work the farm. Practices weren’t passed down to me the way they might have been to a son. By the time I was 30, I still had only a murky idea of what my dad did on the tractor each spring. Add it to the list of things people assume I know how to do after growing up on a farm: Ride a horse. Drive a manual. Can vegetables and fruit. (Though I did one day learn to drive a manual; did one day work the wheat harvest.)

Last week, I invited my father to sit in the farmhouse office, pushed record, and asked him to tell me everything.

I picked up all sorts of nuts-and-bolts facts, which will be useful, but we spiraled into even better things: how a farmer can estimate his crop yield within five bushels if he keeps track of the rain for two years. (I am small and trailing behind my father to check the rain gauge after a passing storm.) That our family was the first to plant winter wheat in the area, a hybrid developed by the WSU wheat breeding program. (I am standing barefoot on field soil, studying the weave of the new head of wheat the year we switched from the delicate Eltan to a stocky club wheat, Bruehl.) That the brick-red color on treated seed wheat (never to be eaten, my father warned me each fall) came from a fungicide they applied to help the wheat winter over without succumbing to rust or rot.

I had a visceral, peripheral memory of each step on the farm my father explained. I had so much knowing and not-knowing. The interview was an attempt to put two parts together to illuminate a practice that was disappearing. Small family farms were dying all over America. I wanted to catch some stories before my father took them to the grave.

We talked about a great many things that will find their way to the page later—how to gamble with wheat prices by tracking the bigger exporting picture; the worst pests he ever had (grasshoppers); the worst weather the farm ever saw (an open winter with 1” of hoarfrost); and how the chemicals he used were semi-volatile, traveling in gas clouds between plants (they didn’t wear masks). But I’ll leave this writing with a quote from our interview that speaks to the land-life entanglement of so many blue-collar people who hold spectacular stories, never writing them down.

“A farmer is a conservationist at heart,” my father told me. “What’s good for the soil is good for him.”