Salad Ahoy!

Steve Himmer, "I Grow Potatoes" (in Amoskeag 2009)

Just because I haven’t participated since September and no one else has since January doesn’t mean it’s not Feedback Friday.

I’ve read more than a little “nature writing” (mostly first-person, nonfiction accounts of experiences in nature) in my time, but ecologically influenced fiction is a bit harder to come by. (Himmer points out that fiction and poetry get little attention from environmental literature awards.) So it’s nice to encounter “I Grow Potatoes,” which is ecologically specific but reads like a “normal” short story.

I think you have to plow past the first paragraph, thick with the word “potatoes” and a potato eyes simile (types the guy who uses “plow” in this review). The rewards are rich: here’s a story that is all about finding your place in the world. For some of us that means finding the right job. For some, finding the right city (regardless of what Facebook tells us). For some, finding the right group of friends. In other words, nearly all of us have a sense of the importance and difficulty of finding our place in the world, and that makes it easy to empathize with the narrator of Himmer’s story.

But the story never descends into generalities and stays firmly connected in the narrator’s particular yearning and frustration. I’ve definitely thought about what would be the ideal climate for me, but for this narrator, it has a much more specific meaning.