I have come to see that quiet lives on the land are just as important as any politician’s or celebrity’s life, yet they are usually unsung and unnoticed – often fading into the earth without any, except family, to remember them or write them down. To write about the “nobodies” of rural America is to keep alive the names that provide meaning, intimacy, and beauty to our world.

“When you write about family farming, do it always from your family’s point of view,” Wendell Berry advised me.