/tags/personal-essay/ Recent content in personal essay on Rootstalk Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Thu, 30 Sep 2021 20:37:23 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-2/manoylov-peaches-meet-corn/ Thu, 30 Sep 2021 20:37:23 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-2/manoylov-peaches-meet-corn/ As a Georgia native, I thought the Midwest meant corn and cows and people who said “baggy” as “bayggy.” It wasn’t until my first year in Iowa that I realized how charming the sleepy little state could be. At sixteen years old, a junior in high school, I set out for Iowa Lakeside Laboratory in Milford, Iowa for a conservation biology class. The field station was established in 1909, and the stone cabin classrooms bore evidence of a century of weathering. /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/healing-the-smallest-casualty/ Thu, 06 Aug 2020 15:55:38 +0000 /past-issues/volume-v-issue-1/healing-the-smallest-casualty/ We arrived in Iraq under the cover of darkness. We were a large deployment group from Wilford Hall Medical Center, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. Many of us knew each other, but to say we were well acquainted would be a stretch. After all, Wilford Hall was the largest medical facility in the Air Force. The range of relationships prior to our deployment was all over the map, much like the range of backgrounds and hometowns that make up every military unit. /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/johnson/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/johnson/ It’s difficult to remember summers where my dad and I didn’t pack backpacks, coolers, books, and ourselves into a car and drive west from our home on Long Island. For most people, a road trip is about getting to a destination, but for us it was about the road. Highways, side streets, and rundown dirt roads. We spent most nights in little motels with bright blue swimming pools and American flag murals, but for two weeks each summer we called our car “home. /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/editor/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-iv-issue-1/editor/ I’ve always felt that cities were too crowded. They have too much cement, too many cars and horns and sirens. They’re never truly dark. During my first week here in Iowa, I attended a bonfire out in the prairie. It felt so calm, so quiet. Beyond the welcoming glow of the campfire, I was surrounded by proper darkness, full of rustling prairie grasses, crickets, and, beyond the smaller noises, silence. /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/baechtel/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/baechtel/ I have had my second injection of the Moderna vaccine and, as of two days ago, I’m 90 percent immune to the coronavirus. As I write this, outside my window spring is on its way, and I should be feeling hopeful rather than melancholy. But after a year that has provided as much storm and stress as 2020, maybe the way I’m feeling is understandable. I’m not quite old enough to have experienced the McCarthy era first-hand, but I’ve experienced its reverberating shock-waves all my life. /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/clotfelter/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/clotfelter/ During the eight years that I lived in Coats, Kansas—from 1934 to 1942—the town existed to support the farms in the area, and the well-being of the farms was of crucial importance to everyone in town. The farmers, in turn, depended entirely upon wheat, for it was the only cash crop. Wheat was planted in the fall and sprouted and grew to a height of a few inches before winter, then died down during the winter months and began to grow again in spring. /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/ross/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/ross/ In 1945, at Iowa’s State Training School for Boys in Eldora, Iowa, seventeen-year-old Robert Miller shoveled coal all day long as punishment for an alleged escape plot. When he tried to quit working because the oppressive August temperature had drained his strength, guards at the school tried to force him to continue and, when he refused, the guards beat him to death 1 with an iron rod taken from a “harness tug. /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/andelson/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /past-issues/volume-vii-issue-2/andelson/ In the spirit of hopefulness that spring betokens, this spring especially, I thought I would take a break from the weighty topics I have addressed in my last few Publisher’s Notes—the pandemic, the derecho, climate disruption, the death of a prairie hero—and write about why I carve spoons. To be sure, spoon carving is a quirky, some might say anachronistic, pastime, but for me serious ideas lurk beneath its surface about our ties to the natural world, the relationship between practicality and artistry, the meaning of knowledge, and the threat posed to craftsmanship by industrial capitalism.