Back To Abnormal: Surviving With An Old Farm In The New South

by Dana Wildsmith

~ The intertwined essays in BACK TO SURVIVING WITH AN OLD FARM IN THE NEW SOUTH spin out from author Dana Wildsmith's daily life on an old farm in the foothills of the north Georgia mountains, to the regional world of the ESL classes she teaches, to the national scope of her work as a writer and a teacher of creative writing. They create a web of connections between the actions of the individual and her relation to the wider world. The chapters read like a string of summer front-porch evenings with the author - talking about her past, her work on the farm, the people she lives among, and the eternal puzzle of how to make sure her time on this spot of earth continues whole, healthy and life-sustaining. Environmental writer Jeff Biggers calls BACK TO ABNORMAL "a testimony to what we risk to lose." Philip Lee Williams, a Georgia Author of the Year, says, "The rural world needs all the friends it can get, and it has here found the champion it deserves." Novelist Karen Salyer McElmurray "Wildsmith's stories are sacrament. They are the wildness we need to keep our souls alive." Writer & teacher Darnell Arnoult says BACK TO ABNORMAL is "a sharp and compassionate anthem and prophetic elegy to the pastoral standing ground against the hungry and devouring teeth of suburban sprawl." www.MotesBooks.com ~

168 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 2010

Reviews

[Joan Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

A remarkable sequence of connected essays by my cousin Dana. Her topics are the restoration of an old farm, environmentalism, nature, dogs, poetry, teaching and more. Wildsmith is a noted poet and this is her first prose collection. Unlike the work of many environmentalists, her text is replete with good hard common sense. Her observations are always acute, but never preachy. She describes her life on Grace Farm in southern Georgia where she and her husband reside in a renovated cotton barn near the 100 year old home of her elderly mother and stepfather with grace and grit. The daughter of a minister, Wildsmith was a Navy wife for 25 years prior to her husband’s retirement. Now she divides her time between clearing creekbeds, rescuing abandoned puppies, teaching ESL classes at a community college, doing poetry residencies, fighting the encroachment of developers, and writing.

[Larry Germain · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read Dana Wildsmith's "Back to Abnormal" twice, and occasionally leaf back to certain pages and passages to be reminded of how universally applicable many of her insights and observations are. She uses her experience in managing a small, 100-year-old farm in Bethlehem, Georgia to illustrate her love of the land and of Language.
A widely published poet and essayist, Dana celebrates Family, Friends and Home with words of wisdom, beauty and humor.

[Gale · Rating 5 out of 5]

The only thing better than reading this collection of stories is having had Dana Wildsmith share them them with me when they actually happened. Thanks for sharing, Dana. Can't wait for the next book.

[Libby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written memoir about living at the end of the road in Bethlehem, Georgia. Wildsmith fights invasive plants, renovates an old farm house, lives in a barn, rescues abandoned dogs, and in one harrowing scene, is bitten by a rattlesnake, then is horrified by the comments she gets.