Earth meets heaven
Tiffany Eberle Kriner shares with us about her new book, *In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm*
Gentle reader,
We hope to see you at our third quarterly Theology & Fiction Book Club gathering! Just click here to purchase your ticket at Eventbrite.
I’m excited every time I bring you a book interview, but today, well, I’m over the moon to introduce you to Tiffany Eberle Kriner’s In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm (208 pages, Eerdmans).
Last night, I got to head out to Root & Sky Farm for a launch party for the book, eat Root & Sky pork and beef sliders, meet some Root & Sky livestock, and celebrate this gorgeous book.
I am absolutely biased, as Tiffany is a dear friend, but the book is absolutely something special. The writing is translucent. The faith is raw. The honesty is necessary. The book releases tomorrow, September 26th, and you can preorder your copy right now.
Here’s the endorsement I wrote for the book:
“Kriner is fearless in her exploration of the difficulty of place and land in a peripatetic and racially scarred America. Here are shades of Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and Julian of Norwich, but In Thought, Word, and Seed has, first, a voice all its own. Luminous. Audacious. Holy.”
And here’s the description from the publisher:
“In this brilliantly crafted essay collection, Tiffany Eberle Kriner weaves together literary criticism, nature writing, and memoir to explore what grows when we plant texts in the landscapes of our lives.
The first time Tiffany Eberle Kriner walked the parcel of land that would become Root and Sky Farm its primary crop seemed to be chaos. Industrial agriculture practices had depleted the fields, leaving them littered with the detritus of consumerism and rural poverty—plastic deck chairs, bags of diapers, endless empty cans of Monster Energy Drink. In this landscape, she meets Virgil and Charles W. Chesnutt, where her close readings of their works intersect with her efforts to create “a just and sustainable community farm.”
From her sixty acres in northern Illinois, Kriner reads James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, T. S. Eliot, William Langland, and others. She weaves reflections into the warp and woof of her life: coaxing growth from neglected land, embracing the frustrations and joys of family life, reckoning with racism in a small town. Along the way she cultivates an awareness of interdependence and mercy as they appear in the particulars of her rooted life.
Connecting culture, ecology, faith, and literature, In Thought, Word, and Seed invites readers to cultivate fruitful conversations between literature and the environments in which they live.”
My interview with Tiffany follows:
BFJ: I love the stark Midwestern beauty of the cover. How do you think about this image?
TEK: I’m so SO delighted by the cover of the book. Kristine Nelson, the art director, and the team, made a book that I love to look at. When they were getting ready to design, the publisher sent this survey, asking things like, “How do you want it to look? How do you want it to feel?” etc. I don’t know what came over me, to be so audacious in my asking but I told them I want it to feel special to sit down with, something you look forward to and save the best part of your week for. I was thinking about how I feel on Sunday mornings, before anyone else gets up, a clean house and a cup of coffee and Sabbath ahead, just ready for thinking and realizing things as I read. I want people who see the book, who sit with it, to feel meditative and alert, like they might do some of their best perceiving during that hour of reading, get the goosebumps. I thought, you should want to hold it.
Their finding of the artist Julie de Graag’s woodcut for the design was a wonderful discovery—across oceans, but it still feels Midwestern! And I connected to de Graag’s story right away, so it felt even more special.
BFJ: Why did you write In Thought, Word, and Seed?
TEK: Because somebody asked me to? That sounds weird, but it’s true. Mark Granquist, an editor for the journal Word and World had encountered my first book, The Future of the Word, and asked me to begin writing essays for their journal of pastoral theology. He didn't mean “pastoral” in the sheepy-sense of the term, probably, but I guess he went with it—he’s been remarkably kind. The owl chapter was the first I wrote, just testing things out, seeing what might be made, theologically, in the place we were, with the texts that came to hand for help. I don’t think we fully understand how significant our invitations can be—into our homes, our journals, our churches, into our classes.
I kept writing the essay chapters as a way to think through massive upheavals in life and in the world. We’d made a huge move in our lives, to Root and Sky Farm, to be sure, but of course the last few years have involved huge, world-rocking events for everyone in global public health, in American racism, in politics. I needed a way to encounter them when we all felt so separated. My friend Joel Sheesley, a landscape painter says that a landscape painting always needs to have a way into it. So, I thought, writing in and through the landscape might itself be a way in, a way to keep going, a way to get through.
My dad always says, “it’s better when Tiffany is writing”—there’s this pressure build-up when I’m not in a writing season, heh heh, and I get pretty cranky—and in these particular seasons, there was so much pressure that it became necessary to essay.
Tiffany Eberle Kriner is associate professor of English at Wheaton College. Photo courtesy of the author.
BFJ: Give us the short version; what’s the book about?
TEK: I think it’s about trying to figure out, on the most practical, basic level, what it means to live at the intersection of earth and heaven. My figuring takes place at one particular intersection, Root and Sky Farm, in rural Illinois, and seems to involve a lot of physical labor and the consulting of literary advice manuals on various matters of importance that arise.
BFJ: Are farms about theology? Tell us about it.
TEK: Everything’s about theology, if Beth Felker Jones and her cat Dwight have taught me anything.
BFJ: Touché. Share a detail you’re fond of from the book?
TEK: There’s a tiny little owl image by Julie de Graag in the colophon of the book, a perfect touch.
BFJ: What do people mistakenly assume when they hear about your book?
TEK: Oh dear, there are so many farm memoirs out there. I think they might assume that it’s a straightforward memoir, full of cute bits with sheep and so forth. And there ARE bits with sheep, so that’s not a mistake. (Oh my gosh, do you need cute sheep pictures? I have SO. MANY. CUTE. SHEEP PICTURES! Babies! Old mamas! Me and sheep! My kid looking like a future Good Shepherd of the Sheep.) And there are many stories of our beginning farmer ineptitudes to amuse our farmer mentors and friends. But…I think the form of the chapters—each one a little different—may surprise people. I remember talking to my editor about a developmental edit. I said something like, “Oh I TOTALLY need an editor, so YES PLEASE, but…um…it’s weird, formally, and I hope you don’t want me to straighten them out, do you (please no)?” I have rarely been so relieved as when she said something like, “Oh we like the weird! We definitely want to keep the weird!”
Photo courtesy of Tiffany Eberle Kriner.
BFJ: Well, it makes my day when you text sheep pictures to me. And lamb pictures! Never stop sending me lamb pictures! How does the book relate to or come from your experience in teaching and discipleship?
TEK: I think the book comes from my discipleship most centrally: how does one live out discipleship LITERALLY in the place where one lives?
But many years of my discipleship have taken place among books in educational contexts. So, almost all the books that show up in the book are close to me because of my experience in higher education, works I read as assigned, which moved me (Go Tell It On the Mountain, Piers Plowman, Middlemarch, Song of Solomon, etc.) , or works I assigned and prayed students would be moved by. And I believe texts are made fruitful in meaning through communal engagement with them, so every work in there has become what it is to me because of communities of readers in classrooms or office doorways.
BFJ: You’ve been such an important teacher for me, on these matters. Are there difficulties in the spiritual life that your book can help to address?
TEK: Well, writing the book helped ME deal with some difficulties, but it’s true, not everybody has to deal with the difficulty of getting an amazingly powerful and justly recalcitrant steer onto a trailer. So, each chapter of the book addresses questions loosely surrounding a theological topic: sin (the Grass chapter), vocation (the Forest chapter), beauty (the Clearing chapter), and holiness (the Wattle chapter). And those difficulties are pretty specific—super practical and right there in my life: the sin synecdochally imaged in the murder of George Floyd, the sinfully intense divisions in the public sphere during the election season, the sinful violence we perpetrate against others in our own seeking of safety in the pandemic. The vocation questions for me were about marriage, 20 years in, when one feels the call to a certain work outside of the relationship, but also knows the call to take up the cross of care for one’s spouse in hard times. And I’ve always had a problem with beauty, maybe since my face got kinda messed up with cancer surgery: it seemed associated with a perfection I never had. Could only the very good artists, the excellent people, evoke it or reach after it? What about the rest of us? The broken ones? It goes on. I think readers will connect to some of those very concrete, applicable questions.
BFJ: If you could gift everyone with one insight from the book, what would it be?
TEK: Maybe I can say I’m aiming for inseeing instead of claiming insight? I’m bewildered by just about everything, so these essays are a chance, as it were, to look into it: the landscape, the books planted there. And what do I find when I look? As Piers Plowman would say it, God’s mercy is over all God's works. And all the wickedness of the world that man might work or think is no more to the mercy of God than a live coal in the sea.
BFJ: That always gives me goosebumps. What would your 10-year-old self say if she learned you’d grow up to write about this stuff?
TEK: Goodness, I wish she’d known she was going to write at all! She would have been able to start practicing! I remember feeling a failure, writing anything. There was this other girl in my class, Suzanne, who knew she was going to be a writer. She used to write stories in pencil in the blank parts of some discarded textbooks in our classroom—I longed to be like her, but it didn’t take. All I could write in my textbooks was marginalia. Which is maybe what this book is, come to think.
BFJ: Besides In Thought, Word, and Seed, what are your top reading recommendations for folks who want to think more deeply about these matters?
TEK: I like to know what people like in order to recommend things, generally, and I hope maybe some people will consider reading the books that they don’t know well that are IN my book. But here are some that I have loved.
For nature farm writing, I think John Lewis Stempel’s works are a joy. For theology of literature, Claude Atcho’s Reading Black Books or Christina Bieber Lake’s Beyond the Story. For bewildered theology, Fanny Howe’s poetry and essays. For oddly formed essays that revel in their odd forms, Lessons and Carols by John West or Dispatches from the End of Ice by Beth Peterson. For thinking about the meaning of things with humor and experimental form, Moby Dick. To change your life for the better, Ross Gay’s Book of Delights—in AUDIO. For magical sentences in an amazingly good story, Kiese Laymon’s Long Division. For the feeling of Sunday morning—alert and contemplative with epiphany around every corner—Thomas Gardner’s Poverty Creek Journal or Sundays or John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination.
I love when people recommend books to me, too.
Photo courtesy of Tiffany Eberle Kriner.
The following is excerpted from In Thought, Word, and Seed. All rights reserved.
Maybe farming handbooks have always been about more than farming. Farming is as good a way as any to talk about being in the world. Both writer and farmer want—need—to do the right thing. So Virgil prays, Grant me the right to enter into this bold Adventure of mine, grant that I make it through, Pitying me along with those farmers who need To be taught to find their way, and grant that we May come into your presence with our prayers That first bleared season, I woke early one Sunday morning in June. The tenants' house was still more or less a landfill. In the house in the woods where we lived, half the kitchen had just been torn off and burnt to the ground. We had no sink, even, and wouldn't for months. But we had just set out the new pasture—no more chemicals. That morning, in bathrobe and boots, I walked through thirty acres of woods full of gooseberry bushes and birdsong. The sun was coming up over the lip of the east's cup as I crossed the field. And yes, finally, there they were, the tiniest bits of new sprouted green pasture grass, each leaf lit like a stained-glass window. So many forces hidden there, from root to sky; and I prayed for the healing of the field.
Don’t miss the book’s release day tomorrow; grab your copy of In Thought, Word, and Seed right now!
Grace and Peace,
BFJ
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I love the quote from Piers Plowman. I think we forget sometimes how much bigger God is than everything we know, and in these troublesome and troubling days it's so great to be reminded of that.
And thank you for the introduction to Tiffany.
I'm really, really, really looking forward to reading this book. :)