Voices from the Land: Gardens and the Making of Americans
Patricia Klindienst, author
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Inkspot Writing Workshop:
"Place and Memory"
Ames Public Library, Community Room
Free and Open to the Public
2pm-4pm
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Public Lecture
Reiman Gardens
Hughes Auditorium
8:00pm
Klindienst will talk about the ethnic gardener as a culture bearer and
citizen of the land community, one who, in healing the wounds of
displacement--whether by injustice, poverty, or war--brings a wealth of
traditional wisdom to the task of healing the land as well.
The Earth Knows My Name begins with the story of how a lost shard of her own
Italian immigrant history propelled her across the country to collect the
stories of Native Americans, African Americans, and Hispanics whose
ancestors were here before our national boundaries were drawn.
These stories are told side by side with the narratives of immigrants from
across Europe and Asia.
Klindienst draws on the work of Wendell Berry, who
warns that our ecological crisis is a crisis of character, and E.O. Wilson,
who writes in
The Diversity of Life, "Our troubles . . . arise from the fact
that we do not know what we are and cannot agree on what we want to be.
The primary cause of this intellectual failure is ignorance of our origins .
. . Humanity is part nature, a species that evolved among other species.
The more closely we identify ourselves with the rest of life, the more
quickly we will be able to discover the knowledge on which an enduring
ethic, a sense of preferred direction, can be built."
A long forgetting defines us, and Klindienst addresses where we might begin
the work of remembering who and what we are.
Patricia Klindienst began her career as an interdisciplinary scholar,
publishing the first of her ground-breaking feminist re-interpretations of
classical myths and biblical stories, "The Voice of the Shuttle Is Ours"
while still a graduate student in Stanford University's Program in Modern
Thought & Literature. She wrote two companion pieces, "Ritual Work on Human
Flesh: Livys Lucretia and the Rape of the Body Politic," and "Intolerable
Language: Jesus and the Woman Taken in Adultery" as an award-winning scholar
and teacher at Yale University. She then left the profession, putting aside
the manuscripts of two scholarly books, one on Virginia Woolf and another a
collection of her essays on the iconography of rape, and began to write for
a broader audience.
Her first book,
The Earth Knows My Name was the
2007 winner of the American Book Award, and tells the stories of fifteen
ethnic Americans who transmit their cultural heritage through their gardens.
Praised by readers as diverse as Jane Goodall and Barry Lopez, Klindienst's
eloquent and passionate rendering of the voices of ethnic peoples has been
called an "original and exemplary kind of cultural study" by Geoffrey Hartman,
Sterling Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature and
co-founder of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimony at Yale.
Hartman characterizes her book as essential reading for anyone seriously
interested in the growing reality that an ancient ecological relationship,
imaginative and religious in its intensity, is slipping away.
Patricia Klindienst,
author
