Coming soon.
In the foreword to Singing the Land, author Stephanie E. Dickinson writes, "I have been waiting for someone to bring Iowa, the black soil breadbasket of my youth and the mono-crop cornucopia of my maturity, to enduring life . . . Chila Woychik has written such a book."
Part memoir, part travelogue, part lyrical essay, Singing the Land records life on a family farm in Iowa over the span of a year. We read about the never-ending cycle of events that serves as the lyrics to her song of love and respect for the land-- snowstorms and windstorms, mountain lions and coyotes, crop- and life-destroying flash floods, newborn ducklings and calves, herbicides and pesticides that harm the life-giving nutrients of soil. Throughout, Woychik returns again and again to themes of sacrifice, loss, love, struggle, and, above all, time. "Time is a peace child with daisies. A joker with a card up its sleeve. Time is a wristwatch strung to the arm of fate. Time flies and dives and dies."
Originally published by Shanti Arts, Brunswick, Maine, in 2020, this is the 2nd edition, published by Port Yonder Press.
In the foreword to Singing the Land, author Stephanie E. Dickinson writes, "I have been waiting for someone to bring Iowa, the black soil breadbasket of my youth and the mono-crop cornucopia of my maturity, to enduring life . . . Chila Woychik has written such a book."
Part memoir, part travelogue, part lyrical essay, Singing the Land records life on a family farm in Iowa over the span of a year. We read about the never-ending cycle of events that serves as the lyrics to her song of love and respect for the land-- snowstorms and windstorms, mountain lions and coyotes, crop- and life-destroying flash floods, newborn ducklings and calves, herbicides and pesticides that harm the life-giving nutrients of soil. Throughout, Woychik returns again and again to themes of sacrifice, loss, love, struggle, and, above all, time. "Time is a peace child with daisies. A joker with a card up its sleeve. Time is a wristwatch strung to the arm of fate. Time flies and dives and dies."
Originally published by Shanti Arts, Brunswick, Maine, in 2020, this is the 2nd edition, published by Port Yonder Press.
Endorsements and reviews:
"A . . . meditation on the wonder of small moments, artfully told." -Kirkus Reviews
"I told myself: I'll just read the first essay then get back to work. Instead, I got swallowed up and lost track of time within Chila Woychik's beautiful lyricism about rural living in Iowa . . . Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology pulls you in. It grows on you, grows within you. Swallows you up whole just as she is swallowed up by her rural life . . . [This book is] also an examination of ideas as she reflects on time, sound (or soundlessness), bravery, migration, and onward, probing these concepts across the months, both globally and locally. And all of this examination is a beautiful song, a lyric to her land. A song that asks us to examine, deeply, our own lands." -Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave (winner of the 2015 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography, the Utah Book Award for Nonfiction, and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Biography; finalist for both the Vermont and Colorado Book Awards)
"In Chila Woychik's Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology, 'rural' is not merely a location; it is an engine that feeds plentiful meditations on time, movement, farming, and family. Broken into a year in her life farming in Iowa, this collection of essays has firm roots on the farm in the present moment and yet wanders, to the Illinois of the author's childhood, to a quiet chamber in Minneapolis, and the wide open wilds of Alaska. Looking inward and outward, backwards and forwards, Woychik's language is at once playful and evocative, inviting and probing. Woychik confidently demonstrates how we are "all wrapped up in this lyric, blanketed in this kismet called rural'" -Krys Malcolm Belc, managing editor, Passages North
"Singing the Land invites us to experience a deep connection to the joys and necessities of rural living. The language is beautiful and the descriptions of rural Iowa life are intimate and familiar without ever being cliched. Woychik explores with humor and humility the varied rhythms of country living-daily, seasonal, and generational. Singing the Land would fit well on a shelf with Mary Oliver and Ted Kooser, Kathleen Norris and Jim Harrison. It could serve as a master class in the art of the lyric essay." -John Winkelman, editor, 3288 Review, Caffeinated Press
"This seamless, lovely book captures the wildness that lurks under the deceptively quiet surface of the rural middle of the US. The wildness of snowstorms, of sunsets, of wind, of mountain lions and coyotes, of crop- and life-destroying flash floods, of cows that appear suddenly in the middle of a narrow road at night, of damp-baled hay that bursts into flame. The wildness of birth and death. The wildness of soil and sky." -Sarah Beth Childers, nonfiction editor, Cimarron Review
"Word painting at its most profound." -Vincent Dublado, Readers' Favorite
"A gorgeous work of creative non-fiction that really steps beyond the standard memoir . . . I would highly recommend [it]." -K. C. Finn, Readers' Favorite
"The imagery evoked is palpable. . . Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology makes nature come to life-must-have for your collection." -Tammy Ruggles, Readers' Favorite
"A . . . meditation on the wonder of small moments, artfully told." -Kirkus Reviews
"I told myself: I'll just read the first essay then get back to work. Instead, I got swallowed up and lost track of time within Chila Woychik's beautiful lyricism about rural living in Iowa . . . Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology pulls you in. It grows on you, grows within you. Swallows you up whole just as she is swallowed up by her rural life . . . [This book is] also an examination of ideas as she reflects on time, sound (or soundlessness), bravery, migration, and onward, probing these concepts across the months, both globally and locally. And all of this examination is a beautiful song, a lyric to her land. A song that asks us to examine, deeply, our own lands." -Sean Prentiss, author of Finding Abbey: The Search for Edward Abbey and His Hidden Desert Grave (winner of the 2015 National Outdoor Book Award for History/Biography, the Utah Book Award for Nonfiction, and the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for Biography; finalist for both the Vermont and Colorado Book Awards)
"In Chila Woychik's Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology, 'rural' is not merely a location; it is an engine that feeds plentiful meditations on time, movement, farming, and family. Broken into a year in her life farming in Iowa, this collection of essays has firm roots on the farm in the present moment and yet wanders, to the Illinois of the author's childhood, to a quiet chamber in Minneapolis, and the wide open wilds of Alaska. Looking inward and outward, backwards and forwards, Woychik's language is at once playful and evocative, inviting and probing. Woychik confidently demonstrates how we are "all wrapped up in this lyric, blanketed in this kismet called rural'" -Krys Malcolm Belc, managing editor, Passages North
"Singing the Land invites us to experience a deep connection to the joys and necessities of rural living. The language is beautiful and the descriptions of rural Iowa life are intimate and familiar without ever being cliched. Woychik explores with humor and humility the varied rhythms of country living-daily, seasonal, and generational. Singing the Land would fit well on a shelf with Mary Oliver and Ted Kooser, Kathleen Norris and Jim Harrison. It could serve as a master class in the art of the lyric essay." -John Winkelman, editor, 3288 Review, Caffeinated Press
"This seamless, lovely book captures the wildness that lurks under the deceptively quiet surface of the rural middle of the US. The wildness of snowstorms, of sunsets, of wind, of mountain lions and coyotes, of crop- and life-destroying flash floods, of cows that appear suddenly in the middle of a narrow road at night, of damp-baled hay that bursts into flame. The wildness of birth and death. The wildness of soil and sky." -Sarah Beth Childers, nonfiction editor, Cimarron Review
"Word painting at its most profound." -Vincent Dublado, Readers' Favorite
"A gorgeous work of creative non-fiction that really steps beyond the standard memoir . . . I would highly recommend [it]." -K. C. Finn, Readers' Favorite
"The imagery evoked is palpable. . . Singing the Land: A Rural Chronology makes nature come to life-must-have for your collection." -Tammy Ruggles, Readers' Favorite
