“A house full of people is a house full of different points of view.”

– Maori Proverb

“Can you imagine a more dire existence?”

The writers looked around the table at each other. At first, no one spoke.

I was chairing a small writers’ gathering. One of the writers had read a short piece about her experience on a farm. A city girl, she had fallen for a young farmer and decided to move onto the land with him. The piece described how the writer had endured everything from fixing fences to cleaning the chicken house. The final affront came when the year’s calf crop was brought into the corral. Her description was well crafted – you could almost see the mucky cattle pen and burly young farmer in coveralls, practically hear the bel...

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