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

– M?ori 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 participants had just 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. Her story described everything from fixing fences to cleaning the chicken house. The final insult came when the year’s calf crop was brought into the corral. Her vivid writing brought the scene to life: you could almost see the mucky cattle pen and the burly young farmer in coveralls, practically hear the bel...

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