Singing the Land

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.”