Prairie Silence: A Memoir

(Hardback)

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Description

Melanie Hoffert longs for her rural North Dakotan home, with its grain trucks and empty main streets, but like many, she followed the out-migration pattern to a more urban life. She returns home during harvest to confront the silences that have keep her at an arm's length from her childhood community. When asked if she's found a "fella," rather than explain that--actually--she dates women, she stops breathing and changes the subject. In this evocative memoir Hoffert offers a deeply personal and poignant meditation on land and community, taking readers on a journey of self-acceptance and reconciliation.

Reviews

A heartfelt coming-out story as well as an eloquent elegy to a rural way of life that is rapidly vanishing from the American landscape.Booklist

InPrairie Silence,Melanie Hoffertshowshowthe landscapes of ourchildhood continue to speak to us, and through us, long after weve leftthembehind. In thisbeautifully written anddeeply imagined memoir, Hoffert invites us back to her North Dakota farming community for a season of harvest,a personal journey of profoundcourageand grace.Judy Blunt, author of Breaking Clean

Hofferts bittersweet and compelling memoir recalls her struggles at ending her silence and creating a fuller life for herself. She illuminates the quiet grace of the people and land she loves and mourns the passing of a way of life. Minneapolis Star Tribune

The quiet, lyric prose of Melanie Hofferts Prairie Silence crept into my days, making it impossible for me to stop turning pages. This book is about looking for oneself in places we are so often afraid to venture. A beautiful debut from a brave new writer.Claire Bidwell Smith, author of The Rules of Inheritance

This is a gorgeous book that evokes quiet country mornings and loud self-examination. . . . If you once believed that you cant truly ever go home again, Prairie Silence is a book youll be eager to read.Washington Blade

A heartfelt love song to a place and its people as well as an honest and rewarding rendering of the authors interior landscape. Kirkus Reviews

Hofferts intimate memoir of place reveals a personal journey both fraught and wondrous, and a present reality of surprising richness. Patricia Weaver Francisco, author of Telling

Author Bio

Melanie Hoffert is the author of Prairie Silence- A Memoir. She grew up on a farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota, where she spent her childhood wandering gravel roads and listening to farmers at church potlucks. Her work has been published in several literary journals, and she holds an MFA in creative writing from Hamline University. Melanie lives in Minneapolis and works for Teach For America. Learn more about her work at melaniehoffert.com.