About this item
A love affair unfolds as crisis hits a family farm on the high plainsJulene Bair has inherited part of a farming empire and fallen in love with a rancher from Kansas's beautiful Smoky Valley. She means to create a family, provide her son with the father he longs for, and preserve the Bair farm for the next generation, honoring her own father's wish and commandment, "Hang on to your land!" But part of her legacy is a share of the ecological harm the Bair Farm has done: each growing season her family - like other irrigators - pumps over two hundred million gallons out of the Ogallala aquifer. The rapidly disappearing aquifer is the sole source of water on the vast western plains, and her family's role in its depletion haunts her. As traditional ways of life collide with industrial realities, Bair must dramatically change course.
About the Author
Julene Bair is the author of The Ogallala Road, A Memoir of Love and Reckoning (Viking Penguin 2014) . Her first book, One Degree West: Reflections of a Plainsdaughter, won Mid-List Press??s First Series Award and a WILLA Award from Women Writing the West. Bair??s essays have appeared in venues ranging from the New York Times to High Country News. A 2004 NEA fellow, she has taught at the University of Wyoming, the University of Iowa, the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, Denver??s Lighthouse Writers and the Jackson Hole Writing Festival. Prior to teaching and writing, her career interests ranged from the management of a San Francisco recording studio to filmmaker to farmer. A graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and the University of Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program, she now lives in Longmont, Colorado.
