A Monday Update
Last week I announced what I am *not* doing so here is an update on what I *am* doing now.
In this message:
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Welcome to Roots and Revolution
Welcome to my Substack! Whether you are newly subscribed or have been following my work for some time, I am grateful for your support and excited to be on this journey with you.
Please reach out any time if you’d like to respond to my writing, have a question or if you have an idea for me to write about. I have a wide variety of interests so hit me up. Chances are if it interests you, it will interest me too — and it will interest our friends as well.
First Things First
Right off the top, I’d like to take a moment to (re)-introduce myself.
My name is Amber Gustafson and I am a Gen X Iowan who grew up during the Farm Crisis of the 1980s. So much of who I am is shaped by growing up in poverty and chaos and it has made me an advocate for those facing challenges today — personal and systemic.
I began writing in the summer of 1987, using my mom’s typewriter and a Konica MG 35 mm camera to chronicle the lives of the cats and dogs on our 240 acre farm, located exactly four miles east, a mile north and a mile east of Orient, Iowa. The Pet Gazette was a short-lived venture, likely due to a circulation of exactly one (our sweet neighbor, Isal) but my love for writing and telling the stories of my family and my community was firmly established with that first issue and has only grown from there.
As the first person in my family to enroll in or graduate from a four-year college, I was a member of the inaugural class of Christina Hixson Opportunity Award recipients at Iowa State University, enabling me to pursue my dream of a degree in journalism (BA, 1999). The work ethic I inherited from my parents pushed me to hold down three jobs in addition to my full-time courses so I could graduate in four years with a minimal amount of debt — a crucial task for any first generation student. I even relied on the money earned from raising my own hogs and cattle to pay my part of my tuition.
Over the last 25 years, I have continued to write, to raise children, to serve my community and to advocate for others. As a grassroots organizer for Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, I created and piloted a rural outreach program to connect with gun safety advocates across the state and traveled to cities large and small to promote the message of gun safety for families. I have made national speaking and press appearances on CNN, ABC, CBS and the foreign press.
In 2018, I ran for the Iowa Senate, challenging the incumbent senate majority leader, coming less than 1,000 votes away from winning in a race that attracted both statewide and national attention and raised nearly half a million dollars.
I have a Master of Arts in Communication in Public Policy and Advocacy from the School of Journalism at Drake University, where I researched and wrote in-depth policy briefs on a variety of social, environmental, labor and governance issues. I am a member of Kappa Tau Alpha journalism honor society as well as Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) and Association of Fundraising Professionals (AFP).
I still live, work and advocate in rural-ish Iowa as a freelance marketing and fundraising consultant, along with serving on the boards of several non-profit organizations.
And I still take photos of my pets.
What I’m Working On
I’m writing a book about the wild ride and the terrifying reality of the Farm Crisis of the 1980’s and my parents’ attempts to save their dignity and their solvency by joining a cult that sold soap. A cult called Amway.
I call my book Crazy Circles: How One Family Bet the Farm On Soap and Lost It All after a term used in Amway recruiting. The business plan was referred to by Amway insiders as “those Crazy Circles” (cults have their own language which is a tool used to isolate members, reinforce beliefs and create in-group/out-group definitions and Amway is no exception.) The term was so ubiquitous that a minor-league christian pop artist wrote a song about it. He performed at Amway events and sold copies of his albums full of other Amway-related music.
Crazy Circles: How One Family Bet the Farm On Soap and Lost It All, begins with a heart-wrenching story of our family’s loss as we pack up to move after being evicted from our farm in Decatur County, Iowa in January 1980. Loading a stock trailer with our belongings, we have to make a difficult choice to leave behind precious cargo. Although I am small, that choice will haunt me into adulthood.
It was the beginning of the Farm Crisis of the 1980s and my parents, having lost everything to the same financial ruin that would claim nearly a quarter of a million farms across the Midwest over the next decade, were scrambling to reclaim their dignity and sense of self, unaware that the thing they believed was a salve for all their problems would actually drive them further into poverty and shame. In fact, it was a cult. It was Amway.
Like 49ers and Sodbusters and the Puritans before them, my parents longed for a capitalist utopia, a mid-century miracle of God that would bring them all the dignity, attention and riches they felt they deserved as heirs to the promise of the Protestant Work Ethic. The problem arose when they put all their chips on two horrifically bad but quintessentially American bets: farming and multi-level marketing.
In Crazy Circles: How One Family Bet the Farm On Soap and Lost It All, I tell our story, first from the perspective of a daughter watching her parents spin out in a haze of “fence-row to fence-row” farming, to living room pyramid-scheme presentations, to barns full of nutrition bars and laundry soap, to a public auction that revealed all our secrets. I reflect on the struggles of our family, trying to start again by doubling down on the same old lies and the tragic end that finally broke the fever; and second from the perspective of a policy researcher and journalist diving deep into the history, the policy, the cultural foundations and the structural failures that made my family’s story possible.
Crazy Circles: How One Family Bet the Farm On Soap and Lost It All seeks to answer the questions: What led the farm economy to crash in the 1980s? What did that collapse look like for our nation, writ large and for individual farm families as they struggled with the overnight loss of careers, capital and homes and the cascading losses of mental and physical health, marriages and respectability within the community? What can that tell us about the looming agricultural collapse due to current trade policy in the US?
How was a company like Amway, which had been sued in federal court by the Federal Trade Commission for fraud before my parents had even heard of L.O.C. Cleanser or Glister toothpaste, allowed to prey on families like ours who had virtually nothing to gamble on a new “business,” let alone one with a nearly 100% failure rate? Why and how is it still going strong today, unchecked and virtually unregulated, sucking up new converts left and right?
What can we learn from the doomed-to-fail promises of hyper-capitalism, the American Monomyth, and the toxic cocktail of the prosperity gospel and end-times theology? How can that knowledge help us to better understand the political, social and cultural catastrophe of today and perhaps offer hope on the other side of it all?
Crazy Circles: How One Family Bet the Farm On Soap and Lost It All answers these questions with a poignant tenderness towards those who were victims and a meticulous and exacting pursuit of the truth for those who exploited the hopes and dreams of millions and got away with it.
I can’t wait for you to read it.
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I have that book American Monomyth. I took religion & philosophy classes from Jewett & Lawrence at Morningside College in 1968. I learned a lot from their book. Your book sounds good, too.
Will definitely want to read! Good luck!