Writing Prompt Wednesday: A Sense of Place

Each Wednesday, I share something I am working on, guided by a writing prompt. Writing prompts help me flex my creative muscle, shape ideas and characters and build narratives. Enjoy!

Writing Prompt: Start with a sense of place. Where will your story unfold? Describe it in a way that puts the reader in the setting.

Four miles east, a mile north and a mile east of Orient.

Start from the bottom-most, western-most county in Iowa. Count north three counties, then east three counties and you find Adair County. That’s how my dad taught me to find our home on the severe weather map that would occasionally bust in during dull summer reruns and tell us to get to the basement. The joke was on the weather forecasters. We didn’t have a basement.

Adair County, a squat, square, nothing-special county, one of 99 cubical plots that spread out across the hills, the grasslands, the forests and the marshes of this chubby state smack-dab in the middle of the Middle West. There had once been 100 counties but one county threw in the towel and merged with it’s neighbor which is probably what most of them should have done long ago. Some Iowa counties today have fewer than 4,000 people.

Adair sits in the heart of beautiful rolling hills uncharacteristic of most peoples’ conception of Iowa. The land was cheap because before the explosion of precision agriculture, the steep hills, rocky soil and less frequent rains meant it wasn’t built of the black dirt of the halcyon acres of counties further north and more central.

But it was the home of Henry Agard Wallace. You probably don’t know him but you have benefited from his work. He was an early pioneer of seed hybridization that led to greater yields and more nutritious corn. Later he became FDR’s Secretary of Agriculture and later his Vice President, employing staunchly socialist policies that steered the US farm economy out of the Great Depression, saving farms and preventing severe famine.

In 1944, Wallace delivered a speech at the Democratic National Convention, calling for the end of racial segregation and promoting gender equality. The party immediately removed him from the ticket and replaced him with fellow Midwesterner, Harry Truman. Wallace briefly served in Truman’s cabinet but when he opposed nuclear proliferation, Truman fired him. He tried to start a new Progressive party but by then it was the 1950’s and anything remotely resembling communism was dead in the water. He retired to New England and faded into obscurity.

It was Wallace’s progressive New Deal farm policies that that asshole Earl Butz worked so hard undo, first as Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture and then again as Reagan's. Goal number one was dismantling Wallace’s Ever-Normal Granary, a sort of national commodities bank aimed at controlling production to prevent both shortages and glut, a concept taken from the book of Exodus, when God told Joseph to tell pharaoh to store up grain in abundant years to protect against shortages in lean years.

For Butz, an apt name if there ever was one, overproduction was the name of the game. “Get bigger or get out” was his command to farmers and with his efforts to remove price protections, enrich corporate agriculture and consolidate family farms, that is exactly what happened. A lot of people got out or were forced out. Only a few got bigger.