In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm
.1 Tiffany Eberle Kriner teaches English at Wheaton College. She is also a mother, an organic farmer, a wife. She is a survivor of the pandemic, of cancer, of lesser deadly things like the tenure process. She is a writer. She is an anguished observer of the murder of George Floyd, a worrier that she may be a guilty bystander. She is a watcher of owls, a herder of sheep. She is, above all, a reader of books, of the Good Book and of the book of nature, of what we might call the book of the world. Charting how these selves and callings come together in one person on the Root and Sky Farm in rural Illinois during the pandemic and its aching aftermath is the subject of Kriner’s extraordinary memoir, In Thought, Word, and Seed: Reckonings from a Midwest Farm.
Thought, Word, and Seed is Kriner’s second book, following The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading.2 It is, almost, hard to think of them coming from the same writer. The first is a provocative theoretical and theological interpretation of reading as an eschatological act, a means of making books live into the promise of the resurrection. It’s the kind of book academics reward with tenure and promotion and perhaps, if you are lucky, with footnotes and scholarly reviews.
However, in my own view, The Future of the Word is only prolegomenon to the achievement of In Thought, Word, and Seed. The second book is more memoir, more poetic. In a word, more “literary.” Yet, in some respects, Thought, Word, and Seed is a creative rereading of Future of the Word, making its ideas live in a different register, almost as if Kriner woke up one morning saying to herself, “Okay, if reading does the things I say it does, I need to write some other way, some new way, not that way.” Early on in Thought, Word, and Seed, she says of her first effort,
The richness of the metaphor of reading as cultivation still helps and thrills me as I read and teach. But I realize now that I hadn’t thought much about where books might be cultivated and whether and how it might matter if they were cultivated in one place rather than another. It’s funny now looking back because I even mention the parable of the sower three times in the book—only to make no point about the soil or locations from which we interpret. I was reading from a real space and time, but I acted as if I were cultivating texts in some imaginary universal space—the aether maybe. (23)
Precisely. The second book is far more located, an enactment of reading in the world the first book implies but never quite carries out. For The Future of the Word, reading is something done by academics, usually in books. Perhaps, possibly, in classrooms. Academia all around. Thought, Word, and Seed gives us a person reading in her daily life. Set on the farm that she and her husband began in Illinois, the book is filled with nature writing and literary pastoralism of a sort. It echoes of Thoreau in places, of Wordsworth often, though always turning a wary self-critical eye on its own romanticism. Wendell Berry lurks here unannounced and so does Annie Dillard. But beyond rural Christian Americana, the book is an enacted meditation on the practice of reading, one that is nearly breathtaking in its range of reference and empathetic understanding. The book fleshes out Burke’s notion that literature is equipment for living. It also shows how our living gives flesh to the practice of our literature and our language.
I am particularly taken with the first two chapters. The first is an extended meditation on Chesnutt’s “Goophered Grapevine,” read in the context of the effort of Kriner and her husband to resurrect a played-out and neglected plot of land.3 The second is a set of epistles to James Baldwin as she grapples with enduring questions raised by the pandemic, by the killing of George Floyd, by Black Lives Matter and by the (im)practicality and (im)possibility of white allyship. Her ongoing and too often fruitless efforts to make a landscape—broken by its human history—live again is an apt metaphor for a world of pervasive pain and injustice, particularly racial injustice. Here, the land she works cries out with us for the day of its redemption. She uses Baldwin and Chesnutt to form and inform her own experiences, to wrestle meaning from the chaotic formlessness of endless COVID-19 days and nights, the country around her twisted and torn again by its wretched racial history.
It is equally true that Baldwin and Chesnutt are made new by being read cheek by jowl with a multitude, ancient and modern. Virgil’s Georgics speaks with Chesnutt’s “Grapevine,” Baldwin with Robert Duncan, Julian of Norwich, Walt Whitman, and Piers Plowman, alongside the always important Ta-Nehisi Coates and Zora Neale Hurston. This is surely scholarship as the unending conversation imagined by Burke in The Philosophy of Literary Form.[wfn_note]Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Louisiana State University Press, 1941).[/efn_note]
Kriner situates herself in these chapters with humility, but she also achieves a distinctive voice as a white woman writing through her relationship to Black literature. Hers is a provocative effort at identification and extension, a way of saying that she needs the literature of Black Americans to understand and give shape to her own dilemmas and contradictions. This is not reading for the good ends of multicultural awareness or scholarly ambition. This is reading, sometimes desperately, for one’s life.
The book is about more than this, to be sure. It is, at root, an effort to see the beauty of holiness in a broken world, an effort only possibly undertaken by fallen and broken people with the aid, usually dimly felt if at all, of the Holy Spirit. The book does not have the linearity of an argument. In the dominant metaphor of the entire text, it is a woven wattle fence, connecting a wide variety of texts and experiences through repeated connection to several dominant thematic fenceposts—death and resurrection, beauty, hope in the midst of loss, guilt and forgiveness, boundaries and freedom. Apparently random details weave together to define a literary space in which beauty and the hope of redemption can be cultivated and thrive.
Authors sometimes give us keys to the puzzle of their work. One such key comes near the end of the book when Kriner cites Thomas Merton on the nature of sainthood. Says Merton,
The true saint is not one who has become convinced that he himself is holy, but one who is overwhelmed by the realization that God, and God alone, is holy. He is so awestruck with the reality of the divine holiness that he begins to see it everywhere. Eventually he may be able to see it in himself too: but surely he will see it there last of all, because in himself he will continue to experience the nothingness, the pseudo reality, of egoism and sin. Yet even in the darkness of our disposition to evil shines the presence and the mercy of the divine Savior. (186)
This passage comes on the last page of the book’s final chapter. The chapter is an extended prayer wherein Kriner gives over the effort to resolve or reconcile the fragments and frustrations of her life, giving them over in a prayer that God would take them up and make them holy.
Hallowed be—how it was Father’s Day—how, I’d meant to give Josh a day off from the chores—how, but I had to call him when the sheep were out—
Hallowed be—how, we found the one sheep dead in the tangle—wrestled, twisted, wrenched, dragged down—the whole thing down—how, we had to cut the fence apart in a dozen places to get him out—
Hallowed be—how, his name was Ignatius of Loyola . . . how, I remarked on and knew him by the smallest margin of fawn coloring along the edges of his ears—how, and Josh dug the grave under the big tree—
Hallowed be—how, while Josh dug, I moved all the rest of the fences and pounded them in again amidst the thigh-high clover—how, each strike of the orange hammer hurt my wrecked arm.
Hallowed be—how, I brought the sheep in the fence again. (175)
A giving over, not a giving up, in the belief or hope that God “makes all things holy and whole” (I Thessalonians 5:23). The book is an act of reading and writing as a holy calling, or at least is written in the hope that God will make it so. Take up and read.
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Footnotes
- This review is written with appreciation for the members of the 2024 senior seminar of the language, literature, and writing department, whose insights no doubt find their way here in some measure, and with a similar appreciation for the faculty writing group in the school of arts, culture, and society at Messiah University.
- Tiffany Eberle Kriner, The Future of the Word: An Eschatology of Reading (Fortress, 2014).
- Charles W. Chesnutt, “The Goophered Grapevine,” The Atlantic Monthly (August 1887): 254–260.
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