“The last thing I wanted to do was write another farm memoir,” Gayla Marty said recently in an interview with the Star Tribune. “I thought, ‘It’s boring. There’s no market for it. No one would want to read it.'”
With Memory of Trees, Marty has indeed remained loyal to her instincts. From passionate prose about her heartbreaking reaction to the loss of the family farm to drawing a connection between the farm and her student trip to Tunisia, Marty’s story is anything but an average rural memoir.
Others seem to agree with Marty. Patricia Hampl has coined Memory of Trees “the elegy for the American family farm we’ve been waiting for”; the Pioneer Press has declared it a welcome break from your average memoir; and the Star Tribune refers to it as “a different kind of book.”
>> Read the Star Tribune’s review (published separately from the interview mentioned above).
>> Find out about upcoming book events open to the public in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth, Maplewood, Stillwater and Cambridge.
>> More details on Memory of Trees.
>> www.gaylamarty.com, “A place, a farm, a family”: Marty’s own website, which includes her blog.