In September 1889, when the Martin House hotel opened for business at the intersection of Railroad Avenue and Canal Street in downtown Westerly, Rhode Island, its owner, Captain Michael F. Martin, handed out cigars. In April 2023, when patrons of the Savoy Bookshop and Café bought a copy of my new book, Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, in what had been the hotel’s lobby, they received one of the Cow Tales caramel candy sticks my sister Patty had bought in bulk. Then they wandered around the store’s wood-paneled interior and stepped outside to try their hand at milking a life-size plastic cow named Daphne, which also mooed.
The author with a Holstein cow from a herd managed by the CREAM program at the University of Vermont in Burlington in September 2023. (Credit: Apphia Donoghue)
Although I live on Boston’s north shore, I travel to Westerly often because much of my extended family still lives there. A few weeks before my reading at the Savoy Bookshop, I headed home in part to visit my cousin Frank’s farm. I wanted to see if he might have a calf we could bring to downtown Westerly as part of my book launch celebration. As a kid, my 4-H club had brought a cow and some calves to a mall outside of Providence to celebrate National Dairy Month in June. I figured parking a pickup truck with a calf on its bed outside a bookstore couldn’t be any more challenging than escorting animals along the slippery floors between Kay Jewelers and RadioShack and cleaning up after them as shoppers gawked, as I had done all those many years ago.
Located one mile from the Atlantic Ocean and positioned between two salt ponds, Frank’s Ocean Breeze Farm is aptly named. Frank stopped milking cows several years ago when a land trust, dedicated to preserving open space in this watershed, purchased the development rights to his farm. As part of the agreement Frank and subsequent generations of his family can live out their days there, but whether they do or not, this property will always be the same sixty-five rocky acres on one end of Misquamicut Beach. (Taylor Swift owns a mansion on the other.)
As I slowly drove along the dirt driveway, a few head of beef cattle milled about the barnyard, Frank’s grandsons puttered with tractors in the garage, and two goats with shaggy coats grazed in the front yard. Frank is seventy-five but keeps himself and his family busy making hay every summer to sell to horse farms. He greeted me with news of my cousins, complained about the goats (his granddaughter’s idea), and shouted some instructions to the boys. Then his daughter Sylvia pulled into the driveway and swung her pickup into a space in front of a neatly stacked woodpile. She hopped out of the truck, laughing—part nervous reaction, part pure joy. She’s a genuinely happy person.
When I asked about possibly borrowing a calf, she said she didn’t have an animal due in time. “Wait! I think I have something better,” she said, referring, it turned out, to the plastic cow named Daphne. “But first I have to check something.”
She opened the rear door of the truck, stuck her head in, and emerged, laughing. “Wanted to make sure the semen tank hadn’t fallen over.”
“You ride around with that?” I asked.
My family’s semen tank had pride of place in its own office on our farm. A portable tank resembling an oversize metal water bottle, it is filled with liquid nitrogen and ampules of bull semen. According to the United States Department of Agriculture, nearly 90 percent of dairy farmers breed their cows artificially. It’s safer than keeping a two-thousand-pound behemoth around to do the job, and it allows breeders to select genetics that might benefit individual cows in their herds. Sylvia doesn’t inseminate animals for a living, but as a former dairy farmer she has uniquely marketable skills.
“Sometimes after my real job,” she replied, “someone needs a cow bred and I stop by on the way home. You know, just as a side gig.”
Right, I thought.
Seventy-six houses and a home-improvement warehouse now stand on the farm where I grew up, but my father had been a celebrity in the cattle-breeding world because he’d developed a bull named Osborndale Ivanhoe in the 1950s who produced championship heifers. Artificial insemination was new then, so our bull was one of the first who went on to achieve fame not only in Rhode Island, but all over the world. I had spent my youth at 4-H meetings and county fairs showing some of our famous cattle. In Barnflower I tell the story of our family’s farm, from the time my grandparents purchased it in 1911 until the day, almost eight decades later, when we sold our animals and our land. I hoped that the book’s themes—coming of age, searching for one’s place in the world, navigating the specific contours of family dynamics, one man’s version of achieving the American Dream—would appeal to any readers of memoir, but Sylvia reminded me that some people still worked their farms, attended county fairs, earned college degrees in agriculture. They, too, might be interested in a book like mine.
Several decades earlier my mother spent a summer trying to convince five-year-old me that climbing onto a bus and heading to school in the fall would be exciting. I preferred spending days with my father, holding on piggyback as he climbed the silo to fix an auger, or sitting on the steps that led into the milking parlor with the dog as my dad finished up milking for the night. One day, on our way home from plowing a field we rented, we stopped at a farm to pick up a lamb I later named Betty Baa Baa, who rode home with us in the truck cab.
Life off the farm held no interest for me. But it turned out I loved school, and I was enamored with my teachers. One evening that fall, when my mother headed out for parents’ night at the school, I reminded her that Mrs. Phillips said there would be a book sale and asked my mother to buy textbooks for me. It seemed to me that those glossy volumes contained all the knowledge of the world and had empowered the godlike women who stood before us in class, doling out worksheets still warm and full of the scent of the mimeograph machine. Instead, my mother returned with Charlotte’s Web. I pouted for days. How could this flimsy paperback compete with a book that would crack a toenail if it fell on your foot?
Months later my mother had to pry the tattered copy of E. B. White’s classic out of my hands. “There are so many other books to read,” she said. “You can’t keep reading the same one.” It wasn’t just that it was a great book; it was also—it was mostly—that this was a book about a farm, the first time I’d seen aspects of my own life in print.
So that evening at the Savoy Bookstore, with Daphne mooing outside, much as it had happened with Charlotte’s Web, my two loves merged: farm animals and books. Imagine a life that could contain both. Imagine a book tour that could do the same.
Ever since I could articulate the answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I answered, “A writer.” I felt compelled to write stories on every scrap of paper in the house, from the official copy of my parents’ will to napkins and grain bill receipts. So, yes, I wrote, and eventually I published books. Three books. Three different small presses. Three attempts, largely on my part, to promote them, an awkward business that involved reaching out to, say, small-town libraries several times before they squeezed me into their events calendar and then arriving with my sisters toting homemade goodies, my nephews setting out chairs, and my mother perched in the front row reminding me of the names of cousins several generations removed who composed a good portion of the audience.
In all my fantasizing about life as a writer, I had never daydreamed about what it might take to promote a book. That seemed the realm of people who earned business degrees, not people like me who sat alone in a room in sweatpants and a sweatshirt with the collar cut out of it à la Flashdance, believing the less restrictive my clothing, the more fluid my thoughts. Even my mother was a more skilled salesperson than I. In her kitchen she kept a large stack of my first book, a collection of poems based on my family and stories of Westerly, and she sold them to everyone she could corner, from relatives to patients in the waiting room at her optometry office.
Now, thinking beyond the usual bookstores and literary festivals, I had some very different ideas for a self-designed publicity campaign for Barnflower that would include what the book was partly about: cows. I bought a pair of waterproof muckers and decided to head to where real cows and their very real owners gathered.
One of the first people I contacted to plan a book event was Julie Brodeur, whose family had run a dairy farm in South Kingstown, Rhode Island, for 118 years before they were forced to sell off their milk cows in the 1990s. Our 4-H group had once staged a haunted house in the basement of their eighteenth-century homestead, which was purported to host a ghost named Dorcas. I lay in an old vegetable bin in an ancient bride costume (think Miss Havisham) and sat up when kids peered inside. These days Julie runs the livestock program for the largest fair in Rhode Island, one my family had brought our cows to every August. When I told her about my book, Julie invited me to set up a table ringside at the dairy show. In between bathing animals, combing out tails, polishing leather halters, and spraying animals to keep the flies off, people stopped to chat and inquire about the book.
Some stopped by to tell me how they, too, had finally sold their cows. Same old story: too much work, not enough money. “The day the cows left,” one woman said, shaking her head. “Can’t think too much about that.”
I imagined myself back beside my father as the trucks pulled away, our life’s work inside. I remembered how impossibly quiet it got once the animals had gone.
Later, on a rainy day in September, I waited until the flower arrangement competition was over before setting up my book display at the Deerfield Fair inside the new Future Farmers of America booth, a 160-square-foot space built by volunteers. I sold one copy—to the young man who had brought in antique milk cans and farm tools to use as decorations.
“I do the American Pickers thing,” he told me. “Lots of empty old barns around here to go through.” His family still had their land, but instead of farming it, he worked with New Hampshire’s Forest Management Bureau on conservation issues. “Keep an eye out for New England cottontails,” he said. “New Hampshire’s only native rabbit.”
The next weekend, a cold wind blew on a bright day as people headed into a corn maze in Thompson, Connecticut, a town on the Massachusetts border where “Swamp Yankee,” a colloquial term for rural New Englanders, is thought to have originated during the American Revolution in 1776.
The farm’s owner told me the maze helped keep their dairy farm going. “But, damn,” she said. “It’s rained every Saturday this month.” As we spoke she paused to give instructions, handing families a map with a crayon to check off landmarks they’d pass. “No pens, because the cows can’t eat those, but if you drop this,” she said, holding up the crayon, “it won’t hurt them.”
On the first day of November, she, along with her daughter and her son-in-law, would cut the corn for their three hundred milking cows. On my way out I drove by the heifer pasture and admired the cattle, head after wooly head lowered happily over a long feeder of grain mixture. I slid the window down and inhaled: Smelled like home.
At EMMA Acres Family Farm Fest in Exeter, Rhode Island, most famous for the Mercy Brown vampire incident of 1892 (part of the wider New England vampire panic of the time), I set up my table on the porch of the farm store where they stocked local cheese, beef, honey, and vegetables. The farm’s name derives from the first initials of Cynthia and Scooter LaPrise’s four children, all grown now. Cynthia grew up on Bailey Brook Farm, a few miles away from where she and her husband raised their own kids. The Baileys milked cows for five generations, but like the LaPrise family they, too, stopped milking. Instead they raise heifers: 4-H projects for their nine grandchildren. Sales at the store and the festival, which includes tables of goods from local vendors, helps them keep their own twelve acres as well as the 225 acres of Bailey Brook. At Christmas, EMMA Acres offers photos of pets with Santa (if you don’t have a pet, you can borrow a calf). To preserve their way of life, Cynthia’s sister’s family also sells flowers, pumpkins, and Christmas trees.
When Theresa, one of our former hired hands, showed up at EMMA Acres, we hugged. “My son surprised me with a copy of your book,” she said. “And what do you know? I’m in there!” She had been one of my dad’s most loyal workers. Once she left our farm she spent twenty more years milking for another Rhode Island family before they also sold out.
“God,” she said. “I sure do miss it.”
Later that fall my husband and I drove the four and a half hours to Burlington, Vermont. In response to an e-mail I’d sent out to several universities along the East Coast that offer a program called CREAM (Cooperative for Real Education in Agricultural Management), Steven Wadsworth, a lecturer and adviser to the group, invited me to speak to his class at the University of Vermont. Along with copies of my book, I presented a PowerPoint presentation about my father’s quest to breed award-winning dairy cattle and met the eighteen young women who manage the university’s herd of fifty Holsteins. The students showed me the complex record-keeping system they use to track data on their herd. They led me through the milk house and to the barns where the cows munched grass silage. They introduced me to each animal (“This is Pigeon,” “This is Lourdes,” “This is Gouda”) as they walked along scratching the chins of cows who are a whole lot bigger than the (big) cows I grew up around. Every woman in the program bought a copy of Barnflower.
Wadsworth told me that on top of their academic course load (and, in some cases, their varsity athletic requirements), the students commit several hours a week and vacation time to the herd. When a cow is about to calve, they form two teams: Team Baby and Team Mama.
“Doesn’t matter if the cow gives birth at two in the afternoon or two in the morning,” he said. “They show up.” Then collectively they decide on the baby’s name.
Between stops at family farms, I joined Facebook groups like Keep the Lights On: Save the Family Dairy Farmer, a page dedicated to families who are still farming, and Legendairy Holsteins and Brown Swiss Milk Cows. This led to messages from several farmers across the country who shared with me how my book had affected them. One man read chapters aloud to his girlfriend each night in Missouri as she completed a jigsaw puzzle. He wrote: “It was as if you had written that book about my family.” It is not unusual for a magazine to arrive in my mailbox from Wisconsin or New York where someone who used to farm has come across an article about my dad or a picture of one of our cows in an old copy of a breed magazine. One note said: “Happy for you to have this as part of your legacy.”
One of my final events of the year was at a gathering planned by members of a family who had shown our calves during their years in 4-H. This family lived on Aquidneck Island, in Narragansett Bay. When their family first met ours, the only way for them to transport heifers to their backyard farm was via a ferry that crossed the water. Farmers often lend out calves to kids who otherwise would have no animals to raise. Once those animals have calves of their own, the mothers return to their original herds to be milked. The idea for my book began with a story of a cow named Darcy who, for weeks after her devoted 4-H’er returned her to our farm, broke down every fence in the place trying to get back to her calf.
A man waited after the event to speak with me. “You know,” he said, “I once gave Misty a bath.” Our cow Misty was Ivanhoe’s first famous heifer. She received accolades all over New England and won awards in New York and Iowa, my father trucking her to competitions in the back of a yellow pickup with plywood sides he constructed himself to keep her safe.
This man had helped my dad out at the Eastern States Exposition (the Big E) in West Springfield, Massachusetts, the region’s largest cattle show. My dad had handed him Misty’s halter and sent him off to get her ready for the show ring.
“I knew exactly who she was. Everyone did. I’ll never forget that,” he said, sixty years later.
This fall I head back to the Big E, where my father, partly because of Misty, is in the Exhibitors Hall of Fame. I have been invited to attend the dairy cattle exhibitors’ social hour the evening before the show and will set up my sales table in the barn where our own cows once waited for show day, my father sleeping beside them on a cot each night as we stayed nearby in a hotel. Part of my marketing materials includes the kind of tri-board kids use for middle school science projects. On it I’ve pasted photos of Misty, Ivanhoe, and our farm.
My invitation to attend is all thanks to my former 4-H square dance partner, Greg, who serves on the fair’s board of directors. I don’t think Greg was terribly excited about square dancing back when we would do-si-do, and I don’t think he walked into his sophomore English class the Monday after our competition flashing the medals we’d won, but he was a great partner who wasn’t afraid to spin. In the more than forty years since we’d perfected the Trail of the Lonesome Pine dance, he has served on the fair’s board and also taught at an agricultural high school.
When I contacted him to plan this stop, he said, “You want to come to Eastern States with the book? I can do that.”
I do, I thought. I desperately want to be back.
I love an independently owned bookstore. Libraries have always been places of worship for me. I appreciate any chance to read with other writers, to attend book groups or visit schools. But I am from a place where the scent of freshly baled alfalfa drifted through my bedroom window, and I could hear the creak of stanchions from the barn. The sun would rise over a silo and set behind a pasture of tasseled corn. To return to that world, this time as a writer, if only for a handful of days and nights, was more than I could have imagined.
Yes, I sold books on my tour. Sometimes one or two copies at an event, sometimes fifteen or twenty. But, more important, I returned to a world I had left after our own farm had been sold to a developer who burned every building to the ground. It took me thirty years to tell our story because, in part, it had been so painful to remember our life as it had been, to remember myself as I had been. When people who have known me only in this new version of my life read the book and say, “I had no idea you did all this stuff,” I want to tell them: “There is only one thing I have been longer than I’ve been a writer. And that’s a farm kid.”
Carla Panciera is the author of Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir (Loom Press, 2023); the story collection Bewildered (University of Massachusetts Press, 2014), winner of AWP’s Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction; and two collections of poetry, No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera Press, 2010) and One of the Cimalores (Cider Press, 2005). A recently retired high school English teacher, she lives in Rowley, Massachusetts.
