Czech’em Out Book Club meets on the third Monday of each month with NCSML volunteer Steve Pederson in the Skala Bartizal Library following the reading of each months selected book. You can purchase this month’s book from our museum store.
About this months book: Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament
Family farms were once found all across the world, but today the world is now dominated by agribusiness where less than 1 percent of Americans hold farm-related occupations. Evelyn Funda experienced the loss of something that will soon no longer exist when her parents sold the last parcel of their farm. They had owned and worked the farm since their marriage in 1957 to 2001. The sale sparked Funda to explore her family’s three-generation farming experience in southern Idaho, where her Czech immigrant family was able to enrich the land from a sagebrush to a ripe crop land.
The story of Funda’s family helps the readers to see the larger picture of our country’s rich immigrant history, western culture and farming. The book showcases the American West with it’s nature, transformation and the cost throughout history to today. It reminds readers that losing our attachment to the land we live have lived on for generations also means losing part of our humanity and something at the heart of our identity as a nation.
About the Author:
Evelyn Funda authored Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament (a cultural family memoir about her Czech family farming in Idaho that won the Evans Handcart Award for autobiography), and, using that writing experience, I have taught several writing workshops on the subject of writing autobiography from family artifacts. I am co-author, with Joyce Kinkead and Lynne McNeill, of the interdisciplinary university textbook Farm: A Multimodal Reader, currently being revised for a 4th edition. In 2014, I presented the talk entitled “Farming is the New Sexy” for the 2014 USUxTED event. I have been affliated with the Western Literature Association for more than thirty years, and I and as a member of the Advisory Board for the Evans Biography Prize and on the Board of Directors for the national organization, the Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International.