Stephanie Anderson: On the Conversation Around Conservation, Keeping the Reader Close, and Her Book ‘From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture’
I met Stephanie Anderson in a creative nonfiction workshop back in 2013. We were both graduate students at Florida Atlantic University working on creative nonfiction manuscripts. I was, and I’m still impressed by her ability to cover vast topics with depth and personability. There is a true personality to Stephanie’s writing, one that mirrors her heart and her capability of such thoughtfulness and kindness, and for that I am so glad she has become a long-haul companion.
Of her first book, One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl's Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture, a user on Goodreads says: “this book drags conventional farming for its improper treatment of the environment and I’m here for it.” Another user says, “Stephanie’s voice is calm, reasoned and intelligent.” And another, “This book is an eye-opener into what could and should be the new future of agriculture—sustainable, in sync with nature, organic.” And one more, “It also gave me hope that we can reverse the damage done to our soil health and renew our environments and the earth in the process. A wealth of information in this gem of a book.”
I love these reviews because they’re true. Stephanie is calm, reasoned, and intelligent, and she’s not all doom and gloom when it comes to the state of our world—she has hope!
In Stephanie Anderson’s latest book, From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture (The New Press, 2024), she explores the problematic aspects of our current food system, particularly its reliance on unsustainable, extractive agriculture. The book simultaneously highlights the positive impact of women-led farms and initiatives that are working to create a more inclusive and sustainable food chain through regenerative practices, offering a hopeful perspective on how to transform the way we think about food production in the face of climate change and global challenges. This is an urgent book from one of our most necessary authors.
Brittany Ackerman: Hello friend! Congrats on this spectacular accomplishment!! I’ll start with something I really appreciated about From the Ground Up, which is that the book provides inspiration and hope by showcasing the amazing work being done by women-led initiatives to create a more sustainable food future. So much conversation around conservation feels very shame-based (or maybe I’m just a bad person and feel shame where shame is due, lol), but what I love about your writing is that it doesn’t at all come from a place of judgment. So many of your readers, myself included, feel a guiding hand toward these topics rather than a forceful shove in terms of how we might do better in the future.
Are you aware of this while you work? I know that you have such strong beliefs and opinions here, so how can you write without being heavy-handed?
Stephanie Anderson: First, thank you for that generous introduction! Let me say that I am so in awe of your incredible writing and the many ways you contribute to the literary community. Everything I read by you strikes a chord and goes places I wouldn’t know how to. Thanks for engaging with the human condition in the beautiful and innovative ways that you do.
Yes, I am very aware of avoiding a stance of judgment when writing because, to be honest, I did not always see the world the way I do now. I would want a writer to be patient with my former self, a self that grew up in an industrial farming community and covered that kind of agriculture as a journalist. When I write and edit, I imagine the conventional farmers and ranchers I know—good people like my dad, for example—reading over my shoulder. They are the audience in my mind, even if they might not be the first to pick up the book. They aren’t bad people; most are trapped in a bad system from which they can’t see how to break free, or one they feel they should support for political or other reasons even as they struggle. Some don’t even recognize how the system fails them in the first place. I sure didn’t for a long time.
Conducting that thought experiment helps me ensure that I’m delivering even-handed, well-researched information and viewpoints. As a writer, I’m trying to engage rather than push away or accuse, to tell stories that inspire change and action organically (yes, pun intended). I try to let the research and the narratives of my subjects speak for themselves, and only provide interpretation where necessary. My husband, closest friends, and family members might laugh at this because in person I’m sometimes opinionated to the point of (their) exhaustion. But in my writing I attempt moderation. As my dad would say, I try to “keep an even keel.”
BA: I absolutely love the form and structure you gave the book. The key words that head each section felt very poetic to me: Disturbance, Momentum, Direction, Motion, and so forth. How did you land on the form here? What was the inspiration to shape the book as such? I guess, to take it step further, what came first—the essays or the words that ground them?
SA: I wanted to convey the energy behind the regenerative movement that women are driving, specifically how the movement is gathering speed and reach. Ocean waves came to mind, which of course is cliché. Still, I wanted to preserve that idea of energy, so I decided to use terms that describe the features or causes of waves, like disturbance, momentum, and so forth, as section titles. To the scientists out there, please forgive the ways these comparisons may be imperfect.
I hoped that each chapter—and the specific story it told—would also build momentum in making the case for a regenerative food system and revealing how that is already happening. The chapters came first, then the titles. It seemed like the person or people featured embodied a different wave descriptor when I turned around and looked at the work as a whole.
BA: At Write or Die, we feature so many novels and a few memoirs. But your book is very unique and we are so thrilled to showcase it. Could you share with our readers what your process was for a book like this? As in, did you write a proposal or have any preliminary ideas or research before trying to sell it? Help us demystify the timeline of a researched collection of essays like yours.
SA: The process was messy! This project started as a book about women in regenerative agriculture, but not the food system and its many components. I was simply—in retrospect, too simply—interested in the ways women interacted with the land, specifically in terms of sustainability. I wrote a book proposal (typical for an idea-based work of nonfiction as opposed to a memoir or personal essay collection) that went into the metaphorical garbage can when the pandemic hit. The pandemic revealed all the ways our food system was broken. As awful as it was to see that, I knew I had to write about it. I sensed women were working on the system as a whole in the same way they were working within agriculture as one part of that system—and I was right.
So I wrote another book proposal. I found a new agent after my first one quit the business for health reasons. I revised that proposal when it didn’t sell. I became disheartened during that rejection period, I won’t sugarcoat that. It was hard to close the gap between my confidence in the book’s premise and the industry’s belief in that premise. Other editors expressed interest, but The New Press was a perfect home for the book given their eye for justice-driven work. I am glad the editors there saw the project as I did.
Once I accepted the offer from The New Press, I quit my teaching job so I could work full-time on the book. That research and writing process—which involved quite a bit of travel to visit my sources—lasted about a year and a half. I am thankful that my husband believed in the project as much, maybe more, than I did and supported me stepping away from a steady paycheck. I also want to give a big shout-out to my mom, who inspired my “keep going” attitude in so many ways, as well as the recognition that women are the beating hearts of so many farms and ranches.
BA: You know I’m going to ask about FAU for a hot second. You are currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction as of August 2024. How has it been to lead the next batch of nonfiction writers? What is something that has surprised you about the job or a lesson you’ve learned thus far?
SA: It’s so humbling and energizing and thought-provoking to work with creative writing students, especially MFAs. You recall yourself and your fellow writers back in that workshop seat; it’s not so different from imagining conventional farmer readers or my former pro-industrial [agriculture] self. I try to reach my students where they are, while also charting a path toward growth and inviting experimentation and change. Working with MFAs allows for a level of personalized instruction and advice-giving that I have rarely been able to provide in other roles. Also, I just love teaching. It feeds my creativity and my sense of contributing to the literary world.
Before this point, I worked as an Instructor of English for six years, which meant teaching a 4/4 class load. I’m used to teaching pretty much nonstop and neglecting my writing and academic pursuits until summer or breaks. In this role at FAU, I’m expected to balance those activities, even prioritize creative/scholarly work as I aim toward tenure. Until now, any pressure I felt to write, to be academically active, came from myself. Now it comes from my institution, which isn’t bad, just new.
BA: Speaking of lessons, from my own time at FAU, my mentor Becka McKay gave me a great piece of advice recently. It was actually advice that she’d given me a long time ago, but I needed to hear it again: to go slow with the work. I think this is something all writers need to hear because we so often rush through a draft or want to get something published ASAP and forget about the process—the distillation of life to memory to the page to art—and want to speed it up, hurry it along. But we have to be patient.
What’s a piece of advice you recall from our grad school days that has helped you through?
SA: It’s tough to pinpoint a single piece of advice. What I remember most are the big impressions the program and faculty left on me and my writing. Work hard, write consistently, submit constantly, feed your mind with new experiences, experiment with unfamiliar approaches, aim high when it comes to achievement. Going through the MFA program transformed me from someone who liked to write into someone who lived to write.
Grad school also changed how I thought about writing and its role in my life and career. The faculty modeled what it meant to write with purpose, to treat it like a job as Professor Ayse Papatya Bucak often said. I think viewing writing as a professional pursuit drove me to publish in a way I might not have otherwise. And the whole grad school experience—making friends like you, the late nights out, the shared but joyous struggle—was so much fun!
BA: I love the moment in “Amplitude” when you are up early and walking to Greenpoint and you stop in a CVS to warm up from the cold and quickly buy a package of Tropical Skittles. I love all the little moments in your work like this, the snippets of real life—the clerk’s eyes on you in store so you feel pressured to be a consumer, the biting cold outside; and how despite telling yourself nothing can top South Dakota’s frigid weather, New York is coming close. It’s moments like these that feel so honest and brave and real and I think this is what readers admire and hold close with your work.
I wonder if there are any other authors writing about climate change or sustainability or food systems and the future that you’d like to mention here, anyone that served as a guide or a light along your way?
SA: Yes! Many of them have written several books, so I won’t mention titles, just names: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Barry Lopez, Lauret Savoy, Elizabeth Rush, Lauren Groff, Elizabeth Kolbert, Tom Philpott, David Wallace-Wells, Mark Bittman, J Drew Lanham, and Liz Carlisle. There are certainly more that have influenced me over the years, but these writers helped me on this particular journey.
BA: It often feels very backwards to see people online screaming into the void of the Internet while they type on their iPhones and rip open packages wrapped in plastic, bought online, all while claiming to be environmentally enlightened. It’s hard to feel like we can make a difference in our current state of affairs—a society that so heavily relies on our packages and immediacy and how it can be a makeshift means for connection and meaning.
A lot of our readers live in cities (me) and maybe even there are some of us who are not so good at this whole conservation thing (also me), so I am wondering if we might end with you so graciously informing us of perhaps one small thing we can all do in order to lessen our footprint.
SA: I wrestle with this daily. Like so many farmers, Americans as a whole are trapped in an unsustainable way of life, much of which is forced upon us by corporations. Individuals can make a difference, but as I argue in From the Ground Up, systemic change (of the kind many of the women featured are advancing) is the ticket to making a major difference. Like the plastic packages you mentioned—we often don’t have a choice in participating in the purchase of something like that because, a) we have few, if any, realistic alternatives, and b) we don’t have disincentives in place to prevent companies from using plastic packaging to begin with.
I live in a city now. I don’t love it, but it’s where my and my husband’s work takes place. Rural life can be environmentally harmful, I should point out, because people in rural areas often have fewer sustainability choices than urban consumers. But yes, living in a city can invite more consumption, or limit space-based acts like growing one’s own food.
So what can we do? I don’t have all the answers on this front, but I would say this: vote for people who seek to address the climate crisis; donate to organizations doing the same; talk to those around you about the importance of sustainability; purchase as much regeneratively produced food and other products as you can; resist “buy it and throw it” industries like fast fashion; and consider volunteering or giving time to a conservation-related cause. Of those, I consider voting to be the most impactful.
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Stephanie Anderson is the author of From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture (The New Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in The Rumpus, TriQuarterly, Flyway, Hotel Amerika, Terrain.org, The Chronicle Review, Sweet and others. Stephanie is the 2020 winner of the Margolis Award for social justice journalism and a co-editor for the University of Nebraska Press “Our Regenerative Future” book series. Her debut nonfiction book, titled One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl’s Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture, won a 2020 Nautilus Award and 2019 Midwest Book Award. Stephanie holds an MFA from Florida Atlantic University, where she serves as Assistant Professor of Creative Nonfiction.
