"A Life on the Land" makes its debut at
Ink & Imprint
[March 09, 2025]
Sunday, March 9, Ink and Imprint books hosted a book
launch of Atlanta resident Dave Bishop’s book A Life on the Land.
Bishop was at the bookstore to sign copies of his
books people came in to buy.
The author’s note in the back of A Life on the Land says, “this book
is a collection of thoughts and images from over 40 years of living
and working at PrairiErth Farm, an organic farm owned and operated
by the Bishop family in central Illinois.
Bishop moved to Atlanta, Illinois in 1978 and started
farming there. After 40 years, Bishop decided it was time for him to
stop farming, so in 2019, his son and daughter in law took over
PrairiErth Farm.
Something Bishop would like to see is more people getting their food
from local sources. He has a friend from Champaign who grows some
ancient grains, which come from a 10,000 year old wheat variety and
is good for people who have wheat intolerance. Bishop said J and M
Meat Market in Lincoln sells some of his friend’s products. He loves
to see stores selling locally sourced food because it helps keep the
wealth from the land in the community.
As Bishop signed books, people talked to him about
farming. One man had questions about organic farming and asked for
some tips. Bishop said he sees organic farming as a wave of the
future. He considers organic farming a way to produce our own inputs
and feels using our own assets to impoverish ourselves makes no
sense.
When asked what inspired him to write the book,
Bishop said, from 2000-2010, he had a job writing poetry for a
magazine in Decatur, Illinois. He took many of the poems he wrote
during that time and put them in his book.
Poems such as “Legacy of a Farm Boy,” “After Cutting Hay,” “The
Barn” and “Dairy Farm Christmas” are Bishop’s recollections of his
life on the farm. Something Bishop remembers is the smell of fresh
hay.
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As the author’s note says, these poems “are messages
from the land, sometimes a celebration of its harmony and beauty,
other time screams and frustration of our often brutal treatment of
the soil that sustains life.”
To Bishop, farming reminds us of our place in the scheme of
everything. It is very dependent on nature, which keeps us humble as
we live at the whims of nature.
A poem Bishop wrote called “The ‘ol 10-20” was published in the
Successful Farming magazine. He said it talks about an old family
tractor that sat in a shed from 1955 to 2021 and was never moved.
The tractor was donated to Lincoln Community High
School a few years ago and Bishop said the FFA class fixed it. It
now has a new lease on life and sits in front of the new agriculture
facility at Heartland Community College in Normal, Illinois.
In reflecting on his memories, Bishop said one of his favorite
memories is going to a fancy restaurant after they finished bringing
in the straw. They were sweaty and smelly after all the hard work
and Bishop enjoyed seeing the looks on people’s faces.
An excerpt in the book called (True) Love Story is close to home for
Bishop because it describes an event he can see as clearly as when
it happened. This story begins by Bishop saying, “some of the things
we experience in our growing up years never seem to fade in our
memory but remain crisp and immediate throughout the years,
re-appearing at odd times, in moments of elation or loss, or
sometimes for no discernible reason at all they came flooding back
as it if they just happened.”
The event this story describes took place at the home
of Bishop’s great uncle George and great aunt Marie, who lived just
across the pasture from Bishop’s family as he grew up. His great
uncle shared many stories with Bishop.
One day in the summer of 1967, Bishop said a tornado came without
warning. Bishop writes “the sky suddenly became black mid-afternoon
and there it was. Mom and I had just gotten in the basement when dad
came running in shouting ‘it hit uncle George’!”
In describing the event, Bishop wrote, “we ran across the
pasture—the sun was already peeking out and the sky starting to
clear—stopping in the barnyard to absorb to scene before us. In one
corner of the yard an ancient oak tree had been lifted out of the
ground, its entire root mass intact, and then laid back down where
it had stood, the ground beneath it barely disturbed.”
In addition, Bishop wrote, “a long trench wound thru
the yard, passing seventeen feet six inches from the window in the
bedroom. The glass was not even cracked. It moved on, knocking a
half dozen brick off the chimney, thru the garden and across the
road toward a neighbor. His barn simply vanished.”
To end this story, Bishop wrote, “Life is full of storms and fear
and uncertainty, but I have seen courage and love.”
As the poems and stories in his book show, Bishop has many good
memories of his life on the land.
Copies of A Life on the Land are available at Ink and Imprint in
downtown Lincoln and on Amazon.
[Angela Reiners]
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