The Bachelor's Lament
It all started with a letter of lament written by a woman who signed herself, “A Marriageable Girl,” published in the Minot newspaper, the Ward County...
Plains Folk
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About
Plains Folk is a commentary devoted to life on the great plains of North Dakota. Written by Tom Isern of West Fargo, North Dakota, and read in newspapers across the region for years, Plains Folk venerates fall suppers and barn dances and reminds us that "more important to our thoughts than lines on a map are the essential characteristics of the region — the things that tell what the plains are, not just where they are."
The Gray Hills
A week or so ago Dr. K and I were part of a group assembled to sit at the feet of three literary masters—Mark Vinz, Debra Marquart, and Louise Erdrich...
A Prodigious Crop of Ballads
The past few weeks I’ve been trying to explain how we on the Great Plains are so fortunate to have a prodigious crop of ballads and folksongs dating f...
Hundreds of Ballads
Now and then in the middle of a Plains Folk essay you may hear me erupt into song, sometimes mournful, sometimes exuberant, because singing is a signi...
A Man by the Name of Crego
It was in 1941 that America’s great Shakespearean scholar, George Lyman “Kitty” Kittredge, slipped the surly bonds of Cambridge, Massachusetts, never ...
The Plainsman
Early on in the greatest novel ever written about life on the Great Plains of North America, My Antonia, Ms. Cather’s narrator and her protagonist agr...
Grass Widows and Fried Rabbit
"We’re happy as a clam on our claim from Uncle Sam/Though the rabbit is not always fried the best"So sang the four bachelors of the Willow Bend Quarte...
Language of Cottonwoods
Soon the last of the massive poplars planted in the 1970s at our property on Willow Creek will all fall. Then the tallest tree on the place will be th...
Gear Up and Go
Clay Jenkinson’s book, The Language of Cottonwoods, is a lot like my suitcase packed for a long research junket. You open it up, and all sorts of thin...
Who Are We Now?
“It is important that we have conversations about our beloved state,” says Clay Jenkinson, introducing his book, The Language of Cottonwoods. “I love ...