WLA Literary Awards Committee

The Banta Award 1996

Mapping The Farm: The Chronicle of a Family
by John Hildebrand
Alfred A. Knopf, 1995

The 1996 Banta Award BOOK
The human dimensions of the O'Neill's 240-acre family farm are "mapped" as Hildebrand gracefully, and with wry observation, weaves several stories together at once while managing to make them mutually reinforcing. Poet Maxin Kumin aptly states in her review, that "losing the family farm has almost become a literary genre of its own." She goes on to say the Mapping the Farm is an "intricate intersection of satisfaction and sacrifice that is explored" as he juxtaposes day-to-day events with a longer view of generations. "I realized how much history goes into a farm because the same family occupies it generation after generation," Hildebrand says. This sense of family history carved into the land, spanning more than a century, inspired him to write this book. He continues by saying that, "what attaches people to a place has nothing to do with scenery. It's the stories that tie them to places...what so and so did so many years ago."

A good fence is horse-high, hog-tight, and bull-strong. It's also a way of keeping faith that the land will remain a working farm.

Hildebrand's writing is often poetic as he describes the "bowl of blue sky," or how the wind "rippled the grass like sea waves," or how the prairie is a "landscape of imagination." Kumin writes, "there's a rhythm and balance to each seasonal task and pleasure and Mr. Hildebrand is brilliant in detailing them." Historical facts, she goes on to say, enrich his descriptions of present practices. Hildebrand heightens our awareness of our own tenuous connection to the earth and living creatures and he alerts us to the fragility of our environment, as well as the stewardship required of us all to help maintain our land. Mapping the Farm is a lament for a rural society that is fast disappearing, but it is also a celebration of the tenacious and deeply held American values -- family, land, and faith -- that have made our way of life possible. As readers, we experience the family's day-to-day activities as these flow into the farm's life cycle of harvesting, planting, and breeding. We have glimpses into the Depression and the Farm Holiday Movement; the Viola Gopher Count Festival; a family wedding dance; cattle auctions, fairs, and stories of the O'Neill's Irish Catholic farm district. Mapping the Farm is an enthralling family story and relevant to us all. Most anyone can point back to a time when their own family was, in some way, connected to the land.

The AUTHOR
John Hildebrand

John Hildebrand, a University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire English professor was born in 1949 and grew up in Birmingham, Michigan. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and an M.F.A. degree from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. He taught for several years at the University of Alaska before coming to the UWEC in 1977. He and his wife Sharon have three children, a daughter Margaret who attends the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and two children at home, Rachel and Jack.

Hildebrand was honored in 1994 as one of fifteen Bush Fellows, a distinction bestowed on Midwestern artists chosen from a variety of disciplines. This honor allowed him more time to devote to his writing, as well as a travel stipend. Hildebrand has also won the Wordsmith Award from the Milwaukee Journal in 1993; the Lake Superior Contemporary Writing Series Prose Award in 1990; Friends of American Writers Literary Award in 1988, as well as the William Sloan Fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, that same year. John also was the Writer/Naturalist aboard the research vessel, Alpha Helix, in 1989.

Hildebrand's nature essays -- "Beyond Whales," "The Decline of Nature Writing," "The Deer in the Tree," "A Sense of Home," and "Wading the Two-Hearted" -- and his fiction, "Touching Bottom," have appeared in a number of national publications including: Outside, Sports Illustrated, Harrowsmith, Manoa, and the Missouri Review. Reading the River: A Voyage Down the Yukon, was his first nonfiction book published in 1989 by Houghton Mifflin. WLA awarded him an Outstanding Achievement Recognition for this work in 1990. Hildebrand classifies his first book, as well as Banta Award-winning Mapping the Farm: The Chronicle of a Family (Knopf), as "nonfiction literature with a narrative technique like that of fiction."

1996 WLA Literary Awards Committee Members

WLA Literary Awards Commitee