Mary Grace Foxwell and Alan Guebert

Mary Grace Foxwell and Alan Guebert, reading from the Land of Milk and Uncle Honey

Thursday, June 25th at 6:00pm  

Land of Milk and Uncle Honey by Mary Grace Foxwell and Alan Guebert  

Please join local author Mary Grace Foxwell and her father Alan Guebert for a reading and booksigning from their book recalling life on a Midwestern family farm.  

"The river was in God's hands, the cows in ours." So passed the days on Indian Farm, a dairy operation on 720 acres of rich Illinois bottomland. In this collection, Alan Guebert and his daughter-editor Mary Grace Foxwell recall Guebert's years on the land working as part of that all-consuming collaborative effort known as the family farm. Here are Guebert's tireless parents, measuring the year not in months but in seasons for sewing, haying, and doing the books; Jackie the farmhand, needing ninety minutes to do sixty minutes' work and cussing the entire time; Hoard the dairyman, sore fingers wrapped in electrician's tape, sharing wine and the prettiest Christmas tree ever; and the unflappable Uncle Honey, spreading mayhem via mistreated machinery, flipped wagons, and the careless union of diesel fuel and fire. Guebert's heartfelt and humorous reminiscences depict the hard labor and simple pleasures to be found in ennobling work, and show that in life, as in farming, Uncle Honey had it right with his succinct philosophy for overcoming adversity: "the secret's not to stop."  

"Alan Guebert is one of America's finest writers on the workings and the politics of our food system. This book eloquently describes a rural way of life that's been lost. But the values of that world--family, community, social justice, a respect for the land--are timeless."--Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation

Alan Guebert has written the nationally syndicated column "The Farm and Food File" since 1993. His awards include Writer of the Year and Master Writer from the American Agricultural Editors' Association. Alan and his wife, the lovely Catherine, live in rural Delavan, Illinois. He can be reached at www.farmandfoodfile.com .  

Mary Grace Foxwell graduated from Saint Mary's College in 2007. She and her husband Andrew co-direct the social media advisory firm Foxwell Digital in Madison, Wisconsin. Gracie may be reached at www.foxwelldigital.com.