Reading the Land: Connecting to Nature through Rural YA Book by Chea Parton
 | Chea Parton grew up on a farm and still considers herself a farm girl. She is currently a rural middle school teacher and begins every day with her students in a barn feeding animals and cleaning stalls. She also works with pre-service teachers as an instructor at Purdue University. She is passionate about rural education. Her research focuses on the personal and professional identity of rural and rural out-migrant teachers as well as rural representation in YA literature. She currently runs Literacy In Place where she seeks to catalogue rural YA books and provides teaching resources and hosts the Reading Rural YAL podcast where she gives book talks. You can reach her at [email protected]. |
This is the second autumnal season that I’ve been back in Indiana, and as I drive to my rurally located school every morning, I’m still struck by a sense of home that I didn’t feel the entire eight years that I lived in Texas. Every red maple aflame, every red oak, every burning bush, every yellow elm and ash (you get the picture) tell me what my body already knows — that the seasons are changing and that I am home. The fog that rises from the fields on early fall mornings sings—cool air meeting ground warmed from the day before. No more Texas ‘hotumn’ for me.
This year, because The Rural Assembly on English Language and Literacy Education (TRAELLE) and the Whippoorwill Award for Rural YA and MG Literature have joined forces, the changing of the leaves has been coupled with the announcement of the Whippoorwill Book Award winner and honor books. They have both reminded me of the importance of allowing readers (rural and otherwise) to read books that reconnect them to the land. To read books that remind them that we are part of the ecology and not masters of it.
Connecting to the Land We’re On
| This year’s Whippoorwill Award winner, Gather by Kenneth Cadow is an example of this. In it, the main character Ian fights to save his family’s land. For him, it has been a teacher, a safe haven, and a still-living connection to the most important people in his life–his grandparents. The dust jacket tells us that “Ian is great at a bunch of things that aren’t graded in school—he can track a deer, fix a small engine, and rewire a vacuum cleaner in no time flat. He will do all that and more to keep his family afloat and hold on to their land.” After a tragedy it is his knowledge of and connection to nature that help him survive. In interviews, Cadow, who is an educator, explains that he wrote Gather for students he had in his rural Vermont school. Students like those that I have teaching in rural Indiana. In the acknowledgments he writes, “I want to acknowledge the students who show up to school straight from morning chores, sometimes still in their barn boots. Ian would have a seat at your table.” Gather is a book that validates and sees the lives of so many of my students (both past and present) who feel connected to land to the same degree that they feel disconnected from their school work. |  |
Similarly, Northranger by Rey Terciero and illustrated by Bre Indigo, allows students to feel connected to the land by showcasing the kind of work that happens on farms and ranches. A Whippoorwill Honor book, Northranger is a graphic novel that tells the story of Cade Munoz, a closeted queer teen growing up in rural Texas. He spends the summer working as a ranch hand to make extra money for his family. Once on the ranch, we see the kinds of farm chores and hard work that take place on ranches. The illustrations are particularly powerful in allowing farm kids to feel seen. I never got the chance to see myself reflected in a text this way. I related to the early mornings and hot afternoons, the physical exertion and exhaustion and more. And because it was inspired by Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, it’s a way to help students see their experiences connected to canonical literature in interesting ways. Like Cadow, Terciero explains that his motivation in writing Northranger was to give young people who grew up like him a chance to see themselves in literature.
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Connecting to the Land We’re From
| Sometimes, the land we’re from isn’t the land we’re on. And yet it still feels connected to us in ways that shape our experiences. In Saints of the Household by Ari Tison (another Whippoorwill Honor book), Max and Jay rely on connections to their Bribri (Indigenous Costa Rican) roots to find their way in their current place in Minnesota. The sacred stories told by their grandfather connect them to their Costa Rican land and heritage because the stories arose from land and creatures to create a way of knowing the world. Even if that world is no longer Costa Rica but Minnesota instead. Saints of the Household powerfully illustrates Indigenous ways of knowing and being and how those intersect with rural identity. The stories of who and where we’re from—our cosmic, global, and local positions in the universe—help us tell the story of who we are to ourselves and to others. We know how powerful it is to see the us and the not-us on the page, and Tison’s book provides crucial opportunities for rural (and nonrural) students with their multiple and diverse identities to think about who they are because of where they’re from in important ways. |  |
All of the Whippoorwill Honor winners this year highlight how the connections between people and land in rural communities shapes those people and communities. Conflict around who gets to claim and own land and what that means for the people, plants, and animals who call that land home. This seems like particularly salient reading for rural kids who are still thinking about figuring out what their connection to the land means to them but is important for everyone to think about. Realizing that we work in collaboration and reciprocity with the land for our survival is necessary for us to sustain both the natural world and our own survival. And these books offer opportunities to do just that.
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