Little Bluestem: Stories from Rural America

A former hospice and hospital chaplain and pastor or rural congregations, Brian Backstrand has witnessed first hand some of the slow unraveling of the social and economic fabric of small town and rural America. He and his wife, Marilee, spent the first year of their married life in rural eastern Kansas in the 1960s. Twenty years later, after spending some time in Alaska and New Hampshire, their family settled in the ridge and valley region of western Wisconsin where they currently farm. Coming out of a parsonage in a small town in Kansas one day, and looking at a neighbor, a man in his eighties, half under his jacked up Pontiac fixing the brakes, Backstrand remembers thinking “who will remember him and the rest of these people? Who is going to remember that they were ever here?” Memories, healing, distruptive, nurturing, sometimes denied, play an important role in the stories collected here. Backstrand’s intention is to lift up ordinary people from rural contexts and place them squarely before his contempory and often urban readers. The stories in Little Bluestem come as an invitation, asking its readers to get to know and remember their rural counterparts.