Weeds

Evelyn I. Funda is an associate professor of American literature at Utah State University. She has written extensively on Willa Cather and her creative nonfiction has appeared in literary magazines, including Prairie Schooner.

• List of illustrationsPreface: "In Dirt We Trust"DodderLoosestrifeWild OatsSageCheatgrass"The True Point of Beginning"NotesAcknowledgments

"I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed Weeds. Such a truthful book. Your book made me admire Evelyn Funda, yearn to become a farmer, wish to live out West, and love the real America all at once! "—Alexander Theroux "A moving look back at a lost way of life."—Leigh Newman, New York Times Sunday Book Review "The result of Funda's lyrical merging of metaphor and landscape ecology is an unforgettable portrait of the hybrid landscape where her farm family lived and loved in a temporary community of hopes and weeds. . . . It is a remarkable book that any child of the West should read, no matter how old and sage."-Max Geier, Pacific Northwest Quarterly "This book stands among the best works in the genre, and it should attract the attention of those interested in narrative scholarship, agriculture, and theories of place."Tyler Nickl, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment "Funda ranges over subjects as diverse as seed hybridization, ex-urbanites, early-20th-century Idaho, storytelling, postwar exile and mutable family mythologies. The resounding theme is her search for home."-Kirkus "Part cultural history, part memoir, and part elegy, Weeds reminds us that in losing our attachment to the land we also lose some of our humanity and something at the very heart of our identity as a nation."-Tom Williams, Utah Public Radio