Synopses & Reviews
After eight months in his childhood home helping his mother through her bout with cancer, Matthew Frank and his wife were themselves desperate for comfort. They found sanctuary in the most unlikely place—amid a collection of outcasts and eccentrics on a plot of land miles outside their comfort zone: a “mostly medical” marijuana farm in California.
Pot Farm details the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at Weckman Farm, a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, populated by recovering drug addicts, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids, and medical marijuana users looking to give back. There is also Lady Wanda, the massive, elusive, wealthy, and heavily armed businesswoman who owns the farm and runs it from beneath a housedress and a hat of peacock feathers. Frank explores the various roles that allow this industry to work—from field pickers to tractor drivers, cooks to yoga instructors, managers to snipers, illegal immigrants to legal revisionists, and the delivery crew to the hospice workers on the other end. His book also looks at the blurry legislation regulating the marijuana industry as well as the day-to-day logistics of running such an operation and all the relationships that brings into play.
Through firsthand observations and experiences (some influenced by the farms cash crop), interviews, and research, Pot Farm exposes a thriving but unsung faction of contemporary American culture.
Review
“[A] quirky, entertaining joyride.”Publishers Weekly
Review
“Between Panic and Desire is more autopsy than memoira strange new hybrid. Its a fantasy of letting go of the things that have haunted Moore his entire life. These things do, in fact, float off the pages.”Los Angeles Times
Review
“The writing is frequently very funny; insightful, too, especially Moores belief that humans are generally delusional when it comes to their expectations vs. what is realistically possible. . . . The narrative has its poignant moments, particularly in Moores recollections of his father. And despite his fractured take on the world, his message is essentially hopeful. Moore, it seems, is moving on.”Robert Kelly, Library Journal
Review
"Between Panic and Desire is more autopsy than memoir-a strange new hybrid. Its a fantasy of letting go of the things that have haunted Moore his entire life. These things do, in fact, float off the pages."-Los Angeles Times
Review
"This book is funny, funny, funny. It is an unconventional-some might say, experimental-collection of frolicsome and touching personal essays. . . . [T]he book is a rare example of how unusual form actually helps. It is the ideal display for Dinty's imagination. He daydreams. He fantasizes. He hallucinates. And this is nonfiction. For anyone who thinks the genre is nothing more than a retelling of facts, pick up a copy of Between Panic and Desire. . . . It is literary nonfiction with integrity. And it's fun."-Oxford Town
Review
"Between Panic and Desire turns the memoir genre on its head as it deftly moves from essay to essay."Peter Grandbois, Review of Contemporary Fiction
Review
"Frank takes the reader into the fields, where a pair of good clippers can make or break a man, and describes the intricate methods used to cut and dry the product to ensure good quality. . . . Investigative research coupled with personal reflections on a controversial arena of American farm production."—Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Pot Farm is a simultaneously beautiful, dark and life-affirming story."—John Warner, Inside Higher Ed
Review
"This engaging memoir chronicles the unusual route the author and his wife took to mental rehabilitation after Frank's mother's grueling, months-long battle with cancer: they took up residence on a medical-marijuana farm in Northern California. . . . A highly entertaining tale."—David Pitt, Booklist
Review
"Clearly Pot Farm is a world of uncertainty filled with people who want to help others and with people who want to help themselves; it is our world distilled. And Frank creates this world in a way that can stimulate a reader intellectually while at once offering readers who want to experience the emotional richness that surrounds and inhabits the people of the world he shows us a chance to do that too."—Brandon Davis Jennings, Third Coast Magazine
Review
"Thriving amidst a hilariously motley crew of recovered drug addicts, hippies, users and business people, Frank shows us how the farm works from the first bud to the delivery of the product. Lots of fun, and high time that everyone had a closer look at this fascinating industry."—Caroline Leavitt, Dame: For Women Who Know Better
Review
"Frank delivers his experiences through a wonderful narrative that stands in reality, but weaves a story like a work of fiction."—Nathan Reynolds, Big Muddy
Synopsis
"Insouciant" and "irreverent" are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore's books--and, invariably, "hilarious." Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, "A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem," this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own.
Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author's early life--the Kennedy assassination, Nixon's resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few--shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today's world for all of us who spent our formative years in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms--a coroner's report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan--aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America.
Dinty W. Moore is a professor of English at Ohio University and the author of several books, including Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, and The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still.
Synopsis
Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Dinty W. Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, “A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem,” this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own. Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the authors early life—the Kennedy assassination, Nixons resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few—shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, todays world for all who spent their formative years in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms—a coroners report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan—aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America.
About the Author
Dinty W. Moore is a professor and the director of the creative writing program at Ohio University. He is the author of several books, including The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction and The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still.