Melanie Hoffert reads from "Prairie Silence: A Memoir"

A
North Dakota expatriate struggles to reconcile family, home, love, and
faith with the silence of the prairie land and its people.

Melanie
Hoffert longs for her North Dakota childhood home, with its grain
trucks and empty main streets. A land where she imagines standing at the
bottom of the ancient lake that preceded the prairie: crop rows become
the patterned sand ripples of the lake floor; trees are the large alien
plants reaching for the light; and the sky is the water's vast surface,
reflecting the sun. Like most rural kids, she followed the out-migration
pattern to a better life.

“Melanie
Hoffert has written a gutsy, complicated book about the little town we
both came from (but which she experienced in a much, much different
way).”--Chuck Klosterman, author of Downtown Owl and Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

The
prairie is a hard place to stay--particularly if you are gay, and your
home state is the last to know. For Hoffert, returning home has not been
easy. While home, working alongside her dad in the shop and listening
to her mom warn, "Honey, you do not want to be a farmer," Hoffert meets
the people of the prairie. Her stories about returning home and
exploring abandoned towns are woven into a coming-of-age tale about
falling in love, making peace with faith, and belonging to a place where
neighbors are as close as blood but are often unable to share their
deepest truths.

----

Melanie
Hoffert grew up on a farm near Wyndmere, North Dakota, where she spent
her childhood wandering gravel roads, listening to farmers at church
potlucks, and daydreaming about impossible love. She has an MFA in
creative writing from Hamline University, and her work has appeared in Muse & Stone and The Mochila Review.