Writing the Land: Foodways and Social Justice

Writing the Land: Foodways and Social Justice is a collection of poems and essays that brings together poets, land protection groups, anti-hunger initiatives and art organizations in order to raise awareness of why it is important to protect land, as well as the role the arts has to play. The Milk House was featured in this anthology in the essay “The Stories We Tell” written by Ryan Dennis.

Customers in the United States can support Agrarian Trust and their mission by ordering the book here. Those in Europe can purchase it directly from The Milk House by contacting RyanDennis@themilkhouse.org.

Lis McLoughlin, founder of Writing the Land, explains the project further, as well as where it came from:

Writing the Land is a collaborative outreach and fundraising project for land protection organizations. Through our anthologies, poets help to raise awareness of the importance of land conservation, ecosystems, and biodiversity.

We coordinate poets to “adopt” conserved properties, partnering them with conserved land for 9 to 13 months. Poets visit their adopted property and create poems inspired by the land. Because our current times restrict in-person events this project emphasizes the importance of individual connection to the land and includes event-sharing experiences of poets reading on behalf of the land—inspiring others to visit or donate toward the protection of these farms, ecosystems, habitats, sanctuaries, and wilderness preserves.

Poems created for Writing the Land are available to the land protection organization indefinitely for use in their media and outreach, and through the anthologies produced, while poets retain their copyrights.

Writing the Land is an attempt to honor nature and our relationship with it in a way that is as equitable and transparent as it is deep and entangled. As poets and advocates, we declare our intention that the scope of this project be as inclusive—to humans and places—as we hope the mantle of protection that land trusts offer can be. Our work in writing the land will never be complete but rather gains strength, depth, beauty, and energy from a multitude of voices.

Our Story

Before Writing the Land, there was Thinking the Land. Enjoyable, but not quite efficacious. In my off-grid cottage in a mature hemlock forest in western Massachusetts, for years I contemplated the land. And as I walked those wooded acres, feeling Robert Frost’s cadences in my hiking feet, I knew that words and land wrote each other. And it occurred to me, that in this way land contributes to its own protection; that land speaks, and further, that Nature poets are trained to hear those voices.

So what does it matter, this conversation, asked the activist in me? In a time when land needs all the help it can get just to avoid being clear-cut or paved over, how can poets help the land that we love protect itself? The answer, as it so often is in Nature, is to cooperate with partners. Land Trusts, as conservers of land, bring our writing into action. By pairing poets with protected lands, we offer ourselves as conduits for the land to speak, to sing, to cry out, to comfort. The Writing the Land project in 2021 was comprised of 11 land trusts, 36 separate lands, and 40 poets helping the voices of the land translate into acts of protection and care. Each 2021 land trust has a chapter in the 2021 anthology, which is offered for sale through the land trusts to benefit the work they do. In 2022 we have 97 land trust partners and over 236 poets, and growing. We are currently recruiting land protection organizations and poets for 2024 publications.

Writing the land is honored to be doing this essential work. We invite you to join us by exploring our website and enjoying the poetry; buying and reading the anthology; donating to your local land trust; enrolling as a poet in our project; or by hiring one of our speakers for your next event (use the form to Contact Us). Thank you for listening, protecting, and respecting the land.

—Lis McLoughlin, PhD; Project Director Writing the Land