On today's episode, we welcome Sarah Neidhardt, author of the memoir Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods, from The University of Arkansas Press. The book recounts Sarah’s experience growing up as part of a back-to-the land family in a small, isolated town in the Arkansas Ozarks. Sarah and her family lived there from 1973 to 1981, building a modest cabin and raising and growing their own food. To write the book, Sarah drew on her own memories, as well as an archive of family letters, photos, and cassette recordings from that time.
We’re also fortunate to have Sarah’s mom, Wendy McPhee, in the studio with us. Wendy figures prominently in the book, and I’m grateful she’s here to add her take on Sarah’s account.
Writer Megan Kruse has this to say about Twenty Acres: “Weaving together extraordinary primary documents, research, and memory with gorgeously rendered prose, Neidhardt captures the zeitgeist of the back-to-the-land movement in the story of her family’s years in the Ozarks. Equal parts memoir and ethnography, Twenty Acres is lush, haunting, and ultimately elegiac, leaving us to consider the grand and often flawed ambitions of our histories and how through those we come to know ourselves.
Author photo courtesy of Kennon Guerry