Farm Girl: A Memoir

Farm Girl is a memoir of urgent grace that crosses boundaries of genre and time. In her second year of college, Megan finds herself bonded to a lover spiraling into addiction and two thousand miles away from her heart’s home—a stretch of forty certified-organic acres along the banks of the Connecticut River separating Vermont and New Hampshire. In the crucible of a rainy Portland winter, Megan is forced to decide whether to embrace her future as a farm girl or to continue growing into the woman everyone hopes she’ll become. Farm Girl is about two love affairs that force a decision: the love between two people and the love between Megan and the landscape. With innovative prose and lush description, Farm Girl raises the earth up as a character and asks questions about the work we choose to sustain us—how careful attention and devotion to the earth transcends human tragedy.

Megan Baxter grew up in Hanover, New Hampshire, just across the river from the fields she grew to love during her days as a farm girl. She worked as a farmer while earning her BFA in poetry and directed an urban nonprofit garden during her MFA program. Megan’s essays have won numerous national awards including a Pushcart Prize, and have been listed in The Best American Essays of 2019.