Minn. woman pens op-ed on why she moved back to her rural home town

Michele Anderson
(NYT photo by Damon Winter)

Regular readers of The Rural Blog may recognize the name of Michele Anderson; we wrote an item about her in December after she and a local artist wrote a blog post eviscerating a German reporter who made up dozens of quotes for a story about his trip to her rural Minnesota town (the reporter was fired).

In an elegaic new op-ed for The New York Times, Anderson writes about why she and her husband moved to Fergus Falls, pop. 14,000, last fall to start a family. A big part of it is roots: Anderson's great-great-great grandfather Walter moved to the area from Canada in the 1800s and lived on a homestead 40 miles away. Anderson herself is from a town of 450 in rural Minnesota, but left to attend college in Portland, Ore.

Living in Fergus Falls, and knowing its history, makes for complicated feelings, she writes. "The Interstate splits the original homestead, so I drive through that farmland often. I catch myself romanticizing my family’s 'legacy,' feeling both pride for what they built and regret that the land that defines my family was stolen from the Dakota people," Anderson writes. "I feel conflicted about my role here. Rural places like this one are facing countless questions about the economy, about identity and about the environment. It’s hard to know what we need to be stewards of and sustain, and what we need to let go or confront, to build a strong future."

Fergus Falls, Minnesota
(Wikipedia map)

Kentucky writer and farmer Wendell Berry calls people like Anderson "homecomers": those who come back to their rural hometowns after spending time away, usually in a city, she writes. It's an increasing trend in Minnesota, and likely elsewhere in the U.S.; state demographers noted that people in their 30s and 40s were moving to small towns and offsetting the population loss caused by high school graduates moving away, Anderson writes.

"In a 2009 commencement address at Northern Kentucky University, Mr. Berry encouraged students to consider whether they might be better and more responsible citizens if they embraced the concept of homecoming rather than the desire for upward mobility, which lures them to places to which they have little connection, to participate in a destructive and extractive economy," Anderson writes.

That connection to her ancestors, to her home in rural Minnesota, is what brought Anderson back after 11 years away. In Portland her life felt as though it lacked meaning, and her work felt "trivial and temporary," she writes. But living and working in Fergus Falls, though sometimes frustrating, is "stimulating and rewarding, a place for bold creativity", Anderson writes. It's not what some urban dwellers might expect: "I am more involved in politics, and more outspoken about social and racial justice, economic development and feminism than I ever was in Portland. And incidentally, I have not had much time to garden, go fishing, or learn how to can food," Anderson writes.

Instead of the ham-fisted or patronizing efforts to bridge the rural-urban divide, Anderson hopes urban residents and news media can pay a more nuanced kind of attention to rural America,"one directed somewhere between bleak landscapes of ignorance and bigotry, and Pollyanna illusions of the pastoral life. This is where most rural Americans actually live and where some of the most important work is being done," Anderson writes.