“My experience of people back home has been like this, one of utter acceptance and, at least with my immediate family, unconditional love. Her acceptance of me, though, was immediate and her love was abundant. But because of my fear, we had lost 20 years - literally - of the sort of authentic friendship we had as kids,” said Hoffert. In preparation for the launch of my book I wrote to a dear childhood friend whose judgment I had feared for years based on what I gathered from her political beliefs. “I feel like I’ve created a self-imposed exile by not breaking free from the silence I’ve harbored my entire life. During her harvest season back home, she came out as a lesbian to several old friends (her family has long known), testing the limits of regional tolerance. But Hoffert’s connection with home is complicated by the fact that she is gay. If it were just a matter of landscape, she might never have left. I know at some point I will need to live closer to the natural world since that is where I derive so much of my energy and inspiration.” Complicated connection “I’m staying here for now - though I don’t know what my longer-term plans might be. “I think I romanticize the notion of living in North Dakota - the quiet, the beauty of the land, the closeness of the people, reconnecting with my childhood home - and maybe I always will,” says Hoffert, who ultimately returned to her home in Minneapolis, where she works in digital marketing for Teach For America.
Hoffert’s memoir, “Prairie Silence” (Beacon Press), is her attempt to reconnect with her home state, and explore the idea of going back there for good. “When you grow up on a farm the cycle of harvest is as imbedded in your life as any holiday, and, so, when I’m not at the farm during harvest it is as if I’m missing Christmas,” she said in an interview. So she decided to go back, if just for one more harvest. She knew they expected her to confirm their ideas about a bleak and flat state, but she remembered it as a place of uncommon beauty. What in the world is North Dakota like?” people asked. She grew up on the edge of the prairie, a farmer’s daughter with a typical rural childhood, but after college she left the state and found herself the object of fascination. For years, whenever Melanie Hoffert met someone new, she’d find herself explaining North Dakota.
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