Making Hay

Description for MAKING HAY by Verlyn Klinkenborg: Making Hay is the brilliant debut of a brilliant new writer.  It is a book about the textured and seemingly timeless life during haying season in rural America. Set in southwestern Minnesota, northwestern Iowa, and the Big Hole of Montana, it depicts the feel of work and the feel of the land when the hay is ripe for gathering.  The portrait of the people, the machines, and the rhythms of farm life is amusing, affectionate, and often movingly poetic; it is the portrait of a life at risk across America. Making Hay opens in a VFW hall in Luverne, Minnesota.  It takes us from a river-flanked farm to a vast cattle ranch, from the bales of midwestern alfalfa to the giant haystacks of wild grasses in Montana, the last of their kind.  It shows us farmers and ranchers doing what they do best:  working. Making Hay is an unforgettable portrait of the richness of rural life in America---and one of the most delicious pieces of Americana you will eve