Grace Olmstead

Grace Olmstead is a journalist and author of Uprooted: Recovering the Legacy of the Places We’ve Left Behind. Her writing has been published in The American Conservative, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and others. A native of rural Idaho, she now lives outside Washington, DC, with her husband and three children.

daffodils

Living Like Perennials

This is what “living like a perennial” should look like: having an attitude of longevity and love that fights back against the consumerism of our age, and against that incessant internal voice that asks, petulantly, “How does this benefit me?”

August 6, 2021

Wheat Field with Cypresses by Van Gogh

Wendell Berry’s wisdom in a time of pandemic

Our health is therefore predicated on more than our own physical resilience. To be healthy, we must acknowledge—and love—the entire web of life we are part of.

September 3, 2020

Coal company houses in Appalachia

The Dignity And Grit Of The Appalachian Hill Women

Cassie Chambers’s Hill Women: Finding Family and a Way Forward in the Appalachian Mountains, like Smarsh’s Heartland, considers the dignity and resiliency of poor working-class families in this region of America.

August 25, 2020

Lake Powell

The Forgotten Treasure In These American Lands

This year marks the sesquicentennial of explorer Powell’s expedition down the Green and Colorado Rivers in 1869. Perhaps more than any other man of his time, he comprehended the limits of Western geography, and suggested that inhabiting the land would require a far different set of rhythms than those we had cultivated up to that point. He questioned the entire orthodoxy shaping the West during his age—an orthodoxy that is shaping it still.

November 19, 2019

Seeds

Seeding Control to Big Ag

Seeds are the home of life, the promise of the future. They are the foundation of civilization and culture, the guarantor of full stomachs and secure governments. They are the quotidian miracle which prompt wonder in the writings of philosophers and theologians, essayists and poets.

February 28, 2019

Heartland

A Price Tag on the American Dream

This is a book about what it means to be poor. It is a book about what it means to be rural. And it is a book about what it means to be a woman. All three of those things, together, could have meant a very different life for Smarsh.

December 12, 2018

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