My friend Jenna Woginrich of Cold Antler Farm and I were exchanging blog appreciation messages recently (she has a very excellent blog on farming, homesteading, identity, border collies, animals and food) and the mere mention of my name prompted some strong talk about my controversial self, and identity. One of her bloggers wrote  message suggesting I was a minor fraud for appearing to be a farmer, when I was really an author. Real farmers, she said,  do not have time to write books or blog. She also said I lived here and there, and thus could not represent myself as a true farmer.

Another poster, coming from a completely different space, said I was a major, not a minor fraud in the “border collie community” (I have to say I especially enjoyed this phrase, and I imagined a New Yorker cartoon invoking a gated community guarded by Welsh Corgis  with sheepskins and border collies lounging in their chaise lounges). I warned Jenna to be careful. Such evil can be contagious.

I was soon promoted yet again to another level of awfulness by a third messager saying Jenna might want to reconsider being anywhere near me, as I had murdered my border collie and good friend (Orson.) She did not claim to represent a particular community, but I noticed the progression from from minor to major fraud, then scourge. What, I wonder, is left? I read these messages to Lenore, who thumped her tail, cut loose some foul gas, and went to sleep.

These messages were interesting to me for reasons beyond the obvious. First, they speak to the American/Internet- spawned  hostility that encourages people to hate or attack what they don’t know or disagree with. Nobody needs to check anything out, or communicate, just cut loose.  Jefferson’s idea was that different points of view all mix together and come out with understanding, consensus or agreement. The Internet seems to promote the idea that we only talk to people we agree with, (we call this “community” online) and hate everybody else. This is why I often squawk when people begin messages to me with the phrase, “Even though I often disagree with you, I still read your work…”) Maybe the messages should begin “because I disagree with you, I read your work.” We need to talk to the people we disagree with more than those we agree with. It’s how we learn and grow. But we rarely do. Because we have to hate them, and be hateful (often in the name of loving animals, and I don’t even want to get into politics.)

Of the three messages, I was most touched by the first. I am not, of course a farmer, and have never, anywhere, claimed to be one. I have wanted to be a writer my whole life, and give thanks every day of my life that I am one. I have never contemplated being anything else. For me, “writer” is the most precious term in the language, and fills my heart with pride. Farming is very different, of course, and I would hate being a farmer more than almost anything except maybe working in a bank or in Washington, D.C. Real farmers (I have a lot of friends who are real farmers) live off the things they raise or breed or grow on their farms, and have a very different relationship with the land. I bought a farm and named it “Bedlam Farm” to make it clear what I am.  A writer who makes a living buying a farm and writing about the things he sees and experiences there. Where else could one get border collies, sheep and a rescue donkey?  Best move of my life, next to Maria. Bedlam Farm has spawned seven adult books and one kids book and more on the way. And nowhere in any of them have I called myself a farmer.

The farmers around here get it and they get a kick out of the idea that I grow stories here. They can’t believe I make a living out of it. I hope to be cremated when I go but if there is ever any marker to me I will come right out of the ground if it says anything but “writer.”

Identity is important to me, and in America and people are always quick to tag people as one thing or another. My grandmother always told me that if I did anything, it ought to be big, and I am glad that I am at least a major, rather than minor and commonplace fraud.

All of this brought me back to Rose, and one of the many reasons I love her and animals. They don’t do this. They are precisely what they are and do not have these ridiculous struggles. And she knows exactly who she is.