Daughters of the Grasslands: A Memoir

by Mary Woster Haug

Overview

Mary Woster Haug offers a lovely, ruminative book transcending usual boundaries of memoir and travel writing. Set in modern, bustling Korea during a teaching year abroad, but forever grounded within implicating memories from South Dakota's stark landscape, Haug's writing evokes the intoxications of boiled silkworm, blood sausage, and Korean kimchi. These appear amid wafting tugs of childhood illness, a sometimes overanxious mother, and the magic of a childhood in Lakota country....Such intricate artistry, dating back some twenty-two centuries in Korea, fashions Haug's own book where knots of writer observation and memory grow all the stronger for our efforts to unravel them. ~Daniel W. Lehman, Co-Editor of River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781933964928
Publisher:	Bottom Dog Press
Publication date:	08/06/2014
Series:	Memoir Series
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Mary Alice (Woster) Haug grew up on a farm/ranch just west of the Missouri River. She attended school in Chamberlain and then South Dakota State University where she eventually taught English for 30 years before retiring in 2008. She has been writing for several years about her childhood on the grasslands of South Dakota and the ways in which family, church and land influenced her. She has participated in several writing retreats at Windbreak House where she worked with Linda Hasselstrom. Mary Alice has also attended workshops at the Loft Literary Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota. In the fall of 2008, she was an Artist in Residence for the Badlands National Park, the inspiration for the essay On the Badlands Loop Road.

She was an exchange professor at Chungnam National University, Daejeon, South Korea in the spring of 2006. She is currently writing a book called Crossing Borders: Discovering Myself in Korea, exploring the ways in which her time in South Korea inspired memories of South Dakota. She recently received a Bush Dakota Creative Connections grant to travel to South Korea to revisit the places and people she describes in her book. In 1990, she edited the book The Woster Brothers Brand, a collection of her brothers columns, published by Ex Machina Press.

Read an Excerpt

From Preface:

The summer I was six I dug a hole to China. Inspired by a story my father liked to tell, I scratched at the packed dirt behind the tool shed on our central South Dakota farm with a tablespoon I had swiped from my mother s kitchen drawer. This was only a minor crime. She had tablespoons to spare; they were packed in fifty-pound sacks of Gold Medal Flour, and in her baking days, my mother bought a lot of flour.

My father would draw an imaginary globe in the air with his index finger, point to a spot at the top of the invisible sphere, and say, Now, here is South Dakota. Never one to let science and reason deter him from a good story, he would trace a half-moon around the circle. With the other hand, he would draw a line down through the middle of the circle and say, And here is China. Do you see how much farther the journey to China would be if you traveled around the earth instead of going directly through the center?

All that summer, I worked on the hole, digging in the hard-packed sod with my tablespoon. When I began the excavation, I imagined a spot where the South Dakota ground met the China sky, and where I would tumble through the hole into a land where men in yellow tunics and trousers ran barefoot over dirt roads as they pulled rickshaws, their faces shaded by wide, straw hats and single black braids bouncing against their backs. Inside the rickshaws, slender women in red silk dresses with mandarin collars and chopsticks in their hair hid their faces behind pleated fans painted with dragons and lotus flowers. For some reason, I could never imagine the faces of the people, nor picture the road they traveled.

After a while, I realized that despite hours of digging, I hadn t even penetrated the topsoil, and so I abandoned the project. If science and reason did not deter my father from telling a good story, it did deter his daughter from pursuing a practical impossibility. However, I never forgot his story of a journey to the other side of the world.

Editorial Reviews

"Mary Haug s book began simply as a record of a visit to a fascinating but alien world. As she delved more deeply in Korea s culture, listening to its people, she began exploring parallels to her own upbringing in South Dakota. The result is a love song to all that is best about the people of both places and a testament to our faith in human nature." ~Linda Hasselstrom, author of Windbreak: A Woman Rancher on the Northern Plain

From the Publisher