Prairie Culture
Local History
This Amana Colonies historian spent over 33 years at the helm of a small Iowa Museum. It was time well spent.
Essay
Can Midwestern farmers stop the steady loss of their most precious possession--their topsoil? This writer says yes, they can.
Local History
On Wednesdays, when Shirley Springer’s dad shut the door of the drugstore in Garwin, Iowa, the best part of the week was about to begin.
Paintings
This painter found inspiration for her triptych in one of the Midwest's most common sights: a cornfield.
Essay
Twenty-five years from now, will fertile agricultrural landscapes look the way they look today?
Essay
Our correspondent reports on the efforts of prairie ranchers like her to bring bison back to their pastures.
Essay
Professor John Ikerd's love for rural communities has led him to ask some difficult questions.
Essay
Traditional Lakota governance has much to teach modern organizations and businesses.
Essay
If our political leaders are really serious about STEM, they need a new approach.
Interview
Linda Omaña, a member of our editorial staff, sat down with the photographer when he was on Grinnell College’s campus.
Mixed-media
In this closeup, we focus on a central Minnesota artist who uses multiple media to explore place, gender, and history.
Book Review
A college biology professor gives us her review of Cornelia Mutel's new book, A Sugar Creek Chronicle.
Poetry
A Kentucky poet describes the union of body, emotion and landscape he finds on the prairie.
Essay
Ag giant Prestage came to Mason City, promising to transform its economy. The author, a City Councilman, describes what happened next.
Memoir
In this memoir, the writer, formerly a bus driver for Iowa State University, chronicles a day in his life. It wasn't always a happy ride.
Interview
Our editors interviewed "Rosa Jimenez" about her experiences living as an undocumented immigrant in a small Iowa community.
Essay
In the course of conducting an ethnographic study, Lane Atmore found the utopian ideal is alive and well in Fairfield, Iowa .
Interview
A conversation between Rootstalk editor Emma Thomasch and residents of the Mayflower retirement community.
Short story
Florida-based writer Todd Kincaid has given us a short story detailing a rabbit hunt on the prairie.
Feature
Quilts aren't just for beds. Our correspondent shows us how they're warming up the rural landscape, too.
Feature
Janet Schlapkohl dramatized the farm crisis of the 80s in her one-woman show.
Local History
Historian Dan Kaiser found a landmark building in American industrial architecture in his small Iowa town.
Publisher's note
For our publisher, the late CEO of the Des Moines Waterworks, Bill Stowe, exemplified environmental heroism.
Essay
Dr. Laura Jackson believes the fate of the threatened Monarch Butterfly is tied inextricably to the fate of agriculture on the prairie.
Closeup
Artist Thomas Agran took an unexpected landscape for his subject: the convulsed earth of a construction site that had once been a farm.
Essay
The FarmHouse at Hickory Highlands in Fairfield, Iowa looks as if it sprang out of the earth it sits on. That's because it did.
Podcast
In this issue, audio producers Sonia Chulaki and Marie Kolarik talk with writer and environmentalist Cornelia Mutel.
Essay
Last summer, native Californian Mary Rose Bernal "farm-sat," and found country life hard, sweaty, itchy and surprisingly...happy.
Photography
The work of this Connecticut-based photographer has frequently found its way onto our pages. Take a look at his work to see why.
Interview
Veterinarian Art Dunham's concern for his patients made him a world-renowned expert on the effects of Roundup herbicide on our environment.
Video
Think moonshine is a thing of the past? Not so much. Watch a batch cook in this video taken on an Iowa farm.
Short story
This fiction writer took prairie graveyards as her inspiration in these short pieces.
Photography
Our regular contributor gave us an image of the Conard Environmental Research Area in high summer.
Photography
For this issue, our regular contributor focused his camera on two butterfly species and a quartet of "Birds of the Prairie."
Photography
This photographer, used to taking pictures of the crowded streetscapes of home, tries his hand at the prairie.
Digital Art
It's a deceptively simple question. Our associate editor created an infographic to provide the not-so-simple answer.
Podcast
With his interview of Des Moines Waterworks CEO, our audio producer debuts our new podcast feature.
Essay
In this feature, a respected Drake University biologist traces the eons through which the prairie region's plantforms evolved.
Music review
The Pines' music is as rooted in their prairie home as a field of coneflowers. Read our reviewer's thoughts, then give a listen.
Interview
Everyone thinks "corn" when they think of the Midwest. Maybe they should be thinking: "mushrooms." Our interviewer talks to the experts.
Essay
Women are coming into farming in increasing numbers. As they do, they're changing the way we think about agriculture.
Local History
Though a closeted gay man during a less tolerant time, in the 1920s, Ralph Lorenzo Warner helped preserve a more gracious Midwest era.
Interview
Spending her life as a farmer hasn't kept Chris Gaunt from fighting for social justice, as our interviewer found.
Interview
The prairie is a long way from the front lines in the fight with ISIS. Our interviewee brings the refugee experience home.
Essay
What do rural Iowa and small-town Norway have in common? Plenty, as it turns out. An Iowa Fulbright Scholar explains.
Essay
Is farmwork also social activism? It was for our correspondent, during an internship at Mustard Seed Community Farm.
Paintings
An Alaska-based artist turned her eye on the prairie during an artist's residency. The result: two paintings, featured in this issue.
Photography
This photographer's images explore the tension between people and the land they inhabit.
Essay
Urban gardens need pollinators, but where do the bees come from amid all that concrete? Enter Jana Kinsman.
Interview
Associate Editor Maya Dru interviewed Des Moines Waterworks CEO Bill Stowe shortly before his untimely death.
Editor's note
In a community writing workshop, Rootstalk's Editor discovered a small town's true diversity.
Personal essay
Iowa Poet Laureate Mary Swander lives in a converted country schoolhouse. She decided a schoolhouse needs a bell, and a belltower.
Editor's note
Our other editor for this issue, a native of New York state, also unlearned many of her prejudices before she came to treasure the prairie.
Interview
Here you'll find our audio recording of Maya Dru's interview with the late Bill Stowe, CEO of the Des Moines Water Works.
Memoir
A "rubber band community" is one that, no matter how far away you go, you always want to come back. This retired teacher explains.
Essay
What's an East Coast transplant to do when she doesn't feel she fits in the Midwest? Fill a car with friends and head for Davenport, Iowa.
Memoir
There was a time for this retired farmer when Saturday night in his small prairie town was a hot car and someone to race.
Photography
This photographer is a compusive creator whose main complaint about the Midwest prairie is its absence of waterfalls.
Personal essay
This Native American environmental activist draws a direct line between the fossil fuel industry and domestic violence.
Memoir
A farm is many things: a business, a home, a way of life. For this farmer, it was a thing to share with the whole town.
Essay
In Toledo, Iowa, a venerable old theatre was a place for townspeople to restore their spirits. Now they're returning the favor.
Personal essay
Mary Swander's Amish neighbor, Joe, places her new belltower over the entryway of her Amish schoolhouse/home.
Feature
This infographic by one of our Associate Editors shows how you can bring prairie back with some hard work and a little know-how.
Memoir
A costume, a pillow case, a couple of friends, and a whole town to roam in: that was Halloween for this coffee shop owner.
Photography
This Minnesota photographer has contributed some stunning images to past issues. In this issue, his focus is a critically endangered bird.
Personal essay
It's a long way from Iraq's battlefields to running a small town barbershop. But because of a little boy's smile, maybe not so far at that.
Essay
Where can you find the essential Iowa? Not in a single place, as this writer found, on the road with his father and a van full of friends.
Essay
In this essay, a Georgia-based writer shares her introduction to the prairie's wild beauty.
Essay
Your news-feed has probably been full of the bad effects of herbicides. This contributor writes about how to do without them.
Photography
What's the best way to find out how "community" is defined where you live? Ask the local kids to make a mural.
Memoir
This indistrial designer searched the world over for a world-class professional challenge. He found it in wintery Minnesota.
Essay
Want to know how prairie culture has changed? Consult the obituaries in your local paper.
Podcast
In the first of two podcasts in this issue, plant scientist Lee DeHaan discusses the new perennial grain, Kernza.
Personal essay
With the bell and belltower in place, Mary Swander can summon the neighbor children for pie...
Multimedia
In this issue we're publishing a variation on our "Birds of the Prairie" feature. This time, it's "Mammals of the Prairie."
Interview
The ability to read and write is far from a simple matter, as Wisconsin scholar Deborah Brandt explains in this interview.
Podcast
In Rootstalk's fifth podcast, our audio producers talk with Prof. Brandi Janssen about the complexities of sustainaable agriculture.
Essay
Our first contributor from Canada tells how a piece of prairie history was preserved in northern Alberta.
Interview
Bryan Boyce's Cow Tipping Press is dedicated to bringing the voices of special needs people to a wider audience.
Essay
How do we reverse the degradation of our prairie home by industrial ag? The residents of Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage think they know.
Local History
Anthropologist Don Janzen examines his own background in his essay about his father's homesteading childhood in early 20th century Kansas.
Closeup
Two artists, born decades apart and working in entirely different mediums, found common ground in prairie wildflowers.
Interview
What does an artist do in a prairie town that doesn't have an arts community? Matt and Sarah Kargol's answer: make one.
Local History
How could a hunk of rock buried on a college campus have so much history attached to it? This woodworker/amateur historian tells us.
Personal essay
The one-room schoolhouse is a symbol of rural education that's swiftly becoming just a memory, as this writer poignantly reminds us.
Memoir
Musician, journalist, educator with a 40-year career in the arts--our contributor has folded together multiple extraordinary lives.
Essay
When you move into an old house in a small town, you inherit that house's history and, sometimes, its former residents.
Poetry
The poet--an Australian transplant--takes on the autumn's changeable weather and its effect on we who move through it.
Memoir
When this Minnesota writer's family farm became a regional park, she kept her family memories.
In this article--part interview, part homage--Associate Editor Ethan Evans meditates on how place makes its way into an artist's music.
Essay
During the yearly migration, an astonishing forty-five percent of all North American shorebirds pass through this Kansas marsh.
Photography
Keith Kozloff discovered a trove of his old black-and-white negatives from the 1970s in an old shoe box. Take a look at this selection.
Podcast
Wisconsin writer/activist Heather Swan talks with Associate Editor Maya Dru about her love of pollinators.
Essay
Blake said we can see the universe in a grain of sand; can we see the prairie expanses of the past in a remnant on an Illinois highway?
Poetry
This poet turns to a pair of Iowa icons--a Grant Wood painting and the quadaennial caucuses--to evoke the quiet behind the image.
Essay
This retired teacher decided to build his replica of the famous Transcendentalist's retreat on his acreage in Minnesota.
Podcast
Audio producers Noah Herbin and Eva Gemrich interview University of Iowa Prof David Osterberg about CAFOs.
Poetry
Not every Midwesterner's youth is a pastoral idyll, as this poet reminds us.
Closeup
To depict ecological change in the American landscape, this artist brings together paints, drawing materials and altered photographs.
Photography
We're featuring two photographs, both taken at Grinnell College's Conard Environmental Research Area, by our frequent contributor.
Book Review
This contributor, a soil scientist, environmental activist and farmer, reviews a new book offering a vision of rural prairie revival.
Personal essay
Interviewing her family, our Associate Editor found that food provided a nucleus for a South Asian community's formation on the prairie.
Photography
This Twin-cities photographer looked south for the images in this Closeup, to the small Iowa town of Belmond.
Memoir
By any measure, Dartanyan Brown has had a remarkable life. In this issue, we run the second of three parts of his story.
Essay
This scholar of Native American culture meditates on the meaning of roots, and the challenge to them represented by energy extraction.
Paintings
This artist has shared her visions of the prairie landscape in almost every issue of our journal. We're fortunate to feature four more.
Music
An Iowa writer, musician and dramatist captures the plight of many small prairie towns in this song.
Photography
Our frequent contributor's lens found Keokuk's iconic power station on the Mississippi River for this issue.
Photography
This first-time contributor's photo makes use of a familiar Midwestern setting: the shorn cornfield.
Photography
This photographer--orginally from Hawaii--found inspiration in the autumn prairie fields.
Photography
John Lawrence Hanson contributed a photo to this issue. We ran his essay "Obedience and Resistance" in Volume III, Issue 2, Spring 2017.
Personal essay
While writer Betty Moffett's husband Sandy works at prairie restoration, she cultivates a different kind of relationship with the land.
Photography
Two of our perennial contributor's images focus on two types of migration in this issue: human and wildlife.
Photography
This new contributor's images backdrop this issue's table of contents, and intimately depict one of the prairie's most important pollinators
Photography
Vegetables, very tall trees, and roadtrip views are the subject's this first-time contributor provided for this issue.