The Slow Farm

In the early 1970s, Tarn Wilson’s father quit his job as the Brookings Institution’s first computer programmer, packed his family into a converted school bus with “Suck Nixon” painted on the side, and headed for the Canadian wilderness. He planned to give his two young children an Edenic childhood, free from the shadows of war, materialism, and middle class repression. Between each lyric chapter, told from the child’s point of view, Wilson incorporates “artifacts” that reveal larger cultural forces shaping her parents’ decisions: letters, photographs, timelines, newspaper clippings, excepts from radicals approaches to child rearing. In the space between the child’s vision and the adult context, readers are invited to consider the gifts and burdens of a counterculture childhood.