“If you can remember the 1960s, you weren’t really there.”*
The old quote has some truth in it, but if you want to remember the 1960s (which really ran over into the 1970s), Dianna Hunter has a book for you. She will be at the East Side Freedom Library on June 19 to read from her memoir, Wild Mares: My Lesbian Back-to-the-Land Life.
This is a quintessentially Minnesota story, ranging from Macalester College in St. Paul and to farms “up north,” which eventually led her to 1980s farm organizing—but that’s another story and another book. My late sister, K/T, appears in Wild Mares, which is how I first connected with Dianna a couple of years ago.
If your memory of the 1960s is fading, this book will remind you of the dreams that we could have it all: end racism, stop wars, replace patriarchy with feminist consciousness, farm the land as stewards of the environment. We had no word for intersectionality, but tried to live it, failing more often than not. Through it all, we lived, fought, loved, and learned with one another.
Hunter’s story, mostly set on farms she shared with other lesbians in northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, is intensely personal, but also a story of the dreams of those years. She writes:
“We wanted to change the world by establishing women’s land, spaces where we could slip through the cracks of patriarchy, militarism, and capitalism, in order to live in peace, feed and care for ourselves, and sustain our values as well as our lives.”
Come and hear her at East Side Freedom Library on Tuesday, June 19 at 7 p.m. Read the book, and remember the dreams.
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* Who said, “If you remember the 1960s, you werent’ really there?” I like to quote accurately, so I tried to find out—no luck!
“Quote Investigator: Yes, many people think they remember who said this. The problem is they disagree: Paul Kantner, Robin Williams, Paul Krassner, Pete Townshend, Grace Slick, Timothy Leary, and many others have been credited with the saying. Of course, no one who was there really remembers.”
Mary Turck
News Day 