Rooted in Care
Published in Earth Island Journal; Autumn 2025.
“Smoke billowed from the sugar stacks. The vegetal rot of processed sugarbeets wafted over the interstate. The vinegar aftertaste coated my throat. Stung my nostrils. The sharp scent of sugary wastewater seeped into my pores. Outside my Toyota pickup, the wind blew across fields crusted with December snow and salts. It was my first North Dakota winter in three years…”
(Photograph by Joshua T. Anderson)
Adventures in Sugarland
Published in North American Review’s Open Space; May 2025.
“We backed the boat into the water. Toxic algae bloomed along the shoreline. A thick skin of bluish-green foam gurgled on the surface. Near the sandbars, streaks of neon green swirled in the water like northern lights…”
(Photograph by Joshua T. Anderson)
From dirt poor to common ground
Published in Iowa Capital Dispatch (February 2024) and North Dakota Monitor (March 2024).
“I was raised on Dust Bowl stories. My grandmother told stories of growing up in Chandler, Oklahoma, until her family was displaced to the fruit plantations of California, where her father became a Baptist tent preacher, famous for his apocalyptic sermons that he delivered under the shade of orange trees.”
(Photograph by Joshua T. Anderson)
Thinking Like a Monoculture
Published in Mary Swander’s Emerging Voices; May 2023.
“On Father’s Day weekend 2022, a windstorm whipped across North Dakota. Acres of topsoil swept through my mom’s cottonwoods while my dad’s legs spasmed in his ritual struggle with MS…”
(Photograph by Joshua T. Anderson)
