Westhope: Life as a Former Farm Boy

by Dean Hulse

In this collection of highly personal essays, Dean Hulse recalls his life growing up on the family farm in North Dakota. He remembers with affection his life in the 1960s and 1970s, when the farms and small towns were thriving but then moves on to deal with the breakdown of these communities as industrial agriculture began to take over.

168 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[Ann]

What is a western? Just as Cowboys admire Indians, readers look to the west as a frontier. No way I can write what I learned from this book as it has entire philosophy of Dakota in it pages. Hulse captured it in a manner that many of us can understand as we read just a few pages before nodding off sitting in a chair after rolling bales, moving oil rigs, or pulling weeds. This book is an easy read and Lin Enger is acnowleged and may have influenced writing.
ZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE influenced the 70s beyond the understanding of those of us who came of age then and may have been a different time of parenting. Hulse chooses not to become a parent, he has much to say about character and how he was influenced by not only his parents and family but by Dakota weather and terrain.

Yes, There is a town named for the hope many of us have for the west.

[Stew]

This is the kind of book historians 100 years from now will read to find out what life was like on the prairie in our time.

[Keith]

After hearing Dean read at the Thomas McGrath Writer's Conference, I didn't know whether I'd be impressed with this book or not. But as I read, I was more and more drawn into it. The subtitle is "Life as a Former Farm Boy", and his experience of growing up in a small North Dakota town was similar in many ways to my own, yet distinctly different. He has the audacity to dream of a future for places like Westhope, which started to decline about the time the first Hulses showed up there in the second decade of the last century with homesteading hopes high. Decline, clinical depression, and tuberculosis took the edge off that hope over time, and by the time he writes of Westhope, it is quite a different place than the one he remembers from the Sixties and Seventies.
It has gone through the downturns all the other small towns across the west Dakota prairie have gone through, and it is a different place. Yet, Dean has the audacity to dream of a revival of places like Westhope, which few have heard of and fewer really care much about. He is drawn to his dream, yet repelled by it at the same time. He hopes for Westhope, but lives in Fargo, the city he migrated to after his attempt to take over the family farm didn't work out. The book is filled with the contradictions present in every Dakota small town heart as he struggles to make sense of the heritage that has brought him to where he is, and the dream of somehow going home to a new and revitalized Westhope once again.
I came to feel a great sense of connection with the land he loves and the heart he honestly opens concerning it. It was certainly the kind of book I am attracted to. You may be, too. I highly recommend it.

[Bismarck Public Library]

The Dakota Discussions series, America by Food, is being hosted by the Bismarck Public Library this spring.

Discussions will be facilitated by Jay Basquiat, professor at Bismarck State College, founder of a Community Supported Agriculture program using his sustainably-operated farm and board member of the NDHC.

Explore the history and future of our food. Three texts offer insight and thought-provoking questions about food and our culture.

Westhope: Life as a Former Farmboy by Dean Hulse
Date/Time: Thursday, April 28 @ 6:30pm

All discussions will be held at the Red Roaster Coffee shop located in the Bismarck Public Library. Books are available for checkout at the library’s Circulation Desk. Free and open to the public.



CLICK HERE to find "Westhope: Life as a Former Farm Boy" in Bismarck Public Library's online catalog.

[WM Rine]

Hulse offers an engaging look at growing up in a small town in North Dakota. It's a beautiful view of the ties of kinship and everyday living that bound people in the small towns that are slowly evaporating from the maps of the prairie country. I had a better sense of what it might have been like to grow up in a place like this than I've had from any other book about the state. Hulse is lyrical at times and also reflective, even on his own struggles; it's unfortunate that some (even here) seem to read this as a kind of weakness. It's a strength in this writing. Sadly, the book doesn't quite bring it all together at the end -- lots of strands started that don't quite pull together at the end. Hulse makes clear that much of what he's writing about is passing, but doesn't take far the questions of what the future is or might be for these places. Still, recommended.

[Jo]

Only three years and 200 miles(not as the crow flies) of geography separate Hulse's upbringing and mine. Apparently my experiences were far better than his. After college I continued farming and ranching, I don't despair about the loss of what once was as Hulse does. I found his essays bitter and self-indulgent. There is a reason he washed out as a farmer.

[MissSusie]

Author is quite whiny and political and seemed to bounce from career to career and give up on them easily including farming which he didn't give much of a chance and doesn't seem to like his hometown or his mother very much. Just ok.