Organic word farmer

Okay, so people have been asking me what “organic word farmer” means.   Also, people keep telling me I’m down-to-earth, and at times I feel like asking them what that means.  But I guess those two metaphors go together?

I first started calling myself a “word farmer” when visiting schools, as a way of helping the children understand that writing was my life’s work but I didn’t have control of the packaging.  As a word farmer I do my best to grow good, nutritious, tasty, colorful words, but I don’t get to say whether the supermarket puts them in pink plastic baskets or cardboard boxes or shrink-wrap, and I don’t get to draw a picture to put on the package, and I don’t get to set the price they charge the customer.   It’s a little more complicated when I try to explain copyright, but anyhow, if I send strawberries, the editor is not allowed to change them to artichokes.

Now about the “organic” part -- I never mentioned that in schools, because a person can carry a simile too far, especially in a classroom full of wriggly sixth-graders.  But when it came to writing this yawp of a web page, “organic” seemed as good a way as any to say that my words are home-grown, natural, unsullied by artificial additives such as what other people are doing.  I don’t follow trends and pop culture, which makes me either original or eccentric, depending on who’s talking.  If I were a chicken I would definitely be a free-range kind of old hen defending my right to lay dragon eggs.  There is no need for me to try to be different; I come by it naturally.

Right now, for instance, I’m living in a quite unspoiled northern area of the Florida panhandle.  My space is shared by tree frogs, toads, lizards, giant silk moths, snakes and at least one alligator who came for dinner -- the others have been good enough to stay in the swamps.  Amid blue-tailed skinks, green frogs with yellow racing stripes, purple gallinules and painted turtles, I feel as if I’m in heaven.  I guess the word “natural” means more to me than it does to most people.  But writing is, to me, an organic process.  The words come out of me, and I’m an organism if I ever met one, albeit a technologically tainted primate you can contact on line:  nancywrotebooks at gmail.com.

Yours, naturally,

Nancy Springer