Why I Set My New Novel On a Weed Farm
Article excerpt
Novelist Ariel Delgado Dixon chose an unconventional setting for her debut novel Sourland: a cannabis farm in California's agricultural heartland. In this interview, Dixon explores why she was drawn to depicting the weed industry, the economic desperation driving workers, the environmental tensions, and the moral ambiguities lurking beneath a booming business. She discusses how the farm became more than backdrop; it's a lens through which to examine labor, community, and survival in contemporary America. The novel interweaves multiple perspectives to complicate easy narratives about both the drug trade and rural American life.
Ariel Delgado Dixon is the author of Sourland, out June 23rd from Random House. Below, she discusses why she set her new novel on a weed farm.
The best and worst day I ever had was spent haying. I was a new farmhand, and it was the last searingly dry summer day suitable for harvesting hay, which required tossing fifty-pound square bales up onto a moving flatbed, then unloading them again, bale by bale, into the barn.
There were three of us in long sleeves, pink-faced, scratchy with chaff. I almost threw up. But the shame of being the broken link in the chain is powerful, and somehow I kept going, surprising myself when I came back the next day for more.
Farming is like that: pained, jubilant, cooperative. When I wrote Sourland, set on a weed farm in Northern California, I wanted it to contain that full spectrum, the sowing and the reaping both.
A farm is a little universe, down to the microbes in the soil, up to the thousand-pound, dome-eyed beasts they call livestock, and beyond, into clouds and weather.
A novel is the same, a wordy terrarium. Sprinkle in illicit drugs and the stakes climb. Droughts, mold, pests, and piss-poor luck are standard hazards of cultivation, but marijuana is the great compounder.
There is the law to contend with, not to mention rippers, double-crossers, the fickle violence of the black market. It’s the price of doing business, and a way of life.
In Sourland, I wanted to preserve this proud strain of outlaw farmer, and pay tribute to this pocket of the Wild West before it’s gone like smoke in the wind.
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