What does organic farming, Harvard, and the Iowa Writers Workshop have in common? Harry MacCormack. He ran Sunbow Farm in the Willamette Valley for 45 years. MacCormack also co-founded Oregon Tilth, and has been a part of The Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Valley Project. He was an activist while a poetry student in Iowa City, which kept him from a teaching job when the board of a college who had hired him received his FBI file and took the offer off the table. In a 2011 Bean Report, MacCormack describes Whistler Peas as “an overwintering edible pea. Giant plants when mature. We lost a lot of young ones to geese who ate them to the ground. Heavy yielder.” He also wrote the first organic farming standards for Oregon Tilth, which greatly shaped the standards of organic farming in the United States. I lived in Oregon for one summer after college, working on an organic farm in the Willamette Valley. I visited Corvallis once, where MacCormack’s farm is situated, with one of my barn mates and fellow farmers, a woman we called Animal. I had forgotten her real name, if I ever knew it, until I saw a photo of her recently in a poetry journal. She’s a poet now, and teaches poetry. That summer, a friend of mine—we met as poetry students—came to visit and we hitchhiked to the Oregon Country Fair. My friend was a terrible guest, actually, and her visit left me with a trapped feeling about the farm, a feeling which never dissipated. I spent my twenty-third birthday with a stranger in Eugene rather than on the farm, and not long after, I went back East. I have one perfect jewel of an Oregon memory: playing badminton under a cherry tree, taking breaks to eat cherries.
-Morgan English