Jess Gigot finds roots on a Skagit Valley farm

By Anna Ferdinand

Forty people gathered on the top floor of Village books to hear local author Jess Gigot read from her new memoir, “A Little Bit of Land” on Thursday, Sept. 15, munching on puff pastry adorned with sauteed lamb raised on her farm, the Sally Best cheese from her sheep, listening to the sounds of local band, Hot Tomatoes.

“The book is very relevant in terms of exploring why our regional food and farming knowledge-base is so vital,” said Gigot, who runs Harmony Fields farm with husband Dean Luce. “This is also the story of following a passion and I think a lot of people are re-examining their own lives right now.”

The book, published by Oregon State University Press, recounts her journey into farming, with roots in 9/11, as she faced the new world order as a young college student.

Her story goes back and forth between her family’s life on the farm, her personal journey getting there and the process of “trying to figure out my life, my way.”

Her subtle humor guides her reader through the characters that populate the various farms and schooling she will encounter, “animal hoarding” as she refers to in the book when she finally has her own farm, (two new miniature donkeys, ducks, the sheep and a dog); her first ride in her Subaru, packed with hay bales, before she would finally find her own work truck.

She incorporates an elegant economy of words, stark visuals of life on a farm, of beets, and sheep, birthing and death, the beauty if it all balanced with the brutal reality of it.

“I have actually been writing this book since 2013,” says Gigot, who incorporates the words of environmental writer Wendell Berry throughout, as meditations on the modern-day disconnect with the land.

Berry’s voice is a thread in a tapestry that weaves understanding of the soil, the larger politics of small farms and her journey to the Skagit Valley where she becomes a teacher, a wife, a mother and a writer.

Gigot is author of two volumes of poetry books, “Flood Patterns” and “Feeding Hour, poems about the succulent earth, about mothering, about sheep and the environmental crisis we face as humans living on earth.

Gigot moved to Skagit Valley 20 years ago. She was working on her masters in vegetable pathology and received her Ph.D. in horticulture.

“Attending the Breadloaf Environmental Writing class in 2016 was a pivotal experience because I felt like it gave me permission to explore the craft of writing and integrate the ecopoetics and science/nature writing that I had been interested in all along,” says Gigot.

“As I mention in the first chapter I never felt like I had a good response to the question, ‘Did you grow up on a farm?’ Memoir felt like the best avenue.”

As their farming business grows, so too does her writing career. Her second book of poems won a Nautilus award and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She is a Jack Straw writer for 2022.

Recently she published an opinion piece in the Seattle Times, arguing the need for support of first generation farmers and educational pathways so that people who do not grow up in farming families can see themselves in farming.

In her next project, she hopes to focus on the trumpeter swans who make their home in the Skagit Valley each year for a period of time.

“I didn’t intend to be a local author, but it feels like there is a lot to talk about here. After a long detour into science and research, I did finally realize I was a poet at heart.”