TWENTY ACRES
A Seventies Childhood in the Woods
A memoir from the University of Arkansas Press. Order now from UAP, Bookshop.org, Broadway Books, Powell’s, or wherever books are sold!
Sarah Neidhardt was an infant when her parents joined the growing back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s. Uprooting their young family to move from Colorado Springs to an isolated piece of land deep in the Arkansas Ozarks, they built a cabin, grew their own food, and for years strove to escape their former lives and achieve an ideal of agrarian self-sufficiency.
In Twenty Acres: A Seventies Childhood in the Woods, bohemian counterculture meets pioneer homemaking. Neidhardt revisits her childhood with compassion and candor, drawing upon a trove of family letters to retrace her parents’ journey from their affluent youths, to their embrace of rural poverty, to their sudden and wrenching return to conventional society. As she comes to better understand her family and the movement that shaped them, Neidhardt reveals both the treasures and tolls of an unconventional, pastoral life.
Audiobook available now!
Listen to interviews with Sarah.
2023 best memoir by a Portland author. Dotted with delightful photos and memorable anecdotes, Twenty Acres is a captivating look at one family’s journey into an “off-the-grid” lifestyle and their jarring return to conventional society.
—Michelle Kicherer, Willamette Week
A memoir infused with both empathy and inquiry.
—Wendy J. Fox, Electric Literature, “15 Small Press Books You Should Be Reading This Summer”
Weaving together extraordinary primary documents, research, and memory with gorgeously rendered prose, Neidhardt captures the zeitgeist of the back-to-the-land movement in the story of her family’s years in the Ozarks. Equal parts memoir and ethnography, Twenty Acres is lush, haunting, and ultimately elegiac, leaving us to consider the grand and often flawed ambitions of our histories, and how through those we come to know ourselves.
—Megan Kruse, author of Call Me Home
Twenty Acres is an engaging, thoughtful memoir of growing up in an off-the-grid cabin as part of the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. Sarah Neidhardt captures her subject beautifully and offers a compelling portrait of a highly specific, historically significant time and place.
—Kate Daloz, author of We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America
At turns poetic, shocking, terrifying, and nostalgic—and always riveting and real as dirt—Sarah Neidhardt’s meticulously researched memoir gives voice to a generation of back-to-the-landers’ children and to this hidden history of American family life.
—Ariel Gore, author of The Wayward Writer: Summon Your Power to Take Back Your Story, Liberate Yourself from Capitalism, and Publish Like a Superstar
Twenty Acres is authentic, clear, and evocative . . . a superb book.
—David Orr, author of Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward
Sarah Neidhardt grew up in Arkansas and Northern California. She left Arkansas with her family in 1986 and moved to Fairfield, California, and later the East Bay. A gap year after high school turned into a gap five years while she worked in a daycare, a refinery, and a bookstore. After earning her BA from Oberlin College in 1999, Sarah returned to California where she worked as a secretary and paralegal in American Indian and business law. She also interned at the iconic California indie press Heyday Books and worked for Apress.
Sarah moved with her husband to Portland, Oregon, in 2007 and freelanced as a proofreader and copyeditor for Heyday Books and others. When her son was born in 2008, she became a full-time mother and began writing Twenty Acres, transcribing hundreds of family letters from as far back as the 1840s, and creating a large urban garden with not a vegetable in sight. She was a finalist for the 2016 New Letters Dorothy Cappon Prize for Nonfiction and the 2016 Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize for Nonfiction. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and teenage son.
Contact: sarah (dot) neidhardt (at) gmail (dot) com
Sarah Neidhardt 