Transcript: Larissa Phillips

My interview with the American writer, farmer and literacy teacher

Since last week’s election win for Donald Trump, we are seeing a renewed sense of scorn for Republican voters in parts of the mainstream media. The Guardian’s Rebecca Solnit, for example, writes in her column that “our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do.” My guest on today’s program doesn’t see it that way. She’s a lefty Democrat who moved from Park Slope, Brooklyn, to Trump country — and she writes that the gift of living in a rural county is that “I keep finding reasons to see my political adversaries as human.”

Larissa Phillips runs the Honey Hollow farm in upstate New York. She’s the founder of the Volunteer Literacy Project, and her essay for The Free Press is, “Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor.”

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

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TH: You and I met a few weeks ago in Woodstock, New York, at an off-the-record women's retreat hosted by Meghan Daum. We got to know each other a little bit then. Right before the election, you published an essay in The Free Press, “Whatever Happens, Love Thy Neighbor.” I just thought this was such a beautiful piece and more relevant than ever after the election. The piece is about you, a lefty Democrat from Park Slope, Brooklyn, moving to a red rural area, Greene County, New York. You run a 15-acre hobby farm, Honey Hollow, there. Take me back to a decade or so ago. What made you and your husband decide to move from Brooklyn to farm country?

LP: It was a few years in the making. We were the typical, very happy Brooklyn family living in Park Slope, and belonging to the food co-op, and sending our kids to these really lovely public schools. And really happy there. Then, I don't know, the city just wore me down. I wanted to have some garden space. I was really into the local food movement. I still had never given up my dream of horses. I just started bugging my husband, over the course of several years, to consider moving out the country out of the city. I finally convinced him. 

We started looking upstate. If we had had more money, none of this would have happened. We would have settled into a very liberal enclave of our people. Because we — especially me — I was a lifelong progressive. Very progressive. Liberal was a bad word. I wasn't a liberal; I was a lefty, I was a progressive. So, we would have found our people in some more expensive enclave. We would have gone to Woodstock or something, but we couldn't afford that. We ended up finding the farm that we wanted in Greene County, which no one had ever heard of. No one I knew had ever heard of Green County. Even people upstate were like, “What's there?” People hadn't even been there who were just across the river. So, it was kind of like parts unknown. But it was the farm that we could afford. It was the farm we wanted. So, we took a chance. We figured we would find our people there. 

TH: What were your views about Republicans going in?

LP: They were pretty awful, I have to admit. I didn't really know any Republicans personally. I was very pro-choice. I was against the death penalty. I believed that the left was the more compassionate half of the country, that wanted good things for even people who hadn't gotten the right end of the stick.

Yeah, I didn't really like Republicans. I thought they were kind of weird, Christian conservatives, but I didn't really think that much about them except for in terms of politics. Like, “Oh, they're going to overturn Roe v. Wade.” I don’t know, the Tea Party was a big thing in the ‘10s. The Westboro Baptist Church protesting in a very ugly way at abortion clinics was probably how I thought a lot of the right half of the country was. So, not a very generous view. And not a very informed view either, honestly.

TH: You have two kids. Parenting was one of the differences that you encountered, in terms of the cultural differences between Park Slope and Greene County. You describe how one of your daughter's friends got stung by numerous wasps at your house and her mother just shrugged and said, “She's fine.”

LP: So wild. That was crazy. Park Slope is the epi-center of the gentle parenting movement, I would say. There was a joke, there was a satire YouTube video going around in the ‘10s that was “in this house we don't use the word no.” But it had a lot of truth to it, and I was definitely like that. I wouldn't say totally permissive, but on the permissive side of the scale. So, when I got up there, it was just totally different. If somebody in Park Slope's kid had been stung by a wasp, they would be like, “I'll meet you at the hospital. I'm on the way. Meet me in the ER.”

She got eight or nine stings on her neck — wasp stings, not even bee stings, like real stings. The mom, I called her. I was like, “Is she allergic?” The mom was like, “No, she'll be fine.” Then the girl's lips started to go numb. So, I called back and I was like, “Can I give her a half a Benadryl?” She was like, “Yeah, sure.” I kept calling back and being like, “Okay, well, I'm going to give her the other half of the Benadryl.” And the fourth time I called, the mother was like, “Let me talk to her.” It was just wild. She was right, the girl was fine. She wasn't crying. She was a stoic, tough kid. It made a big impact. 

We did the county fair, also, and that was wild. We were right in there with farm families. It's a totally different ethos, in terms of kids doing work. You see 5-year-olds with pitchforks and wheelbarrows, and losing. And no one cares if you lost. “That's too bad. Okay, hurry up, the next show is coming up.” Tears are not really appreciated. It was really wild for me — and it was great. I loved it. I thought it was awesome. Because I recognized that it was something that my kids needed, and that I needed.

TH: Just for listeners, you now run a farm camp and you do the same for city kids. 

LP: I teach those kids a lesson.

TH: [Laughs] I want to talk about how your interactions with your neighbours affected how you think about politics. You write that “a decade of farming had made me less aloof, because farming entails emergencies and so often my neighbours were there to help. It's hard to care where someone stands on politics when they race to your house to save a dying lamb.” And you add, “This is the gift of living in a rural area: I keep finding reasons to see my political adversaries as human.” Tell us about the time that your son got stuck in a snowbank.

LP: Oh yeah, that was just last winter. He was driving, actually, to get snow tires. A ten-minute drive to the town closest to us. He went off the road, and he landed in a snowbank. The wheels are spinning, he's gunning the engine, and he can't get out. He sees a truck and a car pull up, and these guys get out and start just marching toward him. After the article came out, we were talking about this story and he told me this other part of it. He said, “I didn't know if they were Good Samaritans or serial killers.” It was the same vibe. They were just marching toward him. They teased him a little bit, like, “What an idiot you are, you got your car stuck out here.” Then they just got to work, and they basically ended up lifting the car out of the snowbank and getting him back on the road.

The one guy drove him to the tire centre. When he thanked them, the head guy said, “You know, I lost my job today. I was looking for something good to do.” Which is just so wild. I thought it was a sweet story, but it didn't shock me by then. This was just last winter. But the idea that these sort of roughneck guys — who one hundred percent voted for Trump, if they voted, but definitely like Trump — had a kind aspect to them, or a helpful aspect. 

I have another story that happened that is similar. In the summer, you see turtles crossing the road all the time. They are crossing the road to lay their eggs, or whatever. You stop and you move the turtle off the road, because otherwise they are going to get hit. It's just a bummer when you see a turtle that got run over by a car. So I saw a turtle, I pulled over, and I was about to get out. And a truck coming the other way pulled over and this kid — this early twenties kid, with his jean cutoffs hanging down, just a total upstate roughneck kid — gets out, hitching his pants up, and he runs over and he picks up the turtle. He gets there first.

I admit this — it was a few years ago — I was like, “What's he going to do to the turtle?” He picks it up and he trots over to the other side of the road, puts the turtle down gently. He's like, “I hate it when they get run over.” So sweet. At that time I was still kind of like, “Oh, wow.” It's embarrassing, to think how narrow-minded I was, that I really actually had thoughts like that.

TH: I thought it was so interesting that you brought up the story of your son and the snowbank, and now that story too. Because, as you point out in the piece, there is a real discourse around these young men being the ones that are driving America into the ground. But if you have any interactions with them, you know that that is not the case. There is a really strange gap in the States right now between what's happening with young men — the decrease in employment and in education, and the increase in suicides and opioid deaths and loneliness and despair — and the political discourse around it, and the demonization of young men. It doesn't make sense to me at all. We're actually just about to do a series on this. But this played a big role in the election, this gender war discourse. What have you been thinking, watching that angle unfold?

LP: I've been watching that for a while, because I have a son. And yeah, it's crazy. It’s interesting, I grew up with a very liberal idea: that boys and girls were the same. Somehow it went from being girls can have access, should have access, to the same spaces, to the same career options, and whatever. And it became that boys and girls are exactly the same, there's no difference between them. When you have kids, most people I think do notice this — especially if you have a boy and girl — that they're not the same. From the very beginning. I mean, we really tried to make my son … not make him, but yeah, I guess make him. We gave him dolls and he had a little canvas bag with his name written in pink. That was a gift. But we tried, we gave him baby strollers. He was just built differently. He dumped the baby out of the stroller and wanted to race it as fast as he could.

By the time he was a teenager, I was realizing, “Wait, this is not working for these kids. These boys really need something different than just being told constantly that they are not allowed to fight, they are not allowed to wrestle, they are not allowed to express their boyness, their naturalness.” I see this on the farm, actually. I run this farm camp where kids come up and they work on my farm and I take them through a two-hour morning farm camp. But the boys are incredible. I have a real appreciation for boys now, because they will do anything. I can see now why on farms around the world, historically boys [were preferred]. It wasn't just the patriarchy that preferred boys on a farm. [Laughs] Girls are wonderful, I love girls. But there is a real difference between the work that is going to get done, especially if you have brothers. I have 6- and 7-year-olds, they're doing real work. They are doing stuff that I don't want to do, that's hard. So, they are so valuable. And their energy is so wonderful. I really appreciate it and love it. 

So, I've seen that up here. There is more value to boys and men here. I've seen that, actually, also in my own marriage. Because when we lived in the city, we both worked and then we had kids. I still worked part-time. So, I just had more work than he did, because I was taking care of the kids. I ended up doing the cooking, and I did most of the cleaning, because I was mostly home and I had different standards than him. My husband didn't have extra work beyond bringing in a salary. So, there was a lot of tension, which I think is pretty standard now. Working mothers have more to do than working fathers and it's a real effort to get the husbands to do the laundry or whatever.

We came up here and all of a sudden everything make sense. My husband does a lot of work — hard work, dangerous work, dirty work — that I don't want to do. And I'm grateful that he does it, and he's better at it. He's up on the roof fixing stuff on the roof. I don't want to do that. I don't want to go up on the roof. When we have to kill an animal, he does it. Even when it's a mercy killing. He's the one with the gun, and I'm totally grateful for that. 

So, it's very interesting to see that even, just in terms of marriage, relationships, how much more sense those roles make. I'm treading into dangerous territory, but it is what I have seen.

For the boys, too, I really think that they need — even if they're in the city, obviously people aren't going to move up to a farm to make sure their boys have hard work to do — but they need hard physical labour and they need challenges. They need real challenges. Like what used to be a walkabout. Around the world, historically, there have been real challenges that boys had. Marine boot camp, or something like that. I think that boys really need that kind of hard, rough challenge.

TH: It's so interesting that you say we are treading into dangerous territory. These are things you're not really supposed to say right now. But around kitchen tables, people say it all the time. One of my hopes for the era that we're just entering now is that there will be less of a gap between what people are willing to say publicly and what people are talking about privately. Then, maybe some of the mob mentality and shaming — maybe that will die down a little bit.

LP: It has to. I feel a real shift right now. A lot of people are very relieved. There has been a real mandate, or a referendum on the direction we were going in terms of being policing language and not seeing things. This is one of the things that I loved about being up here. I work in adult education, so I work with a lot of immigrants. I love talking to people who did not go to college. The thing that I appreciate, over and over again, is that I hear people saying what they think and saying what they see.

It is very, very different from the conversations that I hear among the educated class. Who are, I feel, often saying what they think they are supposed to say. It's refreshing. I have had a couple students, some of my adult reading students, who said they didn't think a woman could be president. That's something I have literally never heard anybody say. I was fascinated. I was like, “What do you mean? Tell me more.” And they had reasons. So, I would rather have that kind of conversation. To me, that's an exciting and interesting conversation, instead of the conversations that I have been having my whole life about how the sexes are equal and that kind of thing.

TH: In terms of the response to the election, where I'm sitting in Canada, most of the media is left-leaning as well, although there's small exceptions. And what I’m hearing here is that people are generally pretty devastated by the election and that it's dark days in the U.S. I know, because I have some contact with Republicans in the United States, that not everybody feels that way. I’m just curious, from where you are sitting, and your vantage point … We should tell listeners, you founded the Adult Literacy Project, so you are in constant contact with adults who are learning to read. You also, I would imagine, have some contact with Park Slope, Brooklyn still. And you live in a red, rural county. From the range of your experience, what kind of reactions are you seeing?

LP: Yeah, I have some friends who are melting down on Facebook. I don't understand it. They can mourn, and they can feel the way they feel. And they see it the way they see it — and the way they see it gives them cause for a meltdown. But one of the best reactions I saw was … I have been talking about the election a lot with my adult reading students. I have a group that meets; it's like a reading group. We often read something about the election and then we talk about it, because it's all about reading and comprehension. It's mostly Black, mostly immigrant, mostly women, mostly middle-aged — late thirties up to sixties. 

This one woman, after the election, she was like, “They didn't listen to us. They didn't listen to us when we told them that we couldn't pay for our groceries. They didn't listen to us when we said we didn't want men in the women's rooms. They didn't listen to us when we said we didn't want boys to be girls and girls to be boys in the schools.” And she's going on and on. I was like, “Wait, wait, wait. I thought you were a Harris supporter.” Because this student was a hardcore Democrat who loves Harris. She was like, “I am. But we lost and now we have to think of what we did wrong.” Beautiful. Exactly. I thought that was a great response. Again, this is someone who is just speaking the truth. I'm so tired of people not saying what they really think. Because a lot of my liberal friends, I don't really believe them all the time when they tell me things, when they tell me what they think. I just don't believe them anymore. I think that they're often saying what they think they should be saying. So yeah, I think that we've got to get past that.

TH: I think it's interesting that one of the sleeper issues, in terms of coverage of this election, was how uncomfortable so many women are with biological males in women's sports, in women's spaces, and the way that's being handled by the schools. Some people are saying now that the women's rights issue of this election was not, in fact, abortion, but this issue and how that was being handled. What are your thoughts on that?