About

Hello,
My name is James Saracini and I’m a freelance journalist and farm boy from Columbia, Missouri. I’ve been living on a farm of sorts since ’98, and my family bought our 80 acres of Moniteau County, Missouri in May of ’08. I’m graduating this May with a B.J. in Journalism and a B.A. in English from the University of Missouri in Columbia.

This project started as a sort of epiphany, which should have happened a lot sooner. It’s hard to not kick myself about neglecting to realize it earlier. My life has always been graced by a lot of duality. My first sentence up there explains it pretty well: I’m a journalist and a farm boy. Now I’m not saying the two are mutually exclusive, but ask a farmer what he thinks about journalists or vice versa and you’ll see what I mean.

My love of nature and my love of writing were like two streams flowing down the same valley; they were bound to meet. So I realized that I could spend my life writing about and from nature. More specifically, it hit me as I was walking downtown in front of Shakespeare’s: I could work on a book while I freelance and spend much needed time working on my own farm.

It sounds great, and I’m trying hard not to be naïve about it. I’m sure you’ve heard, but now isn’t the greatest time to try and break into the journalism field. So I’m not being too rigid about what’s coming down the pike. Hell, I’ve even been thinking about going to spend some time in South Korea teaching English for three grand a month.

Regardless of what I end up doing, I think that my discovery process for the book would be interesting enough to warrant a blog, and it will help to keep up with the state of environmental/agricultural writing. Plus, it will be wonderful to have a record of my experiences researching as well as working on my farm and perhaps the farms of my sources. Talk about a useful notebook.

Now, it’s time to get to work!

Thank you—any help/tips would be much appreciated!
James Saracini

-9 a.m. at Saracini Farm
Sunday, March 7, 2010