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Lin•strom, n.: in Swedish, a name evoking a brook or stream (strom) flowing through blue flax (or linseed, lin) blossoms; thus, a landscape marked by ongoing change shaping an old field, liquid movement inscribing tradition and feeding the roots of plants both horticultural (Linum usitatissimum, cultivated for food and fiber) and wild (Linum bienne, native to the Mediterranian and western Europe); thus, both rooted and searching, transient and local. Sometimes considered anachronistic.
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John Linstrom grew up in South Haven, Michigan, the hometown of the great Progressive Era horticulturist and New Agrarian philosopher Liberty Hyde Bailey. After attending Valparaiso University and its interdisciplinary honors college, Christ College, to earn a BA in English and Humanities, John headed farther into the belly of the Midwestern beast for an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University. He began researching Liberty Hyde Bailey's life and work while a student at Iowa State, at which time he also started working at Bailey's childhood home, now the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, during the summers, quickly rising from intern, to curator, and finally to executive director of the small nonprofit museum. His nonfiction book project explores the layers of history in that small town and the marginal landscape that surrounds it by delving into the experiences of his and Bailey's lives and the hundred-thirty years that separate them.
He currently lives with his wife and their happy window garden in Queens, New York, where he is a doctoral candidate in English and American Literature at New York University and a member of the Space Poets collective. His doctoral research explores various land-based cosmologies in American literature of the Progressive Era that can be characterized as agrarian, indigenous, and/or diasporic, and investigates the ways in which such cosmological modes disrupt the narratives of western science and might inform current discourses surrounding climate change in the Anthropocene.
John's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in North American Review, Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, Atlanta Review, The New Criterion, and Commonweal Magazine, and his nonfiction appears in Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland. In 2015, Counterpoint Press published his centennial edition of Liberty Hyde Bailey's ecological manifesto, The Holy Earth, with a new foreword by Wendell Berry. John co-edited with his former Bailey Museum colleague John Stempien a collection of Bailey's garden writings, titled The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion: Essential Writings, published under the Comstock imprint of Cornell University Press in 2019, and he is editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library, a new series of books by and about Liberty Hyde Bailey, forthcoming from Comstock-Cornell UP.
John’s book project, tentatively titled Havening: Love Letters to a Town and a Dead Man, takes the life and work of L. H. Bailey and slams it smack into twenty-first century topsoil. By putting Bailey’s high ideals and agrarian reform project into the context of Linstrom’s postmodern life, these fellow South Havenites, separated by some hundred fifty years’ nearness, struggle to remap new ways to live as an individual and as a community member in a corporatized and fad-stricken world. Central to that struggle is a looming question of place and home—how can we find true sanctuary in a society so insistently transient and a planet so suddenly volatile? How do we haven ourselves when our anchor lines keep snapping in the current?
John's dissertation, Land, Labor, Literature: Ecospheric Critique from the Margins of the Progressive Era, recovers a set of marginalized American literary traditions—agrarian, indigenous, and diasporic—in their critical engagements with land and labor to complicate progressivist assumptions about twentieth-century ecological awareness and action. The authors from this period whom he considers, including agrarian educational reformer Liberty Hyde Bailey, Potawatomi chief Simon Pokagon, and literary ethnographer of Black diaspora Zora Neale Hurston, each navigate the terrain of scientific modernity from positions informed by cultural traditions that root themselves in what he calls "fieldwork," a category of labor that secures subsistence from the land, and through which the land itself communicates ecospheric cosmologies resistant to imperialist exploitation in the writings of these authors. Ecospheric theory, then, emerges from practice like a bud from a branch—they are of the same substance—and I pose this theory as an intervention into current ecospheric discourse.
John taught courses in creative writing and (eco-)composition while an MFA student at Iowa State, in 2014 he taught a graduate course in research writing and methodology at his undergraduate alma mater, he has been TA for Core and English undergraduate coursework at New York University, and in the summer of 2018 he taught a course on "Literature and Environment: Modern American Literature and Questions of Ecology" at NYU. He has also done educational work with kids ages 6-11 through the Bailey Museum's summer program "Bailey's Budding Naturalists" and through the museum's other educational outreach efforts, including support of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Outdoor Learning Center at North Shore Elementary School, which was begun in 2010 by his inspirational mother and fourth-grade teacher Rebecca Linstrom. He has taught poetry writing to Girl Scouts as the Bailiwick Writer in Residence at the Comstock Girl Scouts Camp in upstate New York, sponsored by AgArts.
A full list of John's publications, information about The Holy Earth and The Gardener’s Companion, his CV, and audio and other performance of his work can be accessed on his website. John has blogged on Medium. You can view his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter, if you dare.
