Nothing heals the mind and a marriage quite like medical marijuana. Or at least that’s what Frank considers in his book Pot Farm, a memoir about a the time spent caring for a terminally-ill parent and working on a “mostly” medical marijuana farm in California.
After eight months in his childhood home helping his mother through her bout with cancer, Matthew Frank and his wife were themselves desperate for comfort. They found sanctuary in the most unlikely place—amid a collection of outcasts and eccentrics on a plot of land miles outside their comfort zone: a “mostly medical” marijuana farm in California.
Pot Farm details the strange, sublime, and sometimes dangerous goings-on at Weckman Farm, a place with hidden politics and social hierarchies, populated by recovering drug addicts, alternative healers, pseudo-hippie kids, and medical marijuana users looking to give back. There is also Lady Wanda, the massive, elusive, wealthy, and heavily armed businesswoman who owns the farm and runs it from beneath a housedress and a hat of peacock feathers. Frank explores the various roles that allow this industry to work—from field pickers to tractor drivers, cooks to yoga instructors, managers to snipers, illegal immigrants to legal revisionists, and the delivery crew to the hospice workers on the other end. His book also looks at the blurry legislation regulating the marijuana industry as well as the day-to-day logistics of running such an operation and all the relationships that brings into play.
Through firsthand observations and experiences (some influenced by the farm’s cash crop), interviews, and research, Pot Farm exposes a thriving but unsung faction of contemporary American culture.
Matthew Gavin Frank is the author of “Barolo” (The University of Nebraska Press), a food memoir based on his illegal work in the Italian wine industry, and “Pot Farm” (The University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books), a behind-the-scenes memoir about his work on a Northern California medical marijuana farm. He is also the author of “Warranty in Zulu” (Barrow Street Press), “Sagittarius Agitprop” (Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), “The Morrow Plots” (forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press/Dzanc Books), and the chapbooks “Four Hours to Mpumalanga” (Pudding House Publications), and “Aardvark” (West Town Press). Recent and forthcoming work appears in The Best Travel Writing and The Best Food Writing anthologies, The New Republic, Gastronomica, Plate Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Iowa Review, The North American Review, Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Epoch, Field, Pleiades, Rosebud, Crazyhorse, Seneca Review, Ninth Letter, The Literary Review, and others. “Barolo” has been featured in such publications as Wine Spectator, The Chicago Tribune, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly.
Matthew Gavin Frank was born and raised in Chicago. Bitten by the food, wine, and travel bug, he left home at age seventeen, embracing the vagabond lifestyle that often lent itself to work in the restaurant industry. He ran a tiny breakfast joint in Juneau, Alaska, worked the Barolo wine harvest in Italy’s Piedmont, sautéed hog snapper hung-over in Key West, designed multiple degustation menus for Julia Roberts’s private parties in Taos, New Mexico, served as a sommelier for Chefs Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand in Chicago, and assisted Chef Charlie Trotter with his Green Kitchen cooking demonstration at the Slow Food Nation 2008 event in San Francisco. He returned to academia and received his MFA in Poetry and Creative Nonfiction from Arizona State University. He taught creative writing to undergraduates in Phoenix, Arizona, and nonfiction writing to soldiers and their families near Fort Drum in upstate New York on the Canadian border.
