Great Plains Anywhere: Taylor Brorby

Center for Great Plains Studies Author

02/22/2023 Added

49 Plays

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In this episode of Great Plains Anywhere, we talk with Taylor Brorby, the author of "Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land" and co-editor of "Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America." He regularly speaks around the country on issues related to extractive economies, queerness, disability, and climate change. Brorby is the Annie Tanner Clark Fellow in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice at the Tanner Humanities Center at the University of Utah.

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[00:00:00.150]Welcome to "Great Plains Anywhere",
[00:00:02.040]a Paul A. Olson lecture
[00:00:03.750]from the Center for Great Plains Studies
[00:00:05.430]at the University of Nebraska.
[00:00:08.280]Taylor Brorby is the author
[00:00:09.870]of "Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land"
[00:00:12.930]and co-editor of "Fracture: Essays, Poems,
[00:00:16.290]and Stories on Fracking in America".
[00:00:18.780]He regularly speaks around the country
[00:00:20.850]on issues related to extractive economies,
[00:00:23.853]queerness, disability, and climate change.
[00:00:27.330]The University of Nebraska is a land-grant institution
[00:00:30.420]with campuses and programs
[00:00:32.160]on the past, present, and future homelands
[00:00:34.830]of the Pawnee, Ponca, Otoe-Missouria,
[00:00:38.130]Omaha, Dakota, Lakota,
[00:00:40.590]Kaw, Cheyenne, and Arapaho Peoples, as well as those
[00:00:44.310]of the relocated Ho-Chunk, Sac and Fox, and Iowa Peoples.
[00:00:48.540]Well, hi everyone, I'm Katie Nieland.
[00:00:50.190]I'm the Associate Director
[00:00:51.450]at the Center for Great Plains Studies,
[00:00:53.640]and with us today we have-
[00:00:56.070]Taylor Brorby.
[00:00:57.120]I'm the author
[00:00:57.953]of "Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land".
[00:01:02.340]Fantastic.
[00:01:03.330]Thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:01:04.950]We really appreciate it.
[00:01:07.170]I figure we would start by just telling us
[00:01:09.240]kind of in general about your new book
[00:01:12.720]and maybe how it came to fruition.
[00:01:15.600]Yeah, my book is to my knowledge one of the first books
[00:01:21.420]that if you follow the 100th meridian
[00:01:24.960]sort of right through the Great Plains from North Dakota
[00:01:28.620]down through Texas, and then go over to Salt Lake City
[00:01:31.830]and up to Seattle, it's about a 13 or 15-state region there,
[00:01:37.110]and this is one of the first memoirs
[00:01:41.070]about growing up in that vast region.
[00:01:43.710]And it's very odd to be talking with you today Katie,
[00:01:47.340]and thinking, it's 2022.
[00:01:49.980]You know, if I were to say even beyond the Great Plains,
[00:01:53.460]like we can surmise I think it's pretty safe these days
[00:01:57.480]to say, well, Willa Cather was a member of the club,
[00:02:00.540]was a lesbian, and there is a memoir from North Dakota,
[00:02:05.700]the eastern part of the state, the Red River Valley,
[00:02:08.760]more about falling in love with another woman.
[00:02:13.770]It's a same sex love story.
[00:02:15.900]But if you go to that arid landscape,
[00:02:18.390]the American West as I understand it,
[00:02:21.300]and if you were to ask people, you know,
[00:02:23.047]"Name a famous piece of gay literature
[00:02:25.837]"from that part of the world," they'd probably tell you
[00:02:28.230]Annie Proulx's 28-page short story "Brokeback Mountain,"
[00:02:31.890]and then there would be a long silence,
[00:02:33.840]and that's just for fiction.
[00:02:35.820]But I really thought,
[00:02:39.270]I grew up in a world
[00:02:41.340]where I was looking for people who were like me,
[00:02:43.650]who were different in their hobbies and interests
[00:02:47.010]rather than just playing football
[00:02:50.310]or wanting to be a coal miner or a farmer or a rancher.
[00:02:54.120]And I thought, what if you have this huge region
[00:02:57.870]and there's no true story
[00:03:01.260]that reflects your existence?
[00:03:02.850]You know, if you grow up gay in Eastern Montana,
[00:03:06.210]let's say, in Forsyth, Montana, and there's no book
[00:03:11.130]about anyone who seems similar to you,
[00:03:13.410]how can you think that you're not different
[00:03:16.530]or that you can stay there, you know?
[00:03:19.920]I mean, part of how we stay in community
[00:03:21.990]is we know we have people who love us and support us
[00:03:25.320]and sort of are like us in some ways,
[00:03:29.368]and that's the huge oversight
[00:03:31.920]in the literary landscape right now.
[00:03:34.440]So that's a little bit
[00:03:35.790]of how the book came into being for me.
[00:03:38.400]It's incredible because I think of that part of the world
[00:03:43.410]as very rich in its literary landscape.
[00:03:46.500]When I think of like the High Plains of Colorado,
[00:03:49.470]for instance, I think of like James Galvin's "The Meadow",
[00:03:52.710]or in South Dakota there's Linda Hasselstrom,
[00:03:55.860]who's still alive and producing books and things like this.
[00:03:59.370]But there just seems to have been
[00:04:02.220]a real lack of nuance in that way.
[00:04:06.263]I mean, what I got outed, I said to my mother,
[00:04:10.897]"Why do you think there are so many bachelor ranchers
[00:04:14.767]"in Western North Dakota?"
[00:04:16.320]I said, "Sure, I can believe the right woman
[00:04:18.967]"never walked down the street sometimes,
[00:04:21.577]"but there also has to be more cooking out in these places."
[00:04:26.070]You know, just statistically speaking,
[00:04:28.380]it's improbable that we, you and I, Kate,
[00:04:31.350]can be talking about a huge region
[00:04:33.277]and there aren't any queer stories there.
[00:04:36.390]That's just simply not true.
[00:04:38.310]So I think for anyone listening or any writer out there,
[00:04:42.627]it's permission coming from me to say pick up the pen
[00:04:45.566]and join the cause to help make the Great Plains
[00:04:49.050]a little gayer, at least on my end.
[00:04:52.290]I grew up in a part of the world
[00:04:53.520]where everyone joked about this cake
[00:04:55.860]that we would have at Lutheran potlucks.
[00:04:57.840]It was called Better Than Sex Cake,
[00:05:00.930]and that tells you everything about the culture.
[00:05:04.170]You know, we do innuendos like that,
[00:05:07.950]but we can't talk about humans and who they are.
[00:05:11.190]Or if you're falling outside
[00:05:13.980]the spectrum of heteronormativity, you know?
[00:05:16.530]And so I think that's part of the conversation
[00:05:20.700]I've been having a lot in rural America with this book,
[00:05:25.620]is going more to colleges and universities
[00:05:28.920]that are surrounded by corn and wheat fields
[00:05:31.830]to really help people, younger versions maybe of you and me
[00:05:37.350]know, like, "Oh, wow, there are people like me."
[00:05:40.590]And of course we have the internet, we have TikTok,
[00:05:44.070]we have these ways of getting information.
[00:05:47.010]I also am concerned, though, that that can also create
[00:05:52.020]an even deeper sense of isolation
[00:05:54.180]'cause you can go, "Well, that's not where I live,"
[00:05:57.000]you know, or, "I'm not seeing that here."
[00:05:59.910]And to know that that world exists but you're not living it
[00:06:04.320]or maybe getting to it as difficult,
[00:06:06.870]I think that's also part of the conversation
[00:06:09.870]we need to be having right now.
[00:06:13.470]So can you walk maybe us through a little bit
[00:06:16.020]sort of where the book starts
[00:06:18.750]in Center, North Dakota? Yeah.
[00:06:20.497]And then kind of like the,
[00:06:21.992]just a little bit of some journey
[00:06:24.869]a little bit? Yeah, totally.
[00:06:26.070]Yeah, it's a kooky book.
[00:06:27.510]I mean, to tell my life story, we have to go way back.
[00:06:31.770]We begin 350 million years ago,
[00:06:34.470]when North Dakota was a shallow sea,
[00:06:36.900]so I feel like I'm doing great
[00:06:38.460]for being 350 million years old.
[00:06:40.980]I loved that part.
[00:06:41.813]I was like, yay, we're starting with geology.
[00:06:43.290]Right, no, I mean, I love geology.
[00:06:44.843]I mean, I learned that from John McFee
[00:06:47.940]and Aunt Rachel Carson, you know?
[00:06:49.800]Begin with some, it's always good to begin with the ocean,
[00:06:53.460]I think, and that is what the Great Plains is,
[00:06:57.270]even still today.
[00:06:58.290]It's a sea of grass.
[00:06:59.610]And so we begin there in a brief section,
[00:07:02.430]but then we get to go to my small town of 600
[00:07:06.570]where I was in the same class of 22 other students,
[00:07:13.110]six girls and 17 boys.
[00:07:16.320]So even if you were straight,
[00:07:17.880]the dating options were quite limited, et cetera.
[00:07:21.900]And it's a companied town.
[00:07:23.940]It's a coal mining town,
[00:07:25.050]and I sort of lineate my family's multi-generational history
[00:07:29.370]in the fossil fuel industry,
[00:07:32.220]coal, oil, natural gas, the whole enchilada.
[00:07:36.300]And you're just seeing a boy grow up in a landscape
[00:07:39.720]that he really loves surrounded by people
[00:07:42.480]who make their money destroying that landscape,
[00:07:45.510]but kind of have to gaslight themselves.
[00:07:48.870]They'll call it God's country.
[00:07:50.640]They love it, they think it's beautiful,
[00:07:53.250]and yet the only way they can earn their living
[00:07:56.130]because of industrial economics is by destroying it.
[00:07:59.250]And it's a traditional memoir in the sense
[00:08:02.130]that it follows the whole scope of my life.
[00:08:05.130]It's childhood almost up until the present,
[00:08:08.070]but there are themes around being,
[00:08:10.260]I'm the first in my family to finish college
[00:08:13.440]much less go to graduate school.
[00:08:15.930]It's also about my own learning
[00:08:18.750]about environmental issues and realizing,
[00:08:22.140]I knew it was unique that I grew up swimming in a lake
[00:08:25.410]that never freezes in North Dakota,
[00:08:27.540]because all lakes should, that the water was used
[00:08:31.320]to cool the coal turbine engines
[00:08:33.630]of the power plant where my mother worked.
[00:08:36.150]But it's a sort of self-awareness
[00:08:39.210]that comes to me, the narrator, the main person in this book
[00:08:44.940]of just realizing the deep impact
[00:08:47.970]that my family's legacy has had
[00:08:50.070]on the landscape of North Dakota.
[00:08:52.890]And then we go on this wild sort of around the country tour.
[00:08:58.620]We get to go to sexy places like Minnesota and Iowa.
[00:09:02.400]Then we get to go Estes Park, Colorado,
[00:09:06.090]and the Olympic Peninsula.
[00:09:07.590]And then it also, I think underneath all of that,
[00:09:12.660]between this sort of rural extractive fossil fuel
[00:09:17.160]and queer threads that are moving through this,
[00:09:20.640]there's also an exploration of masculinity
[00:09:23.820]and the risk of being male
[00:09:26.760]and the risks that males impose on the wider culture,
[00:09:31.320]especially males whose bodies look a certain way
[00:09:35.160]in terms of size.
[00:09:36.570]I mean, we all know those corn-fed boys
[00:09:39.390]that we loved growing up.
[00:09:40.770]They also can be very intimidating if you don't know them.
[00:09:45.090]And so there are things like that,
[00:09:48.090]and it's lastly I'll say a story
[00:09:51.420]that involves family trauma, as well.
[00:09:54.330]I mean, I got outed.
[00:09:56.610]I did not come out to my parents.
[00:09:59.040]And it's a story where
[00:10:02.790]that relationship isn't reconciled
[00:10:05.910]or brought back into a nice little bow,
[00:10:08.400]and so I think in many ways that can relate
[00:10:11.760]to a lot of readers because in America,
[00:10:15.000]especially during this time,
[00:10:16.290]the holiday season between Thanksgiving and New Year's,
[00:10:19.410]so many people put on a good face
[00:10:21.480]that there's no place like home for the holidays,
[00:10:24.630]and most families are more complicated than that.
[00:10:27.960]So that's a little bit of what I think I'm up to
[00:10:31.410]and what the book explores here.
[00:10:34.080]It's a book about loving your teachers too, you know,
[00:10:36.540]and prairie grasses, too, so.
[00:10:40.140]I love that.
[00:10:40.973]Yeah, absolutely.
[00:10:42.060]Well there's definitely a lot of interesting threads
[00:10:45.480]that are happening like in the region
[00:10:47.940]that are also in the book, like talking about,
[00:10:50.160]like, just, you were talking about masculinity
[00:10:52.350]and these towns, these boom oil towns that have sprung up
[00:10:56.580]and what they're dealing with in a town of mostly men
[00:11:01.860]doing all this work- Yes.
[00:11:02.880]And how that is changing the landscape and the town there.
[00:11:06.060]All of that is really interesting, as well.
[00:11:09.090]It was a,
[00:11:11.280]pardon me, fascinating time to be living in North Dakota.
[00:11:14.340]I went back home in 2014 to interview landowners
[00:11:19.230]impacted by the Bakken Oil Boom,
[00:11:21.000]and there were towns I grew up with, Katie,
[00:11:24.090]that were 1,000 people when I left in 2006,
[00:11:28.560]and that's when the Bakken Oil Boom began,
[00:11:30.840]and then eight years later, you know,
[00:11:32.400]the population was over 10,000 people.
[00:11:34.860]I mean, it was that the town was doubling in size
[00:11:37.830]basically every two years.
[00:11:39.600]And you might be listening and think,
[00:11:42.307]"Oh, you know, 10 to 12,000, that's not a huge town,"
[00:11:45.870]but if a town has expanded, you need more gas stations,
[00:11:49.050]you need more grocery stores, you need more zoning permits,
[00:11:53.310]you need better roadways and things like this.
[00:11:56.850]You might need more restaurants.
[00:11:58.380]And so that's expanding while largely men,
[00:12:03.330]most of the time when I was living there,
[00:12:05.100]nine out of 10 workers were men in the oil boom,
[00:12:09.240]are away from their families
[00:12:11.160]or are working three weeks on, one week off
[00:12:14.370]and they're very tired.
[00:12:17.280]Things were very violent.
[00:12:18.480]There were bars in Williston, like, it was just known
[00:12:21.960]you didn't go into the Buffalo Wild Wings after sundown
[00:12:25.620]in Williston, North Dakota,
[00:12:27.000]because every night the police were going to be called.
[00:12:29.640]And so it also just sort of showed I think
[00:12:33.510]the worst habits of humanity and not only what it can do
[00:12:37.980]to the landscape but what our economic models
[00:12:41.168]ask us to do or sacrifice in the name of profit,
[00:12:46.380]and that's mainly people.
[00:12:49.530]Right, the environmental thread in your work
[00:12:54.000]is also really interesting because it's, like you say,
[00:12:57.150]such a change between that pre-oil boom
[00:13:01.800]or shale fracking boom. Yeah.
[00:13:04.915]Yeah.
[00:13:05.748]And after to just not only the land
[00:13:08.880]and the people and the towns.
[00:13:10.920]All of this seems to be really connected to the region.
[00:13:16.170]It's just very interesting to watch these changes happen.
[00:13:19.650]And it's the deep history of North Dakota, you know?
[00:13:22.470]Like I've been saying on my dog and pony show,
[00:13:25.170]North Dakota is the testing ground
[00:13:26.940]of the country's worst ideas.
[00:13:28.860]You know, it begins, I mean, it begins with Lewis and Clark.
[00:13:33.090]I mean, I was taught it's a scientific exploration.
[00:13:36.270]It's a economic journey, is what it is.
[00:13:38.910]That's what the Northwest Passage is all about,
[00:13:41.820]is about grand vision of expansion.
[00:13:45.180]But then we get the genocide of Native Americans
[00:13:49.590]in the wake of that exploration
[00:13:51.330]that continues with the damming of the Missouri River,
[00:13:54.810]where reservations are intentionally flooded
[00:13:57.600]to take away agricultural river bottom land,
[00:14:01.320]especially in modern day North Dakota.
[00:14:05.040]It's not just fossil fuels and coal mining,
[00:14:08.970]and where I come from or the oil in the western part.
[00:14:12.600]It's big agriculture in the Red River Valley.
[00:14:15.300]I mean, the Red River Valley grows one thing
[00:14:17.820]and that's sugar beets, which we all love sugar.
[00:14:20.970]And then in the northern third of North Dakota,
[00:14:25.020]at the height of the Cold War, had the state seceded,
[00:14:27.718]it would've been the third most powerful nuclear nation
[00:14:30.510]because the country plunged sunflower fields
[00:14:33.750]with Minuteman missiles that were pointed
[00:14:36.360]over the Arctic ice sheet towards Russia.
[00:14:39.900]And today that's continuing for any of your listeners
[00:14:43.290]who are interested in it with carbon capture and storage.
[00:14:46.950]I would ask them to look up
[00:14:49.950]a world test site called Project Tundra,
[00:14:53.460]and that's where my book wraps up.
[00:14:55.350]I don't name the epilogue,
[00:14:57.210]I don't use the term carbon capture and storage.
[00:15:00.300]but right now, this technology that would impact
[00:15:03.690]every state in the country, but especially the Midwest,
[00:15:08.040]would be about liquefying carbon dioxide
[00:15:10.890]and pumping it underground
[00:15:12.360]where it would supposedly stay forever.
[00:15:14.730]And so North Dakota is the testing ground,
[00:15:17.460]and the Project Tundra is the world's test site
[00:15:20.610]and it happens to be my home power plant, Minnkota Power.
[00:15:24.180]So, it's an odd life to be living and writing about, Katie,
[00:15:28.700]in that way because I come from a place
[00:15:31.230]that no one's been to,
[00:15:32.640]that for all intents and purposes we don't think is special.
[00:15:36.630]But I think when I sort of take this bird's eye view,
[00:15:40.680]the history of North Dakota is the history
[00:15:42.960]of this nation's obsession with modern industrial economics
[00:15:48.900]and testing out any technology it wants to
[00:15:51.840]because it's the least visited state in the country.
[00:15:56.190]How have people reacted to your book?
[00:15:58.290]What I've found, and earlier this summer,
[00:16:00.810]I had one of those people in the class of 23
[00:16:05.280]that I grew up in that I was talking about,
[00:16:08.301]a friend of mine, one of the women emailed me.
[00:16:11.490]She still lives in this small town,
[00:16:13.950]and I thought, here it is.
[00:16:15.360]The other shoe's about to drop, you know, things like this.
[00:16:17.790]And she said, "Taylor, your book is so good.
[00:16:20.437]"I read it so quickly.
[00:16:21.727]"I'm recommending it to everyone."
[00:16:23.280]And what that showed me, Katie,
[00:16:24.630]was that I think to exist
[00:16:28.200]and to stay alive
[00:16:29.880]or to stay sane in rural America if you're living there,
[00:16:34.230]whether you're stuck, you're choosing to live there,
[00:16:36.750]you've never wanted to leave, anything like that,
[00:16:41.280]there's much we have to keep below the surface,
[00:16:43.800]just like the prairie,
[00:16:45.300]and that's why I think it's such a good metaphor,
[00:16:47.940]'cause so much is below the surface.
[00:16:50.520]And so this woman, I figured, you know,
[00:16:52.980]she's not gonna be flying a rainbow flag outside her house
[00:16:56.400]in Center, North Dakota.
[00:16:58.200]She might not even be talking about LGBTQ issues.
[00:17:02.729]I assume she's straight, but reading is such a private act,
[00:17:08.610]and what I've found is like CS Lewis said,
[00:17:12.637]"Reading lets us know we're not alone."
[00:17:15.240]And so I stereotype my hometown as one dimensional,
[00:17:19.920]not necessarily in my writing of it, but in my private life.
[00:17:23.820]Like, I have no desire to live
[00:17:25.530]in Center, North Dakota again, Katie, you know?
[00:17:28.200]But I thought, here's more here than you think, Taylor,
[00:17:33.090]because people do have to keep things private
[00:17:36.810]because they have to get along with their neighbor.
[00:17:39.060]And if people are in control of your city government
[00:17:42.060]who maybe have very different viewpoints than you,
[00:17:45.150]you're maybe not sharing your,
[00:17:46.530]maybe you are sharing your viewpoints.
[00:17:48.180]Maybe you live in a healthy dialogue,
[00:17:50.040]but so far the reaction has been nothing but positive.
[00:17:55.410]It's been actually really lovely.
[00:17:57.870]What do you hope people take from your memoir?
[00:18:00.870]Yeah, I hope people take from my memoir
[00:18:04.260]that rural America is more complicated
[00:18:08.160]and nuanced than we might otherwise be led to believe,
[00:18:12.030]that it's more than flyover country.
[00:18:14.910]It's more than a place just to accelerate
[00:18:18.540]and drive 80 miles an hour through.
[00:18:20.490]That the landscape is precious, as are people there,
[00:18:25.320]and because of the ways America makes its money,
[00:18:30.900]it's predicated that certain regions have to be sacrificed
[00:18:34.920]and that's largely the Great Plains
[00:18:37.260]and specifically rural America.
[00:18:39.827]And that I think
[00:18:43.530]the book also reveals
[00:18:45.660]that queer people are the canaries in the coal mine
[00:18:49.530]about the health of a culture.
[00:18:51.570]That if we don't feel safe at home,
[00:18:54.300]then what can we really say as a civilization, as a country?
[00:18:59.040]And so until we meet that task,
[00:19:01.620]we've got a lot of work to do
[00:19:03.660]to help our queer brothers and sisters
[00:19:06.990]and transgender family and friends that we love
[00:19:10.830]feel safe where they're planted.
[00:19:13.080]Everybody deserves to be safe, and I think this is a book
[00:19:16.260]that it might not be outright saying that it is a book
[00:19:20.820]that shows it over several hundred pages.
[00:19:25.560]Fantastic. That was lovely.
[00:19:27.300]And where can people find your book?
[00:19:28.965]Anywhere books are sold.
[00:19:31.410]I love a good independent bookstore.
[00:19:34.080]If they're not carrying it, please ask them to
[00:19:37.410]or have your local library.
[00:19:39.900]I really wrote this book
[00:19:41.250]so that libraries would be carrying it
[00:19:43.530]because I think libraries are just huge gateways for anyone
[00:19:48.330]who needs not only information, but a good story,
[00:19:52.020]and so I hope my book is on a shelf near you
[00:19:55.410]where some 12-year-old who really needs to know
[00:19:59.160]they're not alone can check it out.
[00:20:01.350]We'd like to thank Taylor
[00:20:02.400]for speaking with us today.
[00:20:04.020]Find all of our short Great Plains talks and interviews
[00:20:06.900]as videos and podcasts at go.unl.edu/gplectures.

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Great Plains Anywhere: Taylor Brorby

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