INTERVIEW by Leslie Lindsay: Muriel A Murch, Author of Harvesting History While Farming the Flats
Today, while perusing the riverwalk art festival in my town, I wandered into an artist’s booth filled with pieces inspired by nature. Barns and fields. Dirt roads, orchards. The artist was a self-taught electrician who decided he needed something ‘more,’ something other than being a nameless employee. He had a handful of business cards, each contained a glossy image of one of his many works. I was drawn to the one of a farmhouse and barn, a pastoral scene. Maybe that’s because I live outside Chicago, in a town that has grown into a burgeoning suburbia, but is dotted with the occasional farmhouse and barn. I regret I didn’t purchase his art, but my walls are full.
This is something I think Muriel A. Murch would appreciate, the merging of art with nature, complex with simple. Just because it’s ‘simple,’ though, does not mean it’s ‘easy.’ Weaving together Hollywood and agriculture, her upbringing in England, she chronicles food, family, farming, and friendship in such a way that feels not just full of life, but artful and poetic.
Organized in thirteen chapters with subheadings, plus a robust photo section at the end of the book, Harvesting History While Farming the Flats (Sybilline Digital First; March 2025), is a gorgeous, thoughtful book inside and out. A former nurse-midwife, Murch writes about her love of land, community, organic farming, the independent film scene, and so much more, it’s all juxtaposed by the sometimes troubling movement of urban development and Hollywood, which is anything but uncomplicated.
As I reach back to my own ancestral roots, I was so moved by Murch’s opening lines:
“Migration, moving away from one home to another, is sometimes voluntary, and sometimes forced. Quite often, we don’t know where home is until we are there.”
This was something I identified with. My ancestral family hails from the rolling hills of Kentucky, where they’ve farmed for well over two-hundred years. I feel a deep connection to the land, but also: beauty, hard work, and simplicity.
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Aggie & Walter Murch — Family, Farming & Filmmaking
Kitchen Sisters Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva have produced a beautiful love letter to and about Muriel and Walter Murch on their show. This podcast is based off of their interview in the summer of 2025 via City Lights Books and a tour the archives in Dr Worley’s “office” at Blackberry Farm. Have a listen and subscribe to their show to keep up-to-date with their incredible work.
Muriel “Aggie” Murch and her husband, Academy Award winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch, have lived on Blackberry Farm in Bolinas for some five decades, along with their children, chickens, and horses. The two just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary.
They both have newly published books, and are out on the circuit telling their stories that stand at the intersection of the organic farming movement and the independent filmmaking movement of the 1970’s.
Director Francis Coppola, Walter’s longtime collaborator, describes his new book, Suddenly Something Clicked, as “a vast encyclopedia of cinema and everything that can be touched by it.”
Director Phillip Kaufman said this about Harvesting History While Farming the Flats: “Blackberry Farm is Aggie Murch’s Walden Pond. She made existence sustainable, rebuilt life over and over, helped spirits enter the world and gently helped them leave. She’s got the gift.”
We have known and admired the Murches for some four decades and asked if we might do a story to celebrate this moment of love and publishing and graciously they said yes.
Produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva, in collaboration with Nathan Dalton, Brandi Howell and Hannah Kaye. Mixed by Jim McKee.
Special Thanks to City Lights Bookstore and Peter Maravelis.
Funding for our stories comes from listener contributions to The Kitchen Sisters Productions, The Robert Sillins Family Foundation, The Every Page Foundation, The Susie Tompkins Buell Foundation, The Buenas Obras Fund, The TRA Fund, Barbara & Howard Wollner, Michael Pollan & Judith Belzer, Bonnie Raitt, and you.
Our deep thanks to our community for your spirit and for supporting the stories.
The Kitchen Sisters Present is part of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent podcasts that widen your world.
Writtten and read for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side.
Sally came back from across the street, “Granny Turriff has pulled up a chair and has her feet in the fridge.”
“Well that seems sensible. It is hot today.” replied her mother summing up the family consensus from their kitchen on the small street in the village where I grew up. The temperature must have reached the mid 70s at that time in the early 1950s. Granny Turriff was not my Granny, but she was one of the grannies who lived all around, in the house, or across the street at a time when families stayed close and watched out for each other. There was no air-conditioning then – maybe a breeze from an open back door would rise – stirring the still air – and putting your feet in the fridge was a pretty reasonable way for an elderly lady living alone to stay cool.
London Temperatures for Saturday June 28th
This last week with the heat wave now official – three days of temperatures above 30 degrees celsius, the mid-80s Fahrenheit – I’m remembering Granny Turriff as I open our fridge door to reach for the freshly made jug of iced tea and the cool air swirls out towards me. The temperature rests in the mid 80s and is 10 degrees hotter that when Granny Turriff put her feet in the fridge. Low level fridges are long gone so no one will see this piece of eccentricity – when practical might be considered just beyond sensible – and such actions could be judged as inappropriate behavior. There are warnings of the ‘extra’ deaths that this heatwave will bring to the vulnerable; the very young, the elderly and the infirm. The news details the pressures this will put on the already stressed health service and we, the very young, the elderly and the infirm, are advised to stay at home, rest and drink plenty of water. It is almost our duty to do so. We will keep the curtains and blinds drawn down to keep out the sun. We will water our plants in the evening time and we will rest.
The heat wave crosses Europe and given these times an almost manageable concern – what is it that puts global warming into manageable while Palestinian families are bombed, Ukraine battles on struggling to reclaim land stolen by Russia and now the mad man in American makes Dr. Strangelove look sane?
War, once again there is war. War for The United States of America is almost as big an industry as the entire US agricultural section. With these blasts, like aggressive bowel evacuations, of another attack on a sovereign country – whether one likes the regime or not – I look around searching for a place of reason. There are the “No Kings” demonstrations around the United States and even in Europe and other countries. The leaders of Canada, Mark Carney and Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum cradle us in hope while the American Democratic party sits about pinging their phones and deleting emails. The American barrel of sanity looks pretty empty.
But this week, in a small organization, I found a firm steadfast remembrance of the horror of war.
Nurses, old, ofttimes retired are joined by young ones as they group together, state by state to form Nurses Honor Guards. The NHG now has over 300 chapters in all 50 states and continues to grow. Jeanie Bryner is a nurse, a friend, a poet and a power-house member of the Nurses Honor Guard of Eastern Ohio. When asked, the honor guards gathers to perform Nightingale Tribute services for nurses. Like in the military, it consists of the Final Call to Duty. The Nightingale Lamp is lit in the nurse’s honor and when a triangle is rung the nurse’s name is called out three times as a request to report to duty. With the last silence, after her name is called, the nurse is announced as retired and the lamp’s flame is extinguished. She is relieved from Duty.
Relieved from Duty Display from an Honor Guard.
Last week three chapters of the Nurses Honor Guard from Ohio took buses to Washington D.C. where they had been invited to place a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. And that makes some kind of sense. The little I know, but something, from the strength of the grass-rooted down to earth poetry of Jeanie Bryner – the poetry of rural people, the patients, the nurses who care for them from the heartland of America – these are people who know the loss of war. It is probable that at least half of those women nurses have suffered some deep loss from the wars fought within their lifetimes – never mind their fathers before them. I found the video of the wreath laying ceremony on line – of course I did – and like so many at that ceremony there were tears in my eyes watching these nurses, there for their fellow fallen sisters and brothers, lovers and fathers.
Ohio Chapter of the Nurses Honor Guard at Arlington Washington D.C.
In 1995 Ohio State University published the first of a series of Anthologies on Nursing. ‘Between the Heartbeats Poetry and Prose by Nurses’ was edited by Judy Schaefer and Cortney Davis. As many of us as could traveled to Washington DC. where The American Nurses association was holding its annual meeting. But the ANA refused us permission to present or read at the convention. Instead we found a bookstore that took us in. I don’t remember how many other people came to that reading but we were an enthusiastic and proud group of nurse writers. As we gathered after the reading, mostly meeting each other for the first time, there was one nurse I particularly remember. Above her slacks she wore a brown, checked, gingham, short sleeved shirt. She had read her poem about Vietnam. We asked her if she had visited the new Vietnam Memorial wall. “Oh no.” She replied. “It is too soon.” In our silence we understood we would never know the horror she had witnessed. While the Ohio nurses gathered at the tomb of the unknown solder we all hold the world closer, praying for peace and the seeming unceasing wars to end.
This has been A Letter from A. Broad. written and read for you by Muriel Murch.
As dawn broke in years gone by, newspapers would be delivered by a bicycling schoolboy earning a few US dollars or English shillings. The papers were carefully gathered to be opened at breakfast, pages turned with American coffee or English tea – and toast. The news, the gossip, the sports – in green – before finally the cartoons and crossword puzzles were found on the final pages. Now those youngsters are out of a job as television and social media bring everything to us with a click of a button or a swipe of a forefinger. With a nine-year old grandson, I am having a refresher moment of comic book education. It is a good primer for what is playing out on the large and small screens in our hands.
The Cover of Leo Baxendale’s ‘A Very Funny Business’
The story lines are remarkably similar; a bully struts into the Oval Office with all his pals lined up behind him. A new boy comes in – quickly mocked for failing to be dressed the same as the bully and his pals. The new boy sits quietly, tries to reason with the bully and holds his own before leaving abruptly, as if chased from the room, but in reality he has left on his own terms. A few weeks later, the bully picks on another visitor. He too held his own with calm dignity. Now, weeks later, both of these men have achieved their aims. President Zelensky has demolished a third of the Russian bombers that were set to attack the Ukraine while, as South African President Cyril Ramaphosa left the White House, his smile reinforced for both black and white South Africans that his diplomacy skills are a strength the whole country is grateful for. This week the German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, traveled to Washington DC to report back to the European Union. He too saw the symptoms of madness and stayed calm. As the rough-housing erupts in the White House we wait for the next installment to be drawn on the page.
While the comic book gets put aside – I find a gift tucked into my email inbox. A note from Barbara Bos who runs the Woman Writers, Women’s Books website would like a piece on the background of Harvesting History, While Farming the Flats and how I came to write it. This exercise is perfectly timed to answer a question that I pushed aside before it even had a chance to form. Did I answer her question? I’m not sure but this is some of what I wrote about that time in 2014.
Bees are busy in the Borage
It is midday. As many mornings as I can, I spend outside. Farm chores call out: ‘Over here, over here’ with raised wands of weeds, brambles and fences to care for. Fridays are sacrilegiously saved, even called ‘My Friday Farm days’. But I can only manage three morning hours before my body tells me to halt and I come back inside. Clean up, and enjoy a small snack before taking my place, sitting at the Bistro table, beside the French doors, in the main dining room.
The Farm Dining room is quiet now
This is a quiet room, saved now for big occasions with family or friends, but in this solitary time I take it for my own. The stillness calls me and I welcome it putting my pen to the page bringing immediate and long-past memories together, taking time to talk to the page.
Journal books are on the table. The little blue one – whose innards I change each year – records the past day, the day today, and the things still to do. Lists abound in that book while very occasionally an Idea or Question is also captured. When the three pages of warm-up notes are completed like piano scales, the little blue book is put aside. Two bigger journals, also with soft covers, have big spaces and faint lines. I can only open these when I am alone, for the pen may find memories of its own, spilling its ink over the pages onto the table, and I am frightened that I cannot scoop them back again. My pens also are important. Somedays I pick and choose, wanting something different, possibly a useful pen, even a pencil, or a beautiful one with free flowing ink, gliding across the page like a superb dancing partner. I have a fountain pen, a gift we bought from Rome one Christmas for my mother and which she used for the rest of her life. Sometimes when I write with it, I feel my mother’s encouragement – now flowing more freely through that pen. Each entry begins as a letter to you, whoever and wherever you are, or even a chat, as if we were sitting side by side in a cafe.
Between the Heartbeats. Poetry and Prose by Nurses, edited by Cortney Davis and Judy Schaffer
I start writing like this, knowing that much of it will not find its way into the final piece. I accept that scribbling is OK, good, it is the compost, heating up the heart, trusting the practice, the craft that hones thoughts into words until they become uniquely mine. There is no final version – until maybe it is published and given to you – a reader. Writing becomes us, as slowly, one gathers a body of work behind one. I remember the first time that I received a postcard back from a Submission, (with a capital S) It was for Mr Tims Morning and Cortney Davis wrote on a card, “Thank you for this excellent work.” She probably wrote that on cards for all the work she and Judy Shaffer collected for their first Anthology of Nurse writing Between the Heartbeats. I still have that note.
Now, two books later, it happened again, Steve Wax had read some of my essays published in ‘The West Marin Review’, then, in a huge cinematic reunion sought me out to say, “I read your essays and they are beautiful”. And so the harvesting began again.
The isolation imposed by Covid and age, helped me turn inward in earnest as I carried those farm journals to London and old memories began to sit beside the farm memories from – well – memory. Only when the essays laid themselves alongside of each other, jostling back through the-time-before, like the loose and falling pages of old photo albums, which must – one day – all be digitized. But until that time I would write about – that – those – times, remembering them in words and stories. Sometimes the words rise like yeast-laden dough, as the memories crowded on the page become kneaded together with imagination.
What does it take to do that? Perseverance, putting the words on the page, taking them up again, moving them around before pushing them back down. There is a reason why in bread recipes we are instructed to knead the dough for 10 minutes until it is soft and silky under our hands. That is how we want our words to be, soft and silky, gliding along the page and into your imagination.
This has been A Letter From A. Broad written and read for you by Muriel Murch
Libraries carry the past forward to the present and into the future. The knowledge and truth stored safely from the Library of Alexandria through to the likes of Wikipedia and The Internet Archive, and all libraries, are the creations of our minds and those looking to control the narratives of history are oft times fearful. It is not that long ago that the burning of books took over from the burning of witches. The concept of an open and accessible library is an ancient democratic idea, and for the destruction of democracy access to knowledge and art must be curtailed.
How much of a surprise was it then when on May 8th Carla Hayden received an email from the White House’s Presidential Personnel Office.
Carla Hayden as head of the Library of Congress
“Carla, On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as the Librarian of Congress is terminated effective immediately. Thank you for your service.” A spokesperson for the Library of Congress confirmed that the White House told Hayden she was dismissed. The reason given by the White House press secretary, Caroline Leavitt, was that Hayden ‘did not fit the needs of the American People’. Leavitt, a young and ambitious Republican, reminds me too much of Reese Witherspoon’s character in Alexander Payne’s 1999 film Election which follows Tracy Flick in her race for high school president in Omaha, Nebraska. Leavitt comes from New Hampshire and, like Tracy Flick, she too has learnt to use the media, adjusting her facts to suit a hoped-for narrative. Fact-checking at The Library of Congress is not likely to happen soon, for a culture war has begun and the Library of Congress, along with National Public Radio and other media are making fine early targets.
The Library of Congress was founded in 1800 and during the 1812 war burned by British troops. But precious documents had been saved and after the war ended, past-president Thomas Jefferson gave his own library to help restock all that was destroyed by the British on the condition that the library was to be free and accessible to all, sharing knowledge of the diversity and culture that already made up America. His library held copies of the Quran and Hebrew Bible which exposed Jefferson’s beliefs in the freedom of religions which was not then – as is not now – despite the pledge of allegiance – a universally-accepted truth in America. With the firing of Hayden this month we have a return to that history.
A lithograph of the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812.
At the moment there is a stand-off in which the Library Staff and their legal counsel have refused admittance to the President’s team without congressional approval. We hold our collective breath as the lasso circles around the Kennedy Center, National Public Radio, and libraries large and small.
In spring and autumn, this little community of Primrose Hill holds a festival of self. The main street is closed off. Vans are parked and stalls pitched on both sides of the road. Food stalls bring ethnic foods from all corners of London, hand-made boutique gifts are laid out under twinkling light, bright colored clothes hang high, swaying in the sunny breeze. Big ferris wheels and spinning teacups twirl around, flinging children up into the air with screams of delighted fear.
Around and around they go.
And after all that excitement almost everyone is in need of a bathroom, a cup of hot builder’s tea, cookies and a book. Then they pour into the library – which is strung with ancient bunting – which offers – cheaper than anywhere else – all of the above in their biannual Cake and Book sale.
For weeks leading up to this event, the library kitchen has been storing donated books. Like any community organization the kitchen becomes the store room – or the store room becomes the kitchen. We can hardly get in to haul out the books and begin sorting them into categories: history, fiction, non-fiction, biography, art, cookery, travel, children’s, philosophy, poetry and all else. Are there enough books to make plays and short stories a category? It’s a delightful dilemma. The days before the sale sees volunteers sorting, sifting books into crates with the aforementioned categories. On Saturday we admit partial failure, but on Sunday the full crates of books get hoisted onto the tables and, as the doors open and the first cups of tea are poured, we begin again in earnest. Every book is second-hand and priced at £1 except for the large and colorful cook-books, the only ones that are £2. They are interesting to wonder about. Which ones have been outgrown, or the families have developed other tastes. What is the story behind this almost perfect copy of ‘The Joy of Cooking’? Was there an illness in the family, was it given as a wedding present by a very old-fashioned aunt or did a divorce tear the fabric of that relationship before the first casserole came out of the oven?
So very many books
Titles spring out, surprising, delighting and amazing us. A leather-bound copy of Mao’s Little Red Book, is tucked into self-help. There are two almost new copies of both Barack and Michelle Obama’s autobiographies. Obviously readable but a one-night stand and not save-able to take up so much space on the bookshelf.
People come in – in waves – and we watch who comes and what books they choose. An early-bird Muslim woman combs through the boxes. She picks out seven books, one on the destruction of Palestine and I slip out, “Oh good one” before offering to find her an old bag in the kitchen. I tote up her spendings, £1 a piece – that’s £7- “I want to make a donation to the library she says. “£3 to bring it to 10?” I ask. “No £50” she replies and I wonder at the price of, and gratitude for, kindness. Later another woman has ‘The Art of the Deal’ in her collection and I wonder out loud again (when will I learn to be quiet) “You’re buying that?” “I want to understand more.“ she replies. I pray for her compassion as I ask her if she has seen ‘The Apprentice’ film. ‘No’ she replies “But I will look for it after reading this.”
It’s a wonderful mixed crowd drawn from the community and beyond. A single gentleman spends at least an hour circling the crates before choosing one book. £1 changes hands and he disappears back into the crowd. But he just went to the cake stall for a cup of tea, a piece of cake and a sit-down at the round table. Half an hour later, refreshed, he is back and buys four more books. It is a good day for him. There are several single visitors, using this day, this time to be among other people – a kind of friendly cafe without any obligations – cozy and safe from the carnival atmosphere outside and the world beyond.
There are two lower tables filled with books for children, all within easy reach of little hands. Parents lean over too, choosing this or that book. A family comes bouncing in and the sisters pounce on two collections. “Daddy Please?” and their father is so happy that they want books he smiles his “Yes” to us all. Pregnant mothers sit down at the round communal table, sipping their hot tea resting for too-brief a moment, while their toddlers eat brownies and flit through the pages of their new-to-them purchase. Maureen and I take turns sweeping the floor.
This has been A Letter From A. Broad written and read for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side. Tech support by murchstudio.com
Beatrice presenting her book at the Feria del Libro in Buenos Aires
Taking a night train tonight from London to Glasgow. A new adventure for The Bell Lap and I as we go to the Royal College of Nursing Congress and Exhibition 2016. Wisepress is featuring The Bell Lap at 11.20 am through noon on Tuesday June 21 (stand number A9). I have no idea what to expect – a big convention hall and masses and masses of people wandering about. Hopefully some folks will have tired feet and want to sit down and listen to a story or two. Thinking of Beatrice when she presented her book on the A-line subway in Buenos Aires in 2014.
Muriel Murch 