DeAnna Knippling

I have lost my ability to shrug off the cold. As a kid, the cold wasn’t just cold, it was part of my identity:  I am better than you because I can endure the cold.  South Dakota has a lot of sour-grapes values:  I can’t have nice things, so I’m better than people who can. […]

The early cats in my life are going to be really hard to write about, so I’m going to skip it for now: right now you just get the dogs. Vague Red Dog Sorry, vague red dog.  I only vaguely remember you:  you must have been an Irish setter.  You belonged to Chris, maybe.  I

  I’m tempted to write this one like a horror story, but that would miss the point. The boogeyman lived inside an old, disconnected furnace inside my great-grandmother’s house, just across the gravel road from my grandparents’ house.  It wasn’t until just this morning that I realized her house was a mother-in-law house:  probably because

Lee’s Corner, population 3, marked on all car-trip-sized South Dakota maps at the corner of Highways 34 and 50.  The farm lies a few miles straight north along the old Star Route road. In rural areas, a lot of the time the post office used to be a farmer’s wife in a station wagon driving from farm to

I wanted to write about my step-grandmother Chris, but I can’t, not as such — I’ve written about her twice now and have come up with little more than a physical description and a big mess. So instead let me tell you about the table at Grandpa’s house, which I hope will cover what I

Sometimes places strike me and they end up getting a kind of fantastic layer painted over them, although it feels more like I’m carving and discovering the true shapes underneath than adding something. Minneapolis, for example, is a noir fairyland constantly hovering on the edge of freezing.  Fat flakes descend through the orange-and-green haze of

We moved back from Cheyenne when I was two — Dad got out of the Air Force and went back to the farm. The Farm. The older and further removed from the farm I am, the less saying “I grew up on a farm” means.  Even Lee has no idea what it means to grow