“When are you going to write your book?” is a question I get asked a lot, and I consider it fair
game since I often tell others I have helped over 80 people with their books.
“I have written eight of my own books” I reply.
“Yes but your biography, your story,” they insist. I don’t know if they are really asking or just
trying to get me to quit encouraging them to write.
As it turns out I have been planning what I call my last book for several years, and the time alone
because of Covid 19 has actually got me taking steps to making it a reality. The plans have been
underway for at least three years, and there is a leather bound journal that holds the notes to my last
book. I don’t plan on dying but it will be the last book I publish because I want to include as much of my
story as I can squeeze into it.
Farmers of the World is the working title, and while that is a pretty grandiose title I have every
intention of toning it down when it goes to the publisher. I have no intention of it going commercial, it
will be a very limited run perhaps 300 copies that will be given to friends when they visit. I will be out of
stock by the funeral.
Yes, indeed I have made plans for my last book. It will be a 10 x 13 inch coffee table book,
leather bound and about 193 pages of content – full colour pictures through out with text of a story from
each of the 68 countries I have visited. It will not be an almanac of agriculture because there are lots of
those.
It will be a story about the people of the countries I visited. Some of the best advice I ever got
came from Dr. Clay Gilson who told me understand the people and your material will not be dated, write
about the things you see and they will be out of date in two years.
The stories will be about the farmers I met. The fellow who I met at a Clydesdale Show in
Scotland the birth place of the breed where it is now and endangered species. They sold their breeding
stock to the US and got caught short, now the breed is an endangered species.
The story about Korea and how I was invited to a dog farm by a feed salesman on the very day
that I had been told by my guide that Koreans no longer eat dog because North Americans found it
offensive during the Olympics so the practice was curtailed. The feed sales man showed me different and
explained that dog meat was though the closest to human in composition and there fore easiersto digest so
it was used for patients who had a flesh wound.
Those are the kind of stories that will be in Farmers of the World, and the end sheets will be an
oil painting by a friend, Gail Sawatzky, of a lone grain elevator that was two miles from the Kletke
homestead. The book will be dedicated to my grandfather and father who farmed the land at Hope Farm.
Yes, the plans are in place for my last book. What has surprised me is when I share these details
people ask how they can get one…who knew?
You asked? Now you know, I am working on it.