LIESE GREENSFELDER

SEBASTOPOL --

Copperfield’s Books is delighted to welcome Liese Greensfelder to Sebastopol for the launch of her autobiography - .

Discussion followed by a Q&A and book signing.

This event is free and open to the public.

A summer job turns serious when a young woman takes the reins on a remote farm—and learns far more than how to herd sheep

In May 1972, Liese Greensfelder arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese to startling news: Johannes, the farmer who hired her for the summer, had just been hospitalized after a stroke. Could she please watch over his place for a month or so, until he got back on his feet? Twenty years old and with no farming experience, Liese was dropped off the next day at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above the magnificent Hardanger Fjord—with 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse, and a Norwegian herding dog to care for.

Armed with a command of Danish that enabled rudimentary communication, Liese began learning from neighbors who spoke an ancient Norwegian dialect—how to feed the animals, milk by hand, and supervise her first lambing. The farm was run in the old way: horses and wagons instead of tractors, haymaking in the rain, and hikes into the mountains to check on the sheep that ranged free over those wild peaks all summer. And, she was quick to discover, the farm was on the brink of ruin, for Johannes was a heartless man who had abused his animals and neglected his buildings and equipment for decades.

Although her employer had alienated his neighbors, they immediately welcomed the American newcomer and offered her help. As “a month or so” stretched to a year and Liese struggled for the survival of the farm, she joined this tight-knit enclave of farmers, learning their stories and history, adopting their dialect, and growing intimately familiar with the grass-based farming practices that had sustained them for generations.

From moments of levity, such as sampling a neighbor’s fruit wines, Christmas parties, and skiing; to soul-battering challenges, including the directive to K*ll a fox, sending sheep to slaughter, rotten silage, and vicious weather; to the yearnings of a young woman awash in a sea of masculinity, Accidental Shepherdis a candid account of Liese’s year in a remote farmhouse. Confronted with dangers and obstacles for which she was utterly unprepared, she tells a story of remarkable resilience and records the fascinating but rapidly vanishing traditions of the community that took her in.

Author: Liese Greensfelder is a journalist and editor who writes about biology, earth sciences and medicine. After graduating from high school in Mill Valley, she lived in Denmark for a year, and then in Norway for three, where she ran a sheep farm, studied at ag school, and managed a mess hall aboard a Norwegian coastal freighter. In 1975, her book about her first six months on the farm was published in Norway and became a best-seller there. (Hardanger—her kjem eg!) With a B.S. and M.S. in agricultural sciences from UC Davis and a graduate degree in science communication from UC Santa Cruz, she has worked as a county agricultural advisor, spearheaded an agricultural development project in the Guatemalan highlands, and held the position of public information representative in the news offices of UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and UCSF. She and her husband, a furniture-maker, live off-grid in rural Nevada County.

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