Barnflower

Osborndale Ivanhoe was a bull who became

 an unlikely celebrity. He defied e

xpectations and challenged long-established

notions of what constituted a champion

Holstein. But his fame was dependent on one

 man’s stubborn insistence that the animal

was, indeed, special. Carla Panciera spent

years with her father and his famous herd

traveling from county fair to county fair,

and answering the same questions: “Is that Aldo Panciera?” and “Are you Aldo’s daughter?” This memoir is based on the real man and his very real effort to make a living at what he loved. He was a demanding teacher and an unappeasable boss, but he was also a father who finished night milking and took his daughter for sled rides down a frozen hillside, or for a spin on the local carnival’s Ferris wheel, or who paused, plowing fields, to pick her the first wildflowers of the season. Barnflower is about a man and his work and what that life demanded of his family. Read about the bond between a father and daughter and their love for the kind of life they shared, a kind of life that is both a critical and a vanishing part of our history.

Born in Westerly, RI, Carla Panciera was raised on her family’s dairy farm. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in English and has a graduate degree in poetry from Boston University where she studied with George Starbuck and Derek Walcott.

She has published two collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines including Poetry, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review.

Her first collection of short stories, Bewildered, received the 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (Pam Houston, judge) and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Her short stories have appeared in the New England Review, Clackamas Review, Slice, and other magazines. Her short story, “The Kind of People Who Look at Art” was chosen by Junot Diaz as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories for 2017.

Ms. Panciera worked as a high school English teacher for almost thirty years. She lives with her husband, Dennis Donoghue, and their three daughters in Rowley, MA. Find out more about this author and about life on Tum-A-Lum Farm at her blogsite: carlapanciera.wordpress.com.