Osborndale Ivanhoe was a bull who became an unlikely celebrity. He defied expectations 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—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.

Praise

Carla Panciera’s Barnflower, stories about a girl growing up on a Rhode Island farm who helps her parents, especially her famous father, Aldo, raise show cows, brings to mind such writers as Alice Munro and Elizabeth Strout. Finely observed, with every detail feeling both resonant and true, the book explores mysteries of class and family and love. The deeply human stories also reflect on the relation of the human world to the animal. The cows and dogs have their own individual character, while also embodying knots of human feeling.

Underneath it all is a father’s love for his daughter. “I have no idea what it’s like out there,” Aldo says to Carla when she expresses doubts about leaving the farm, “But I know you. None of those kids are tougher than you are.” I don’t know if any writer is tougher than Carla Panciera, who looks unflinchingly at those she loves, honoring both them and the art of storytelling. Barnflower, a 30-year labor of love, is a book that you want to give to others because you know they will like it—whoever they are.

— J.D. Scrimgeour, author of AWP Award-winner Themes for English B

In this luminous collection of stories drawn from her childhood on a Rhode Island dairy farm, poet Carla Panciera creates a love letter to her father, a man who became so famous among dairy farmers that he was even profiled in Esquire magazine. These unforgettable stories are by turns touching, tender, and hilarious, and provide a profound look at a lost American way of life.

— Holly Robinson, author of Chance Harbor and Folly Cove