Dan Needles
Many Canadian readers are familiar with Dan Needles's popular books, Letters from Wingfield Farm and Wingfield's Hope. Since 1984, he's also penned seven plays and mounted 4,000 performances across Canada and the United States with actor Rod Beattie starring as his protagonist newbie farmer, Walt Wingfield.
Now, like the entire Stars War DVD collection, there's Wingfield's World, a novelization of all seven Wingfield plays. The author uses an 18th-century epistolary format: Rural newcomer Walt Wingfield writes to his small-town Ontario newspaper.
There's a broad appeal to Needles's fish-out-of-water tales. His setting for the Wingfield Farm letters is rural southern Ontario, within two hours of manic Toronto. This is where Needles's alter ego, urban-stockbroker-turned-farmer Walt Wingfield, lives on a 100-acre farm in fictional Persephone Township, among a multigenerational gaggle of wing-nut inhabitants.
Wingfield's neighbours comprise a mix of age groups, co-existing in an 150-year-old Scottish Presbyterian settlement. "Every August, the Women's Auxiliary gets together and holds a dance to break up the harvest. They hire a one-lung orchestra from Lavender and wax the floor of the Orange Lodge for the occasion. A general amnesty is declared on Catholics and the pictures of King Billy crossing the Boyne are retired into the loft to avoid offending anyone."
This is the cultural setting for the Squire, a stoic, octogenarian ex-farmer, Don, a middle-age dairy farmer, Freddy, a middle-age bachelor farmer-auctioneer-hoarder – with more grassy areas to drag auction detritus onto than he'll ever have time to restore – and Freddy's hillbilly twentysomething nephews, Willy and Dave.
When Wingfield initially runs up debt, his helpful new neighbours suggest that he sell off his livestock. But he's already named them and grown too connected to their quirks to see them end up on someone's supper plate.
Needles's smartest plot device in his urban-rural split saga is to have Wingfield marry a local woman, Freddy's sister Maggie, which gives Walt more acceptance. When Wingfield finally gets comfortable in his adopted community, he decides to run for council, but he is warned off by neighbour Freddy, who pragmatically explains: "It's not that people wouldn't agree with what you have to say. It's just that you're from the city. They won't even consider you."
Needles covers all of the standard rural archetypes: ancient rural feuds "that date back to the Crusades," the "Evil Eye" culture (folk wisdom), a real estate developer/urban lawyer antagonist who wants to subdivide a farm for condos, and at least one loyal border collie, the wily Pookie, who has a biting feud with one of the hillbilly nephews.
Wingfield's World even plays with the rural shun, which is carried on by rural people with more endurance and zeal than a golf and country club could ever bother to maintain. Professor Burns and his wife, a retired, ex-urbanite couple who move into Persephone Township, build a "passive solar geodesic energy self-sufficient New Earth" home. But they may as well be cross-dressers at a Progressive Conservative rally.
Difference, like all rural communities, is not tolerated in Persephone Township, and you have to know your place. When Professor Burns earnestly writes a letter to the local newspaper objecting to a new factory hog barn, Needles nails it, accurately portraying the naive urban newcomer who receives a hog's head in his rural mailbox for this condescending faux pas.
Wingfield's World is rural romance, not the harsh reality of a real fish out of water, where too much truthiness can get you in trouble with your new rural friends. Needles, also a rural resident, has his central character successfully navigate the newcomer territory by making Wingfield the butt of most of the jokes. Wingfield is both Bob and Ray – straight man and fop.
Next time you're brooding in your postage-stamp condo pondering a move to the pastoral countryside, read the cautionary – but very funny – Wingfield's World instead.
D. Grant Black is a freelance writer and author of Saskatchewan Book of Musts: The 101 Places Every Saskatchewanian Must See . He lives in rural Saskatchewan with writer Patricia Dawn Robertson and their border collie muse, Laddie.