Jerry Apps Releases New Work on Farm Life

In his latest collection of thoughtful and entertaining essays, Simple Things: Lessons from the Family Farm, celebrated rural storyteller Jerry Apps reflects on the simple things that made up everyday farm life. Apps holds these items up to the light for a closer look, plumbing his memories for the deeper meanings and sharing the values instilled in him during his rural boyhood in the 1940s and 1950s.

Apps is a professor emeritus of agriculture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Wisconsin Academy Fellow. The former UW-Extension agent has written more than 40 fiction, nonfiction and children’s books, many of them on rural history and country life. He has co-created four documentaries about farm life and country living with Wisconsin Public Television, including the Emmy Award-winning A Farm Winter with Jerry Apps, and has won several writing awards.

Simple Things is the fourth in Wisconsin Historical Society Press’s collection of rural-life memoirs by Jerry Apps. The series includes The Quiet Season: Remembering Country Winters, Whispers & Shadows: A Naturalist’s Memoir, and Never Curse the Rain: A Farm Boy’s Reflections on Water. For more information visit wisconsinhistory.org/whspress.