Lin•strom, n.: in Swedish, a name evoking a brook or stream (strom) flowing through blue flax (or linseed, lin) blossoms; thus, a landscape marked by ongoing change shaping an old field, liquid movement inscribing tradition and feeding the roots of plants both horticultural (Linum usitatissimum, cultivated for food and fiber) and wild (Linum bienne, native to the Mediterranean and western Europe). Rooted and searching, transient and local. Sometimes considered anachronistic.
John Linstrom is a writer, community builder, editor, and scholar. He grew up in South Haven, Michigan, hometown of the Progressive Era horticulturist, rural reformer, and ecospheric visionary Liberty Hyde Bailey. After attending Valparaiso University and its interdisciplinary honors college, Christ College, to earn a BA in English and Humanities, John moved to Iowa for an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University. He began researching Liberty Hyde Bailey’s life and work while a student and composition instructor at Iowa State, at which time he also started working at Bailey’s childhood home, now the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum, during the summers, quickly rising from intern, to curator, and finally to executive director of the small nonprofit museum. His literary nonfiction book manuscript explores the layers of history in that small town and the marginal landscape that surrounds it by delving into the experiences of his and Bailey’s lives and the hundred-thirty years that separate them.
In 2014, John left the Bailey Museum to pursue a PhD in English and American Literature at New York University, which he received in 2021. In 2020/2021, he was an NYU Public Humanities Fellow at the Museum of the City of New York, followed by a year as a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in English at New York University and then two years as a Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate Humanities and Social Justice at The Climate Museum in New York City. In 2024, he began a new chapter as Assistant Professor of English at Centenary College of Louisiana. He now lives in Shreveport with his wife and daughter.
John’s debut poetry collection, To Leave for Our Own Country, was published by Black Lawrence Press in April 2024. The book explores questions of place, identity, labor, and family, all against the backdrop of the climate crisis and the linked eco-social phenomenon of the American small-town diaspora. His scholarly manuscript, Demolish the Fence: Ecospheric Writing and Interspecies Fieldwork from the Margins of the Progressive Era, integrates critical autoethnography and literary scholarship to explore the ecospheric writing that emerges from the interspecies fieldwork practices of a diverse set of writers during the U.S. Progressive Era (1890-1929), and it investigates the ways in which the engaged work of these marginalized thinkers disrupts the narratives of western scientism and might inform current discourses surrounding climate change in the Anthropocene.
As the series editor of The Liberty Hyde Bailey Library for the Comstock Publishing Associates of Cornell University Press, John built and maintains The Liberty Hyde Bailey Project, an online resource hub related to that series and to Bailey studies generally. His editions of Bailey’s works include The Nature-Study Idea and Related Writings (Cornell UP, 2023), The Liberty Hyde Bailey Gardener’s Companion (coedited; Cornell UP, 2019), and The Holy Earth (Counterpoint, 2015; foreword by Wendell Berry). His edition of Bailey’s book The Outlook to Nature is forthcoming.
John’s poems have recently appeared widely in journals such as Northwest Review, The Christian Century, North American Review, The New Criterion, and Atlanta Review; his nonfiction has appeared in The Antioch Review, Newfound, and Prairie Gold: An Anthology of the American Heartland; and his scholarship has recently appeared in PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association and The Sower and the Seer: Perspectives on the Intellectual History of the American Midwest (Wisconsin Historical Society, 2021).
At Centenary, John has taught courses in “Creative Nonfiction Writing,” “African American Literature,” “Literature and Environment,” “Literary Theory and Criticism,” and the freshman core class, “Credo.” While a postdoc at NYU, he taught “Introduction to Literary Studies,” “Major Texts in Critical Theory,” and the “Creative Writing Capstone in Fiction” in the English Department. Previously, he taught courses in creative writing and (eco-)composition while an MFA student at Iowa State, he taught a graduate course in research writing and methodology at his undergraduate alma mater in 2014, he worked as a TA for Core and English undergraduate coursework at New York University, and in the summer of 2018 he taught his “Literature and Environment” course at NYU. He has also done educational work with kids aged 6-11 through the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum’s summer program “Bailey’s Budding Naturalists” and through the museum’s other educational outreach efforts, including support of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Outdoor Learning Center at North Shore Elementary School, which was begun in 2010 by his inspirational mother and fourth-grade teacher Rebecca Linstrom. He taught outdoor poetry writing to Girl Scouts at the Comstock Girl Scout Camp while there as the Bailiwick Writer in Residence sponsored by AgArts. He led virtual field trips with K-12 students in New York City for the Museum of the City of New York on topics ranging from the history of graffiti art in New York City to the Movement for Black Lives today.
Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr. (1858-1954) was an influential agrarian philosopher, advocate of “nature-study” in primary schools, “Father of Modern Horticulture,” bestselling author of over 70 books and editor of some 140 more, Chair of Theodore Roosevelt’s national Commission on Country Life, pioneering plant explorer and photographer, and the founding Dean of the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University. His writings have influenced writers as diverse and influential as Marianne Moore, Aldo Leopold, Pearl Buck, and Wendell Berry. You can read a thumbnail sketch of his fascinating life story, which John wrote for the Bailey Museum, here, or check out the 1956 biography by Philip Dorf, Liberty Hyde Bailey: An Informal Biography, for a fuller profile.
John Linstrom 