Love, Sex and 4-H

Love, Sex and 4-H
220 Pages
ISBN 978-0-8143-4078-3

As the 1960s dawned in small-town Michigan, Anne-Marie Oomen was a naive farm girl whose mother was determined to keep her out of trouble—by keeping her in 4-H. In Love, Sex, and 4-H, Oomen sets the wholesomeness of her domestic lessons in 4-H club from 1959 to 1969 against the political and sexual revolution of the time. Between sewing her first dish towel and finishing the yellow gown she wears to senior prom, Oomen brings readers along as she falls in and out of love, wins her first prize, learns to kiss, survives her first heartbreak, and makes almost all of her clothes. Behind all these homebound moments, the sixties shape the background of unrest and the backdrop to a newfound wildness.

Anne-Marie Oomen

About Anne-Marie Oomen (Traverse City, Michigan Author)

Anne-Marie Oomen

Anne-Marie Oomen is author of the memoir Love, Sex and 4-H, (winner, Next Generation Indie Award for memoir); Pulling Down the Barn, and House of Fields, (both Michigan Notable Books); An American Map: Essays  (Wayne State University Press); and a full-length collection of poetry, Uncoded Woman (Milkweed Editions).  She is represented in New Poems of the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry, edited Looking Over My Shoulder: Reflections on the Twentieth Century, an anthology of seniors' essays funded by the Michigan Humanities Council. She has written seven plays, including award-winning Northern Belles (inspired by oral histories of women farmers), and Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern, 2012 winner of the CTAM contest.  She adapted the meditations of Gwen Frostic for Chaotic Harmony, a choreopoem.  She is founding editor of Dunes Review, former president of Michigan Writers, Inc., serves as instructor at the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing at Pine Manor College, MA; Interlochen College of Creative Arts; and appears at conferences throughout the country. She and her husband, David Early, built their home near Empire, Michigan. www.anne-marieoomen.com