Liese Greensfelder in Conversation with Tom Killion: Accidental Shepherd

Join Mesa alum Liese Greensfelder and Tom Killion at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station as they discuss her memoir, Accidental Shepherd: How a California Girl Rescued an Ancient Mountain Farm in Norway

A summer job turns serious when a young woman takes the reins on a remote farm—and learns far more than how to herd sheep.

In May 1972, Liese Greensfelder arrived in the small Norwegian town of Øystese to startling news: Johannes, the farmer who hired her for the summer, had just been hospitalized after a stroke. Could she please watch over his place for a month or so, until he got back on his feet? Twenty years old and with no farming experience, Liese was dropped off the next day at a centuries-old mountain farm at the end of a dirt road high above the magnificent Hardanger Fjord—with 115 sheep, two cows, one calf, a draft horse, and a Norwegian herding dog to care for.

Armed with a command of Danish that enabled rudimentary communication, Liese began learning from neighbors who spoke an ancient Norwegian dialect—how to feed the animals, milk by hand, and supervise her first lambing. The farm was run in the old way: horses and wagons instead of tractors, haymaking in the rain, and hikes into the mountains to check on the sheep that ranged free over those wild peaks all summer. And, she was quick to discover, the farm was on the brink of ruin, for Johannes was a heartless man who had abused his animals and neglected his buildings and equipment for decades.

Although her employer had alienated his neighbors, they immediately welcomed the American newcomer and offered her help. As “a month or so” stretched to a year and Liese struggled for the survival of the farm, she joined this tight-knit enclave of farmers, learning their stories and history, adopting their dialect, and growing intimately familiar with the grass-based farming practices that had sustained them for generations.

From moments of levity, such as sampling a neighbor’s fruit wines, Christmas parties, and skiing; to soul-battering challenges, including the directive to kill a fox, sending sheep to slaughter, rotten silage, and vicious weather; to the yearnings of a young woman awash in a sea of masculinity, Accidental Shepherd is a candid account of Liese’s year in a remote farmhouse. Confronted with dangers and obstacles for which she was utterly unprepared, she tells a story of remarkable resilience and records the fascinating but rapidly vanishing traditions of the community that took her in.

Liese Greensfelder is a freelance writer focusing on medicine, biology, and agriculture. She has worked as a farm advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension and as a science writer for UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley, and she initiated an agricultural development project in the Guatemalan highlands. In 1975, an epistolary account of her first six months on Johannes’s farm became a bestselling book in Norway. She lives in rural Nevada County, California, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Liese is a 2007 Mesa alum.

Tom Killion is an artist, author and historian. The rugged scenery of Marin County and Northern California inspired him from an early age to create landscape prints using linoleum and wood, strongly influenced by the traditional Japanese Ukiyo-ë style of Hokusai and Hiroshige. He completed his PhD in African History at Stanford University and taught at Bowdoin College. He has published several books of his art including “Fortress Marin”,  “The Coast of California” and “Walls: A Journey Across Three Continents,” which featured landscapes of Africa. Tom also published several books with Gary Snyder including “The High Sierra of California”, “Tamalpais Walking,” and  “California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Poetry, History and Prints.” Killion is currently based in Point Reyes and working on landscape prints including treescapes, coastal and mountain views.

This free event is presented in partnership with Point Reyes Books.