Yellow Springs News Online

Ed Davis’s new book based on Whitehall effort

Ed Davis with his scrapbook of the Whitehall Farm sale. The Whitehall event is the basis of his new novel, “The Measure of Everything,” which comes out next week.

When Yellow Springers came together in the winter of 1999 to save Whitehall Farm, they brought to a halt the threat of sprawl and development. After raising almost a million dollars to help purchase a conservation easement on the village’s northern edge, local residents won a landscape that will stay forever green.

Local writer Ed Davis has spent the intervening years writing a novel loosely based on the community’s save-the-farm effort. In a country increasingly overrun by urban sprawl, he believes, the Whitehall event stands out as an unusual and inspiring story of community activism and environmental awareness.

Next week Davis’s new novel, The Measure of Everything, will be published by the Plain View Press of Austin, Texas. Davis will read from the book at the Epic Book Shop on Friday, Dec. 9, at 7 p.m.

The Whitehall Farm event colored villagers’ lives in a variety of ways, and for Davis, the effort proved life-changing, he said in an interview last week. A novelist and poet, Davis had always been the observer and chronicler of others’ actions. But in the Whitehall effort, he recalled, he found himself compelled to act.

“I call it the most significant event of my adult life,” Davis said. “It was that miraculous.”

When the legendary Whitehall Farm went up for sale, Davis wrote on his Web site, www.davised.com, he along with many others began holding rallies and meetings, attempting to raise the money needed to purchase easements on the farm. According to the Web site, “The fight proved what can happen when a community is willing to sacrifice blood, sweat, tears and money to maintain its values.”

The title of Davis’s new book comes from the lesson learned by Billy Acorn, the novel’s protagonist, who organizes the effort to save a 1,000-acre farm near the fictional town of Shawnee Springs, Ohio. In the book, Acorn reconnects with his rural heritage and realizes, Davis said, that “man is not the measure of everything. The earth itself is.”

Early on in his writing, Davis said, he decided that his book would not be a roman a clef but rather a work of fiction, and the characters were created from his imagination. Transforming a real-life event into fiction doesn’t just mean changing names and identifiable features, Davis wrote on his Web site.

“Transformation means it’s a process of complete alchemy, putting what really happened through the fire so that it emerges reborn as an entirely new thing: not memoir or journalism, but fiction,” he wrote.

The main characters in The Measure of Everything are Billy Acorn, an unemployed organizer and sometime womanizer who comes to a deeper understanding of himself and of his own past, and Seth Abel, a mysterious woman with a secret who is a newcomer to Shawnee Springs. Other characters include Billy’s best friend, who initially questions the farm project but later signs on; an irascible and wealthy professor at the local college; Billy’s fiery ex-girlfriend; and Seth’s troubled 9-year-old son.

As in real life, the characters are drawn to the anti-sprawl activism for complex reasons, and the book covers not only their political struggles but their emotional ones as well.

In the novel, according to Davis, “the personal and the political meet head on.”

While Davis hopes that The Measure of Everything stands as a work of literature, he said he would also be pleased if it inspired others to take action similar to that which saved Whitehall Farm.

“It can serve as a primer on how to save the land, how to love the land,” he said. “I hope it contributes to the debate.”

He said he also hopes the book presents the complexity of the Whitehall Farm controversy, and he includes in it opinions of those who support the land’s development, including farmers who need adequate financial compensation for their land and villagers who want the green space used for affordable housing.

Davis spent about five years writing the book, deciding midway to change the point-of-view character when a draft seemed not to be working, he said. After all of his effort, he said, he was discouraged when the book was rejected by about 40 agents and publishers, who all said that the topic of fighting urban sprawl wasn’t compelling enough to ground a novel.

That attitude, Davis said, “shows the state of urban sprawl in this country.”

He put the book away after trying unsuccessfully to sell it, Davis said, but in the spring of 2004 he came upon an ad in a writers’ magazine about a small Austin press that sought literature on environmental topics. The press’s editor, Susan Bright, was excited about his book, Davis said, and he has worked the past year to ready it for publication.

A professor of creative writing at Sinclair Community College for 28 years, Davis has previously published an autobiographical novel, I Was So Much Older Then, and several books of poetry. While he once hoped to write bestselling novels and still wants as wide an audience as possible for his work, Davis said that the corporate state of publishing in this country makes it difficult for most writers to sell their books.

But he learned some things marketing his first book, he said, and now believes that most of his readers will come from the readings he gives at bookstores or environmental events or through his Web site. And while he wishes the publishing industry made it easier for writers to market their work, he said he believes fervently that writing fiction is its own reward.

Writing is a spiritual process, Davis believes, and when he puts his characters through life-changing and difficult situations, he learns and grows along with them.

For instance, when the protagonist of I Was So Much Older Then healed his strained relationship with his mother, Davis said he found that the same thing happened in his own life.

“At first I wanted what everyone wants, to be on the bestseller list,” he said. “I didn’t get that but I got more.”

A lifelong observer of others’ behaviors, Davis said he found that the Whitehall Farm effort drew him for the first time to activism. He was happy to leave the speaking and main organizing to others, he said, but he found ways to be useful, such as writing fliers. One of the strengths of the Whitehall effort, he said, is that organizers encouraged supporters to offer their individual contributions in any way they could.

“I loved it that I could be a grunt,” he said. “I’m a good private in the army. I mainly showed up.”

More than anything else, Davis said, the Whitehall Farm effort gave him reason to feel positive about the country’s future.

“It gave me hope,” he said of Whitehall. “In this divisive red state-blue state alienated world, it gives me hope that good things can happen.”