Author's Note Excerpt
The Dust Bowl was the worst man-made ecological disaster in U.S. history and scientists fear it could happen again soon. Most Americans believe the root cause was a particularly bad drought. Though Mother Nature certainly played a part in the disaster, the Great Plains had weathered centuries of droughts before the rains stopped in the 1930s. They did not start again for almost a decade. During that time, two and a half million people left their farms—a group that literature tends to focus on. But I was interested in the stories of people who stayed behind: what they endured and how they survived.
So how did it get to the point where millions of tons of dirt was flying thousands of miles across the country? During World War I, Allied forces needed American agriculture to feed the troops, so the U.S. government urged farmers to “Win the War with Wheat” and grow more in the Great Plains. Farmers new and old took up the cause, despite the fact that the area was semiarid and prone to harsh droughts. (In fact, several sources jokingly refer to the Plains as “The Great American Desert” because there were few natural trees and little precipitation.) But advertisements promised that “Rain follows the plow,” and there was a (now debunked) theory that human settlement and agriculture would bring humidity to the region. For a while, it looked plausible. The 1920s were a lush time of plentiful rain and bumper crops. Europe’s slow recovery after the war and reliance on American grain meant the price of wheat soared. Some Great Plains farmers made a fortune. Opportunists also jumped in and so-called “suitcase farmers” bought land, planted wheat, and returned to their city homes until harvest time. Over five million acres of native grassland were torn up to grow wheat during the “Great Plow Up.”
Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed and the price of wheat plummeted. To compensate, farmers plowed up new land to grow even more wheat, trying to reap the same profits. But then the rains stopped, the crops failed, and some farmers (especially the “suitcase farmers”) abandoned their fields, leaving them bare and ready to blow.
Starting in 1931, dust storms blew millions of tons of topsoil across the Great Plains, suffocating livestock, destroying crops, and sickening families. The most devastating dust storm of the decade was two hundred miles across and two thousand feet high on April 14, 1935, a day known as Black Sunday. Winds gusted at sixty-five miles per hour, the temperature dropped more than thirty degrees as the thick dust blocked the sun. More than three hundred thousand tons of topsoil blew away. A newspaper reporter who witnessed the storm nicknamed the area the dust bowl, comprising the southwest corner of Kansas, the southeast corner of Colorado, the northeast corner of New Mexico, and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas.
[…]
I wrote this book to remind us of the mistakes our ancestors made, and to stop the mistakes we’re already making. Research published in 2020 found that climate change is causing more long heat domes and waves like the ones that triggered the storms in the thirties. In May 2023, a dust storm caused by soil erosion killed seven people and injured over thirty others. In June of that year, scientists calculated that the earth’s axis is tilting because of groundwater extraction. Human activity is causing the Colorado River to dry up and the Mississippi to flood. All over the globe, more communities are suffering from wildfires and other climate extremes. As Grant Haynes urges in the story, we can’t keep fighting against the land, we’ve got to work with it.
Though the rains eventually did come back in 1939, the Dust Bowl didn’t end on its own. Hugh Hammond Bennett, considered the “father of soil conservation,” provided instrumental leadership through the USDA Soil Erosion Service, which is now called the National Resources Conservation Service. The Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration planted thousands of trees as windbreaks through the Shelterbelt Project. The government sponsored soil conservation classes and paid farmers to take up more sustainable farming techniques. Once again it will require the combined efforts of many people and governments to create a more sustainable future for ourselves.
This novel centers around fictional twins, Joanna and Howe Stanton. It details their experiences on Black Sunday and the days leading up to it. Though their unnamed town is fictional, it is based on an amalgamation of other towns in the area. I studied countless maps, listened to oral histories, and read the accounts of those who lived in Oklahoma’s Cimarron and Texas Counties. I have tried to keep everything as accurate as possible, including following the weather station reports, but did have to alter some details and timelines for the sake of the story. [….]
I’ve depicted Joanna’s scoliosis as close to my own experiences as possible, though I was lucky to live in the modern era when treatment was available. I was diagnosed by a school nurse during a standard screening in second grade. My parents didn’t believe it until we saw a specialist, and even then I didn’t understand. I’d never heard of scoliosis before, let alone met anyone with it. A very large percentage of my memories from the next five years involve doctor visits, MRIs, and X-rays. Every night, my parents used giant Velcro straps to secure me into a Charleston Bending Brace that went from my armpits to my mid-thighs. It overcorrected me in the opposite direction of my curve, helping to reduce it, though I will never be “healed.” I was in frequent pain and dropped out of sports and dance, though, unlike Joanna, no one forced me to do so. I’d always been an active kid, but my back pain caused me to doubt my abilities. It wasn’t until a doctor got me into the right physical therapy program that I found my strength and courage. By seventh grade, I was able to take up horseback riding—a long-held dream and one I never would have thought possible after my diagnosis. Yes, it was hard. Yes, there were days that hurt a lot and I cried. Yes, I still loved riding.
Readers, please don’t let one thing about you fully define who you are. Find what inspires your strength.
Alyssa Colman
Where Only Storms Grow
© 2025
So how did it get to the point where millions of tons of dirt was flying thousands of miles across the country? During World War I, Allied forces needed American agriculture to feed the troops, so the U.S. government urged farmers to “Win the War with Wheat” and grow more in the Great Plains. Farmers new and old took up the cause, despite the fact that the area was semiarid and prone to harsh droughts. (In fact, several sources jokingly refer to the Plains as “The Great American Desert” because there were few natural trees and little precipitation.) But advertisements promised that “Rain follows the plow,” and there was a (now debunked) theory that human settlement and agriculture would bring humidity to the region. For a while, it looked plausible. The 1920s were a lush time of plentiful rain and bumper crops. Europe’s slow recovery after the war and reliance on American grain meant the price of wheat soared. Some Great Plains farmers made a fortune. Opportunists also jumped in and so-called “suitcase farmers” bought land, planted wheat, and returned to their city homes until harvest time. Over five million acres of native grassland were torn up to grow wheat during the “Great Plow Up.”
Then, in 1929, the stock market crashed and the price of wheat plummeted. To compensate, farmers plowed up new land to grow even more wheat, trying to reap the same profits. But then the rains stopped, the crops failed, and some farmers (especially the “suitcase farmers”) abandoned their fields, leaving them bare and ready to blow.
Starting in 1931, dust storms blew millions of tons of topsoil across the Great Plains, suffocating livestock, destroying crops, and sickening families. The most devastating dust storm of the decade was two hundred miles across and two thousand feet high on April 14, 1935, a day known as Black Sunday. Winds gusted at sixty-five miles per hour, the temperature dropped more than thirty degrees as the thick dust blocked the sun. More than three hundred thousand tons of topsoil blew away. A newspaper reporter who witnessed the storm nicknamed the area the dust bowl, comprising the southwest corner of Kansas, the southeast corner of Colorado, the northeast corner of New Mexico, and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas.
[…]
I wrote this book to remind us of the mistakes our ancestors made, and to stop the mistakes we’re already making. Research published in 2020 found that climate change is causing more long heat domes and waves like the ones that triggered the storms in the thirties. In May 2023, a dust storm caused by soil erosion killed seven people and injured over thirty others. In June of that year, scientists calculated that the earth’s axis is tilting because of groundwater extraction. Human activity is causing the Colorado River to dry up and the Mississippi to flood. All over the globe, more communities are suffering from wildfires and other climate extremes. As Grant Haynes urges in the story, we can’t keep fighting against the land, we’ve got to work with it.
Though the rains eventually did come back in 1939, the Dust Bowl didn’t end on its own. Hugh Hammond Bennett, considered the “father of soil conservation,” provided instrumental leadership through the USDA Soil Erosion Service, which is now called the National Resources Conservation Service. The Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration planted thousands of trees as windbreaks through the Shelterbelt Project. The government sponsored soil conservation classes and paid farmers to take up more sustainable farming techniques. Once again it will require the combined efforts of many people and governments to create a more sustainable future for ourselves.
This novel centers around fictional twins, Joanna and Howe Stanton. It details their experiences on Black Sunday and the days leading up to it. Though their unnamed town is fictional, it is based on an amalgamation of other towns in the area. I studied countless maps, listened to oral histories, and read the accounts of those who lived in Oklahoma’s Cimarron and Texas Counties. I have tried to keep everything as accurate as possible, including following the weather station reports, but did have to alter some details and timelines for the sake of the story. [….]
I’ve depicted Joanna’s scoliosis as close to my own experiences as possible, though I was lucky to live in the modern era when treatment was available. I was diagnosed by a school nurse during a standard screening in second grade. My parents didn’t believe it until we saw a specialist, and even then I didn’t understand. I’d never heard of scoliosis before, let alone met anyone with it. A very large percentage of my memories from the next five years involve doctor visits, MRIs, and X-rays. Every night, my parents used giant Velcro straps to secure me into a Charleston Bending Brace that went from my armpits to my mid-thighs. It overcorrected me in the opposite direction of my curve, helping to reduce it, though I will never be “healed.” I was in frequent pain and dropped out of sports and dance, though, unlike Joanna, no one forced me to do so. I’d always been an active kid, but my back pain caused me to doubt my abilities. It wasn’t until a doctor got me into the right physical therapy program that I found my strength and courage. By seventh grade, I was able to take up horseback riding—a long-held dream and one I never would have thought possible after my diagnosis. Yes, it was hard. Yes, there were days that hurt a lot and I cried. Yes, I still loved riding.
Readers, please don’t let one thing about you fully define who you are. Find what inspires your strength.
Alyssa Colman
Where Only Storms Grow
© 2025
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