On Sunday, the May X put on the show Map of My Kingdom. It was written by Iowa’s Poet Laureate, Mary Swander, and deals with the issue of land transition. Even before the play, the idea of land transfer had been talked about a lot. The reason for this is with the aging population of farmers there will be a lot of land in Iowa trading hands. This was the reason why Practical Farmers of Iowa commissioned Mary Swander to write the play in the first place–to help start the conversation within the family. This conversation can be so hard to have with ones family because it deals with two topics that are hard to talk about: money and death. The play was in my mind an excellent way to start that type of conversation with a community because it gave examples of times where the family was prepared and had talked about it and then avoid some of the worst case scenarios. Not only would this show be prevalent to farming communities, but it would also be good to see with most families no matter what they do for a living and how to deal with the tough situation.
After the play and a talk back with Mary Swander, there was a panel who talked about how they experience and how they dealt with the situations. The three people on the panel were Rev. Dr. Matthew Rueger, Mr. Ron Pepples, a lawyer., and Mr. Chris Brinkmeyer, a banker. All three had very interesting things to say and gave more real world answers about how to go about this.