Packinghouse Daughter
by Cheri Register
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 278
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0060936843
Publisher: HarperCollins
Cheri Register often tells people her University of Chicago Ph.D. really stands for "Packinghouse Daughter." The opening chapter of Packinghouse Daughter was cited as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 1996. Her work on this memoir earned a Jerome Travel and Study Grant, a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship, and grants from the Loft Literary Center and the Minnesota Historical Society. Packinghouse Daughter has won a Minnesota Book Award and an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Register's other books include The Chronic Illness Experience: Embracing the Imperfect Life (formerly titled Living with Chronic Illness: Days of Patience and Passion) and "Are Those Kids Yours?": American Families with Children Adopted from Other Countries. She has published many essays in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies, and is known for her early work in feminist literary criticism and Scandinavian literature. A writer of creative non-fiction, Register now teaches writing at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis, where she lives.
An Interview with Cheri Register
1. You begin Packinghouse Daughter with the memorable image of your father and his blue workshirt. Why did you choose to open your book with it? When I write essays, I usually begin with a particular charged moment and then explore all the themes and associations to other experiences that the moment contains. Starting with "The Blue Workshirt" allowed me to introduce myself, my family, my hometown, the packinghouse, the union, the altered relationship with my family that resulted from leaving home and going to college, the puzzling concept of social class, the clues-such as clothing-that we use to identify who we are and where we belong. Those are the essential elements of the story I go on to tell.
2. In your introduction, you say you "would rather argue against" a romantic view of labor history. Why do you think romanticization of the working class persists in the United States? I think much of the romanticism I see can be traced to historians educated in the 1960's who looked to the labor militancy of the 1930's as a precedent for their own dreams of broadscale social change. They have tended to focus their studies on periods of intense organizing and on strikes, which is not a revolutionary way to look at history at all, but parallel to tracing political history from war to war. The image of the "worker" that emerges from this focus has a raised fist. It's pretty hard to work in that position.
3. Did your account of the 1959 strike at the Wilson & Co. plant awaken any latent hostilities in your hometown of Albert Lea? The response to the book has been surprisingly and overwhelmingly positive. I get responses from both current and former Albert Leans who are eager to tell their own memories of that time, no matter what their relationships to Wilson's or to the union.
4. Were there any discoveries about yourself, your family, or your community that especially surprised you as you researched your memoir? I was pleasantly surprised to learn how much sympathy there actually was for the striking workers, or at least for the importance of job security to the health of the community. Some local businesses extended credit and delayed mortgage payments. I found letters written by prominent local citizens to the arbitration board appealing for reinstatement of the workers whom the company had "permanently replaced" with strikebreakers. Much of this was behind-the-scenes and not publicized at the time.
top of the page
