The grass beneath the American dream: Exploring the many facets of lawns
Jay Kirk’s Xfic Nonfiction Workshop this past semester focused on the American lawn—which students approached through the lenses of environmental studies, history, gender and media, veterinary medicine, and more.
4 min. read
After a semester-long deep-dive into the American lawn, students in Jay Kirk’s Xfic Nonfiction Workshop found that “lawns have taken more of a broad ideological shape than strictly grass or a small patch of grass.”
American lawns.
They evoke images of cornhole and cookouts, fertilizer and fences, and hedges and homeowners’ associations. They consume an estimated 9 billion gallons of water per day and more than 80 million pounds of pesticides annually. And they raise multidisciplinary questions about biodiversity, soil chemistry, property rights, labor and leisure, gender roles, suburbia, and who has access to the “American dream.”
They were also the topic of this spring’s Xfic Nonfiction Workshop, an undergraduate course in which students produce written and multimedia works for Xfic, Penn’s experimental nonfiction literary journal.
Journalist and author Jay Kirk, a lecturer in the Department of English, has been teaching this course since founding Xfic in 2018. But this is the first time students have collaborated on a single topic.
In teaching writing and editing, podcast production, and social media content creation, Kirk wants students to understand what makes a good nonfiction story—how it is more than simply “regurgitating information.” And with lawns, he sees an opportunity to look at the many facets of one microcosm of society.
“How can you take one of the most normalized features in our culture and defamiliarize it to see it anew, maybe even see it for what it is?” he asks.
Natalie Glasgow, who recently graduated with a Master of Environmental Studies degree, helped Kirk reenvision the course as part of Penn’s Integrating Sustainability Across the Curriculum program. Last summer, Glasgow generated potential story ideas, interviewed 16 academics and professionals across the country about what the American lawn means to them, and identified “thinking partners” across campus who could help students develop their stories.
‘Lawns are riddled with nuance’
Kirk says that during class periods, students had the third floor of Van Pelt Library set up like a magazine office, overseen by the editors: recent graduates Claire Zhang, Jules Lingenfelter, Arthi Venkatakrishnan, and Allison Li.
As a pre-med student majoring in bioengineering and biology, Zhang—who is from Kinnelon, New Jersey—says she has mostly thought about lawns in the context of biodiversity. But she wanted to explore creative writing for the first time, “and this class felt like the perfect opportunity to bridge those two perspectives.”
Her main piece used data visualization to look at the role of lawns in urban heat islands, discussing the environmental tradeoffs—such as water consumption and loss of biodiversity—but also the role they play in cooling urban environments. Zhang, a student in the Vagelos Integrated Program in Energy Research, got assistance from architecture professor Dorit Aviv and engineering professor Lorena Grundy.
Zhang says the course has taught her about the cultural and symbolic role of lawns in American society. “From hearing about my classmates’ pieces, everyone has such a different relationship with lawns,” she says. “I’ve learned that we can’t classify lawns as just a good or bad thing—lawns are riddled with nuance, and that’s what makes them such an interesting subject.”
Approaching the subject of lawns in a different medium are recent graduates Asher Zemmel and Noah Greer, childhood friends from Manhattan who started the podcast “Thorns in Your Side” for this class. Arthi Venkatakrishnan produced the podcast, in addition to producing video interviews with an entomologist and paleontologist.
Learning “how controversial this seemingly benign and pacifist concept of lawn has been so fascinating,” says Zemmel, a politics, philosophy, and economics major and engineering minor. Greer, a political science major, says, “Lawns have taken more of a broad ideological shape than strictly grass or a small patch of grass” in their podcast—that the concept of a lawn doesn’t fit neatly into a box.
The podcast includes interviews with classmates about their projects, meditations on transcendentalism and national parks, and fun games like “Fertilizer or AI startup?” (Sea3, Yara, and Maxi are fertilizers; Rootly, Growth Loop, and LeafLink are not.)
This sort of “fun exploration and play” is what led Allison Li, a neuroscience major from Buffalo, to take this class after also taking creative nonfiction with Kirk her second year at Penn.
“We need new ways of talking about climate change that are fun and fresh and get people not feeling doom and gloom and climate anxiety,” she says.
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