Growing Up, From Utopia To Reality In 'Arcadia'   by Lauren
Groff  Hardcover, 291 pages | purchase  Purchase Featured Book
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"And so this book came as an act of willpower. I was trying to
will the world into caring and will myself into being happy,"
Groff says.  She found herself fascinated by the way people keep
trying to form Utopian communities, even though so many of them
ultimately fail. So she began to research Utopian societies, and
eventually settled on two: Oneida, a 19th century commune in
upstate New York, and The Farm, founded in Tennessee in the
1960s.  The Farm is still in existence. In an interview, founder
Stephen Gaskin says its founding was driven by the members' need
for land. "We said we gotta go have land. We gotta be together
so we can work. We got to try to live our future that we have
talked about for so long, and we left to go to Tennessee."
Groff says she borrowed some details from The Farm to create her
own fictional