Permission to pursue a passion

NORTH HAMPTON, Mass. — While growing up on her family’s western Massachusetts dairy farm, Emily Everett dreamed of writing for Hoard’s Dairyman one day. Instead, Everett has built a career that includes writing novels about her life experiences. Her debut novel, “All That Life Can Afford,” was Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club pick for April 2025.

Everett grew up on a 30-cow dairy farm near Williamsburg, operated by her parents, Alan and Terry. The farm has been in her father’s family since the 1800s. Her father had planned to continue the family’s tradition of pig farming, until her mother convinced him to get cows.

The farm was a family farm in every sense, Everett said.

“Most of my life it was just us, and my sisters and I were basically the only help,” Everett said. “When we did hire someone who helps us a lot, they became part of the farm, part of the family. My uncle, my dad’s brother, helped us a lot, too. Our whole extended family continues to help with haying.”

The dairy herd was dispersed in 2017, as Everett’s mother battled cancer.

“My mom basically spent the final year of her life making sure the cows went to really good homes,” Everett said. “I did the last milking with my niece, who was too young to even remember it. It was one of the saddest days of my life, watching the cows loaded onto trailers.”

The Everetts were founding members of one of the area’s first local milk cooperatives, called Our Family Farms, she shared.

“We were just a small farm, and my parents were among the first ones to start a local food movement around here when I was a kid,” Everett said. “It started out as maybe six or seven local farms that began pooling their milk together to advertise and sell it locally. This area is a college town, a little bit of a hippie area, so people love to buy like that, so it was kind of a big thing. Now everybody gets their milk and ice cream and what not from the farms and farm stands, but back then it was a pretty new idea.”

Everett recalled watching the adults in her world attempt to improve their marketing position.

“It was a lot of work,” Everett said. “Farmers are very independent and don’t always work well together, but I’m really proud of them for doing that.”

The entire family was involved in promotion efforts to support the fledgling cooperative.

“I remember as a kid, we would take a cow in the trailer, usually one of my Guernseys because they were so sweet, and go to Whole Foods or the local grocery stores,” Everett said. “We’d hand out milk and cookies, just to make people aware of the brand. I remember feeling very proud of the cows, the milk they produced and our family’s farm.”

That same sense of pride and accomplishment came from working side by side with her sisters, doing chores, Everett said.

“Our job was always feeding calves as soon as we were old enough,” she said. “Then we started taking care of the youngstock and the yearlings. Eventually we all learned to milk, but we never got as good at it as my mom. She was the best milker. My dad did most of the tractor work on the farm and a lot of the vet work.”

The animals they cared for became woven into their identity, Everett said.

“My mom got into Ayrshires first, so that’s where my older sister started,” Everett said. “Then I got into Guernseys and my twin sister got Jerseys, so our herd got more and more colorful over time. My Guernseys didn’t make a lot of milk. They were sweet cows, but we used to joke they made enough for your cereal.”

Like many dairy farm youth, 4-H played a pivotal role in Everett’s childhood.

“Showing in 4-H was really huge for me,” Everett said. “A lot of my best friends through that time in my life were 4-H friends. My twin sister and I were also very into doing 4-H dairy quiz bowl, and we even competed at World Dairy Expo and won that one. The first time I ever flew on an airplane was going to Iowa for the National Holstein Convention contest.”

During the free time she had growing up, Everett said she was typically reading.

“My sisters and I were big, big readers,” Everett said. “I think some of it came from growing up with your parents always busy working on the farm, and we didn’t have cable television or anything. That was before the internet, so you read to entertain yourself when you weren’t doing chores.”

The stories they read prompted Everett and her twin sister to explore their own creativity.

“Even when we were little kids, we were both already writing little stories and stuff,” Everett said. “For a long time when we were kids, I think we both thought we would be farmers, but my sister is now a journalist and I’m an editor and fiction writer.”

As she began to realize that she was not necessarily cut out to make a living dairy farming, Everett considered ways to meld together the things she enjoyed most in life.

“I started thinking about ways to combine farming and writing,” Everett said. “That’s why I always thought I would write for Hoard’s Dairyman. I used to write for the local newspaper and would cover the fairs and that kind of thing. In school, teachers told me I was a good writer, so I thought, ‘Oh, I’m going to write books someday.’ As I got older, it felt very presumptuous to think I was going to write books, that it wasn’t a very practical career path.”

While she had learned practicality growing up on the farm, Everett said she also learned the value of following her dreams.

“My parents had other career opportunities they could have pursued, but they always wanted to farm, even though it was hard financially,” Everett said. “They could have done other things that would have been much more lucrative, but they chose to farm. My dad was an agricultural engineer and he used to design combines in Canada. There were good years and bad; we had a big vegetable garden. It’s not like we were poor or anything, but they really had to mind the books all the time, making sure the grain bill got paid after the milk check came and that kind of thing.”

Everett took those lessons to heart.

“It was a lot of work for not a lot of payoff, but it was something they loved,” Everett said. “I’ve talked to a lot of people who grew up working class and their instinct was to get as far away from that as possible by getting a well-paying job. I feel like my sisters and I didn’t go that direction, because it was always clear to us that our parents had pursued passion over financial success, and that made us understand it was an OK thing to do, too.”