Author Margie Sarsfield’s ‘got the beet,’ and it’s really creepy
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Writer Margie Sarsfield has a confession. She’s not sure how to pronounce the title of her debut novel.
“I call it ‘BAY-tah vull-GAH-riss’” she said. “Somewhere out there, there’s probably a scientist who knows Latin who’s saying, that’s not how that’s pronounced, but that’s how I pronounce it.”
It’s the Latin name for the beet family.
Sarsfield admits when she left Brooklyn a little more than a decade ago to take a beet harvest job in Minnesota she was just looking to make money. She said before her trip to the Red River Valley, she’d never made the connection between sugar beets and the little white packets she saw at the diner.
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“I just thought sugar comes from sugar cane. I did not realize that there were sugar beets and that very much of the sugar that we eat day to day comes from that.”
And she definitely didn’t understand how many beets there are in the world, especially in October in Minnesota.
“By the end of the harvest, you know, there were just beets everywhere on the side of the road. They had just been popping off trucks left and right, and it was just the sheer magnitude of the industry and the amount of people employed and the amount of money involved was beyond my imagining before I had started.”
Every year that would be an estimated 20,000 people, generating close to $5 billion.
Like Elise, the central character in her novel, Sarsfield worked in a piling station near Crookston, Minn., just one of many dotting the valley. The novel is set about 15 years ago.
“There are bits of Elise which are me as someone who was once a 20-something millennial Brooklynite,” said Sarsfield. “She’s going with her boyfriend Tom. The relationship is very functional. I believe he’s a little bit mediocre, but aren’t we all? Yeah. And she’s not going into it as badly as she will come out of it.”
Like Elise Sarsfield lived at a workers’ campsite near the piling station.
“Everyone at my campground was this kind of, like young punk people who lived in RVs and did these kind of intermittent like labor jobs, and then would live off that money for a couple months. And we definitely formed a little community, almost like a Coachella, or like a festival or Burning Man, or something just as dirty and muddy.”
The crews worked 12-hour shifts building mountains of beets. They use a machine called a piler. Sarsfield describes it as looking like the Loch Ness Monster. The beet piles freeze in the cold weather, sitting until it's their turn for processing.
She reads from the book as Elise joins a ragtag group of workers for an all-too-quick orientation and safety speech from a guy called Jeff.
“The most important thing is that when the trucks are loading their beets stay away from them,” Jeff said. “You wouldn’t want to be too close if they tip over.”
He takes some of the workers to show them how to operate the piler. As he leaves he tells the others to go inside to keep warm.
“‘Cause right at eight, we’re starting for real,” Jeff promised. “Sound good?”
“Judging by the response from the workers on the ground,” Sarsfield writes “it sounded terrible.”
It’s cold, boring and occasionally dangerous work, what with moving trucks and other heavy equipment. For money-strapped Elise, who’s also dealing with a recurring eating disorder, and an increasingly troubled relationship with her boyfriend, it’s a perfect place to fall apart.
“She starts hearing things,” Sarsfield said. “Potentially voices coming from the piler and from the beet pile but really, I think the disintegration starts when she starts feeling a kind of profound abandonment.”
Elise notices people disappearing from the campsite where the workers live. Yet no one else seems concerned.
“She begins to lose her mind, I think,” said Sarsfield. “Or not. Everything might actually be happening as well. So either she's losing her mind, or the world is losing its mind. Or both.”
Margie Sarsfield says she loves horror: horror movies, horror stories. But she doesn’t believe horror has to be scary.
She says she doesn’t write scary books.
“My greatest hope was that people would read it and be creeped out and a little bit disturbed and feel a little bit of dread. And that has largely been the feedback I’ve gotten is that it’s dreadful in a in a way that I was going for.”
So dreadful in a nice way?
“Yeah,” she replied.
Looking back she said when she traveled to Minnesota to pile beets, she did not think it would result in anything literary. Maybe a couple of poems, or a short story.
“I had friends who were very artistic that I went with who wanted to do documentaries about it and talked about, you know, all the different ways that they could make art out of the experience. But during the actual experience, the last thing on my mind was making art. Clearly, it just took some years to foment, and eventually it got art out of it. But at the time, it was just about surviving and getting through the early 20s malaise and, you know, insecurities that I was dealing with.”
In the years since she has lost touch with all of those people, but now hopes they will hear about the book and reconnect.
Sarsfield wants to capture a moment in history, to create a generational snapshot of mental illness, struggle and labor.
While she was writing “Beta Vulgaris” she returned to Minnesota and worked a few shifts at a piling station. She wove details into her book like how dirt dropping from the piler felt on her hard hat. She felt a little nostalgic.
At least until the freezing wind blew again.
