In 2013 poet Sarah Heady went out to southeastern Nebraska for a writing residency at Art Farm, a program started by a woodworker who’d grown up in that farmhouse. While introducing her to the place, he invited Heady to poke around the attic, which was filled with turn-of-the-20th century magazines and newspapers. It was July on the prairie, and it was sweltering. “So I went up there and spent a long afternoon sweating and looking through these old magazines from the teens and twenties,” Heady says.
Mostly, she told me, she was drawn to the stacks of a magazine called Comfort, “which was like a Ladies’ Home Journal for rural women.”
Touted as “the key to happiness and success in over a million and a quarter homes,”[1] Comfort was a mail-order magazine published from 1888 to 1942 by Gannet & Morris out of Augusta, Maine. Primarily a means to advertise Gannet’s Giant Oxien, a snake oil cure-all, Comfort increased its circulation ten-fold in the first six years of publication, making it the first magazine in America to surpass one million subscribers.
The pages of the magazine were filled with articles and ads about domestic life, in some ways much like those that fill magazines marketed to women today: advice columns, beauty tips, and recipes, with a tinge of early-internet-esque information sharing. “People would write in with questions about what was wrong with their chickens or share recipes for food or fertilizer for the kitchen garden,” Heady says. More surprising for today’s readers might be the ads for things like pessaries, mechanical devices used to keep one’s uterus in place to recover after a prolapse, most common after a woman has had multiple vaginal births.
Heady left Art Farm with photographs of many pages of Comfort magazine and other similar periodicals. When she got home, she started experimenting with constructing poems from this found language and, eventually, many other primary and secondary sources about the settlement of the Great Plains. These experiments, interspersed with other lyric pieces, eventually became her second book, Comfort.
