Death by Violin

Ledbetter’s writing is often about people on the small farms of Southern Illinois, Nebraska, and the Palouse in Southeast Washington who have lost their ability or inclination to talk to each other, having been beaten down by harsh weather, or poor crops. John Van Doren has called his work “a report of a vanishing world that was always achingly inarticulate and therefore of violent heart. “ There is humour of course, as there is in any place in any time, but it is often short-lived, and a feeling of terror is never far beneath the surface. And throughout, there is that strange farm silence that covers land and the people of the prairies—places Ledbetter both feared and loved.