Under the Henfluence

An immersive blend of chicken-keeping memoir and animal welfare reporting by a journalist who accidentally became obsessed with her flock.

Since first domesticating the chicken thousands of years ago, humans have become exceptionally adept at raising them for food. Yet most people rarely interact with chickens or know much about them. In Under the Henfluence, culture reporter Tove Danovich explores the lives of these quirky, mysterious birds who stole her heart the moment her first box of chicks arrived at the post office.

From a hatchery in Iowa to a chicken show in Ohio to a rooster rescue in Minnesota, Danovich interviews the people breeding, training, healing, and, most importantly, adoring chickens. With more than 60 billion chickens living on industrial farms around the world, they’re easy to dismiss as just another dinner ingredient. Yet Danovich’s reporting reveals the hidden cleverness, quiet sweetness, and irresistible personalities of these birds, as well as the complex human-chicken relationship that has evolved over centuries. This glimpse into the lives of backyard chickens doesn’t just help us to understand chickens better—it also casts light back on ourselves and what we’ve ignored throughout the explosive growth of industrial agriculture. Woven with delightful and sometimes heartbreaking anecdotes from Danovich’s own henhouse, Under the Henfluence proves that chickens are so much more than what they bring to the table.

Brood

Battling weather, predators, and bad luck, the nameless narrator of Brood struggles to keep four chickens alive while juggling a life filled with family and friends, love and loss, and the uncertainty of a future that may not look like anything she imagined.

Tove Danovich is a freelance journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Ringer, Backyard Poultry Magazine, and many others. Her articles have been included in Year’s Best Sports Writing and Best Food Writing. She lives in Portland, Oregon with one husband, two dogs, and an ever-changing number of chickens. The flock's Instagram @BestLittleHenhouse is more popular than hers.

Jackie Polzin lives in West St. Paul, Minnesota, with her husband and two kids. Her first novel, Brood, won the Sue Kaufman First Fiction Prize and the L.A. Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Her writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Literary Hub, and The Idaho Review.

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