Southampton Native Returns Home From Lebanon To Write About The Farming Community

At 24 years old, Southampton native Alexandra Talty was living in New York, held an esteemed position in communications at Forbes magazine, had earned a bachelor’s degree from New York University, and had saved over $15,000.

A persistent dream and a desire to explore changed her life dramatically.

“I basically thought … I can either start saving for a house — or I can move to the Middle East,” Ms. Talty said in a phone interview last week.

In 2013, Ms. Talty left her role at Forbes and moved nearly 6,000 miles, to Beirut, Lebanon. Seven years later, her bet seems to have paid off: Ms. Talty became an award-winning journalist in the region.

Ms. Talty moved back to Southampton in March, her journalism career abroad now informing her writing on something more familiar: her hometown.

Ms. Talty, who wrote a series of columns about the farming community on the South Fork for The Southampton Press, has written a book, “This Good Ground: America’s Oldest Growing Community and the Sustainability of Small Farms,” that is in the process of selecting a publisher.

For five years at Forbes, Ms. Talty had worked on the business side of the media industry. But when she moved to Lebanon, she did so to work as a journalist.

When she landed, the “Syrian Civil War had just started, so there was a lot of interest in news from the region, but there weren’t a ton of American reporters,” she said. The small number of American journalists in the region “gave me a big advantage to break into the news industry,” she said, “and to be able to tell the stories I really wanted to tell.”

When she arrived in Beirut in 2013, Ms. Talty first took on a role sending “postcards” back to employees at Forbes. These postcards — short clips about life in Lebanon — launched her career as a journalist.

Just three days after moving, Ms. Talty wrote a postcard on first impressions of Beirut; it was a piece that later went viral. “It was a very innocuous piece,” she said. “It was about how [Beirut’s] a beautiful city, but also how the electricity goes out every day.”

Soon after, Ms. Talty began a position as a tech reporter for a local magazine in Beirut, working to tell stories of developments in the region from an American perspective. But with training in fiction writing and a knack for exploring Lebanese life, she started scouting, too, for features with deeper cultural relevance.

“I was out with a friend one day,” said Ms. Talty, “and she told me Beirut Pride was canceled and they arrested the protesters.” The story that followed — a piece on gay rights in Lebanon, illustrated by the annual protest and march — would later win an LA Press Club award.

Ms. Talty wrote the story for Playboy magazine, the first time a piece of hers appeared in print for the outlet. Focused on the experience of being gay in Lebanon, Ms. Talty noted that the process of writing the article itself was “eye-opening.”

“It made me realize how every culture has their own paradigm,” she said. While looking for sources, Ms. Talty had difficulty finding people within the LGBTQ community in Lebanon who were willing to go on the record. “They did not want to be out in the same way we define it in America,” she said. “I had to work hard to communicate that … to not say, ‘This is bad,’ but to highlight the culture difference.

“It was exactly the piece I always wanted to write,” Ms. Talty reflected, “based off years of me knowing people in that community.”

But despite the award-winning article, Ms. Talty said that one of her personal favorite projects while in the region was an article on saving the world’s wheat supply amid civil war.

Twelve “libraries” of seeds are scattered throughout the world, she explained, designed to protect humanity’s agricultural progress. One of these facilities is in Aleppo, a war-torn, once longstanding rebel-held city in Syria. It houses centuries of wheat variations.

“When people need more drought-resistant crops, scientists use those old varieties” stored in the seed banks, Ms. Talty said, illuminating their importance.

And, during the Syrian Civil War, with the fear of losing the bank’s crop growing, one scientist spearheaded a movement to smuggle more than 100,000 wheat plants to a “doomsday vault” in the Arctic Circle. Ms. Talty helped to report it all.

It was a feat she credits to her roots writing about farming on the East End.

Even after years living abroad and a lifetime of adventure, the pull of writing about what she loves — farming and Southampton — prompted her to board a plane to come home.

“The reporting I had done [on the East End] was the most interesting thing I had done in my career,” she said, “I think because of the people — some of them I had known my whole life, and understanding things like why when I was a kid there were all these farm fields, and then by the time I was 18, they were gone.”

In 2016, Ms. Talty returned to Southampton with the intention of staying for only the summer. But when she began a deep-dive into farmland reporting for The Press, she felt it necessary to stay longer. It was in the summer of 2016 and into the early months of 2017 when Ms. Talty realized her stories of East End farms were more than a column — they constituted a book.

She began combing through legal rhetoric and local policy to determine why family farms struggle to preserve land through generations. She interviewed countless farmers and sought out individuals who’ve been in the industry for decades.

But the proximity of her focus made it difficult for Ms. Talty to write. “It was really hard to get into that long-term mindset needed to write a book when I was seeing my subjects at the grocery store,” she said.

In the fall of 2017, she moved back to Lebanon — to Batroun, a small seaside town she dubbed the “Southampton of Lebanon.”

Now, with the draft of her book completed, Ms. Talty has once again made the long journey across the globe.

“I knew I had to come back to Southampton,” she said. “I always knew it was my home.”