Marcella Prokop: Creating Rural Fellowship in Storytelling

After a day working with students as the director of access and workforce opportunity at Southeast Tech in Sioux Falls, Marcella Prokop returns to her Minnesota farm in Beaver Creek to harvest. Prokop pulls the frames out of her beehives and processes and bottles the honey before going back inside to work on her doctoral homework until 11pm — some days she wakes up at 5am to start again.

It’s a rhythm that might sound overwhelming, but for Prokop it’s all part of the story she’s writing — one that balances farming, motherhood, education, art, and community. At the center of it all is the power of storytelling, a thread that binds together her many roles.

“Conversation with other people is a standard in my day,” Prokop says. “I love learning about other people and hearing their stories ­— and telling my own story.”

 

Prokop’s story has largely centered in the rural Midwest for the past 30 years. As a dual citizen of the United States and Colombia, she grew up on a Nebraska farm. Her involvement in 4H introduced her to news storytelling. Local reporters covered her group’s projects. When she entered high school, she asked one of the reporters for a job. Prokop worked at the local newspaper and found it an intellectually stimulating career that could earn money, which inspired her. She went on to earn a BA in journalism and an MFA in creative writing, then went on to lead writing workshops and pursue her own creative work.

As a 2024–2026 Rural Regenerator Fellow with Springboard for the Arts, Prokop continues to bridge her multiple roles — as an educator, writer, mother, and community builder. The funding and support helps expand her storytelling practice in creative nonfiction and poetry while also lifting up others’ voices in workshops and mentorship.

The fellowship supports artists across the Upper Midwest and centers on work connected to land, environment, and food systems. Fellows explore environmental justice, land and food sovereignty, agriculture, climate solutions, and sustainability through their chosen mediums. Twelve artists have received $10,000 in flexible funding to expand their practice and take part in two years of dialogue and exchange with peers who also call rural places home.

Since receiving the grant in September 2024, Prokop and the other fellows have participated in discussions focused on the connections between the environment and their creative practices. Some of the fellows include a shepherd and textile artist, an Ojibwe natural resources artist, and a pollination gardener who is leading rematriation of eleven acres for a botanical sanctuary.

For Prokop, whose creative and professional life already revolves around storytelling, the fellowship is both an extension and a deepening of her work. She sees storytelling as a fundamental human right. “I really believe that people have a right to tell stories, because it’s what can sustain us and it’s what can effect change long term.”

As both a writer and an educator, Prokop encourages her students and communities to think about their unique interactions with place.

She emphasizes that lived experience shapes how each person understands their environment, whether that’s a “foreign country or the fountain in the town square. There’s something really unique about your interaction with a place that makes it worth exploring,” she says.

Prokop does not see education as defined by the walls of the classroom and enjoys helping students thrive. “There is this power in being able to grow as a human being that comes through education, whether it’s formal or informal,” she says.

The urge to create connections that allow for growth extends from classrooms to her farm. “I find that there’s so many beautiful opportunities to take everything that I’ve experienced and try to bring it back to my communities, to young people, to older people, to anybody in between who wants some of that artistic creativity, communion, and fellowship,” she says. “Stories are essential and empowering.”

Marcella Prokop encourages readers to find ways to uplift storytelling in their own communities. Go to your local library, chamber of commerce, or school and discover what storytellers are already out there and how you can get involved.

 

 

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