In November 2025, John McIntyre opened Dirt Farm Books, a secondhand bookstore, in the Ville. Three months later, he spoke with The Phoenix about the joys and hardships of life as a small business owner.
Alma Greenfield: So, just to begin, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what drew you to open Dirt Farm Books?
John McIntyre: I grew up in Tennessee. If we wanted books, that was the thing we could always have. Toys or other things, maybe not, but if you wanted a book, you got a book. And I seem to have taken that on as kind of a guiding principle for every day of my life, and I ended up accumulating too many of them over the years. But in the course of accumulating them, I was actually teaching and writing, rather than attempting to sell books — keyword being “attempting.”
So it just happened that we ended up here. My wife took a job at the college, and the first day we were here, I happened to walk down the street, and there were two spaces open at the time. And, you know, I’m not an omen person. Then again, a thing comes up, and you’re like, “Maybe it’s an omen,” because you want a thing to come together.
So it was kind of inadvertently confirming a thing that I was pretending I didn’t know I wanted to do — I knew I wanted to do it, but it’s a commitment to actually do it.
AG: You mentioned that your wife was doing work here at the college. Can you speak more about that, and what actually drew you to Swarthmore?
JM: It was a job in a terrible labor market if I’m honest, even though I had a job at the time, so it wasn’t quite as desperate. But it took the better part of a year of looking for job openings and applying, and eventually, on a whim, she applied for this. It was not on our radar. She had done her doctorate in Caribbean literature and tried out the academic job market, which was especially difficult. She decided to have a change of direction and started doing prospect research for fundraising for nonprofits. This job just popped up at the right time, and you can understand why any college or university right now needs to be extra motivated to raise money. They were motivated enough to beef up their staff when certain things started to become … So here we are.
Darius Kim: We were also just curious: why the name “Dirt Farm”?
JM: It was sort of tongue-in-cheek. My family were farmers for a long time, right? And the reality is, my grandfather came of age around the time when the Great Depression happened, and farming was not exactly a winning proposition at that point. And now I’ve started doing this. And as much fun as it can be — as much as every now and then, something really exciting comes around — a lot of the time, you feel like you’re just tilling dry ground. There’s no guarantee of anything coming of it. The profit margins are not huge. It’s not particularly glamorous. So it’s kind of a not-taking-yourself-too-seriously sort of thing.
AG: On that theme, I wanted to ask about the creative writing teaching that you mentioned you were doing, and what the transition to being a small business owner looked like.
JM: Well, I was teaching writing workshops, primarily fiction and poetry, and eventually it became clear that you can do that for a long time, but because so many schools work on — I don’t want to have to throw the word out there, but essentially — exploiting contingent faculty, you realize that you’re always on the edge of something bad. If there are not enough students for a course, or some horrible thing happens, and your mediocre health insurance doesn’t pay for it, then where you’re left at that point … It just kind of burned me out.
There came a point where I felt like I was telling students a lie, unless and until there was some serious future in what they were writing. Because I don’t know if you paid attention recently, but it’s not a lucrative thing being a writer. There’s some cultural cache to it for certain people, but yeah, it just started to feel impossible to keep going. And it so happened that near one of the colleges I was teaching at, there was a little bookstore like this. I would usually have classes at, say, one in the afternoon, so I’d show up a bit early and go wander around the bookstore and get to know the owners. I said, at some point, do you need any help? Of course, nobody could pay me anything in a used bookstore. So it wasn’t like I was doing it to get rich, but we just kind of hit it off. I’ve spent a lot more time thinking about these things; I have some sort of knack for understanding what [books] have value, what would sell, and why. And from there, there was the surprise transition to here. I’ve been collecting things [for a long time, but not with the intention of] keeping them forever, because the more stuff you collect, the more space it takes up in your life. Go in with that in mind.
DK: On that topic, we were also wondering if you have any books you’re selling that are particularly special to you or that you have an attachment to?
JM: Yeah, [but] not an attachment to this book itself … Randall [Kenan] was the first legitimate writer that I knew when I was probably eighteen or nineteen. If I remember correctly, the reason why I went to talk to him was because the girl I was dating had seen him give a lecture and was blown away by him, and I wanted to impress her. It turned out that we got along for one reason or another. I took some courses with him and wrote some stories, and we ended up being friends for the next twenty years. So, it’s probably less that I’m attached to the book than I’m attached to the idea of somebody taking that and it being an introduction to someone whose work I think is meaningful — somebody who I cared a lot about.There’s also a handful of little stuff … This is a little deck of cards, and it’s called Oblique Strategies. It’s very hard to find … [But] you can get [the PDF version] online for free.
The theory is you use these when you’re writing something. It’s over 100 worthwhile dilemmas. So if you get to a certain point in a story, you can just pull a card, and you have to answer this question in your mind as you write. Some of them are more direct. What do you do with [a specific prompt] if it’s not part of your story? How do you make that work? So all these things are something to kind of break you out of a rut that you get in. I learned about them from a musician, actually, and he said he’s writing songs. Sometimes he would just get to a spot and think where could this go? He would bust those out and see what happened. It’s fantastic.
AG: Speaking of books and ephemera, is there a dream book or a dream piece of book-related ephemera that you’d like to add to your collection?
JM: No, not really. I’d have to play capitalist and say something really expensive. But, I mean, half of the fun, though, is times like when I sold a book to a guy a couple of weeks ago about Wall Street in the ’20s. I had said that there are a couple other things that were from the same period. And he said, “No, I already have those.” He collects. He’s some actual finance guy. I didn’t know his name, but he’s “important.” But I had come up with this other thing, and so I sent it to him to say, “How cool is this?” Because it’s like pictures of the trading floor in the 1930s, and it looks so amazingly antiquated, but obviously, it was cutting-edge at the time. Half the fun is just seeing stuff that you didn’t know was out there.
AG: Do you have just a favorite book in general? What are you reading right now?
JM: Right now I’m reading all of Jim Thompson’s novels from the ’50s and ’60s, because I’m supposed to be writing about them for the LA Review of Books. My favorite, though? That’s very hard. There’s a lot of stuff I like on the shelf because that’s how it ended up there. Actually, you know, this is totally the opposite of Jim Thompson — the next time that you’re really just kind of down on everything, the most uplifting little thing you could possibly read is “The Women In Black.”
DK: To end, we just wanted to ask about the rise in independent bookstores — It’s been said that there’s going to be a comeback, or that there is a comeback.
JM: Who’s telling you that?
AG: I think that there’s been a rise of physical media, and I think bookstores are certainly a part of that. We’re just curious about how you would situate Dirt Farm Books in its role as an independent bookstore, and how do you see Dirt Farm in the future?
JM: That’s a grand question. We’d just like to still be here. It’s the kind of thing where it’s easy to get ahead of yourself and, so far, people have been very kind and welcoming and eager to part with their books, strangely enough. That’s why there are boxes of crap everywhere. That’s why we have a basket of $1 books.
I think the weirdest part to me has been seeing the reactions of people I’ve known for a long time: “Oh, all of a sudden, you have a bookstore.” They’re kind of freaked out. They have this romantic notion of what it actually means. It’s pretty much a day-by-day thing. You’re not going to make enough money in one day to quit. You’re not going to make enough money in a year to quit. You’re going to work forever at this. And that’s okay. There are worse things to be doing. It’s a grind like anything else. I get to show up and be surrounded by books, but also I have to be the one that finds them and decides if they’re worth anything and all that. We’d just like to stay around. That’s pretty much it.
