Book Launch - Pamela Petro - The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir

Date and Time for this Past Event

• Wednesday, Aug 30, 2023  7pm - 8pm

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Category

Arts

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Join us on Wednesday, August 30th at 7:00 pm to welcome Pamela Petro as she introduces her newest memoir.

The publication of The Long Field will coincide with the Welsh American Festival happening from August 30th - September 3 at the Marriott Hotel in Lincoln.

About the Book:
In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time.

A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.”

About the Author:
Pamela Petro is an author, artist, and educator living in Northampton, MA, with her partner, Marguerite, and Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Topaz. She has written four books of creative nonfiction including her latest, The Long Field – Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir, as well as Travels in an Old Tongue, also about Wales; Sitting up with the Dead, about the American South; and The Slow Breath of Stone, about Southwest France. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, and others. She was shortlisted in 2022 for The Wales Book of the Year Award and has received literary and visual arts residencies from Grand Canyon National Park, the MacDowell Colony, The Black Rock Arts Foundation, and The Spring Creek Project at Oregon State University. Pamela teaches creative writing at Smith College and on Lesley University’s MFA in Creative Writing Program, and is co-Director of the Dylan Thomas Summer School at the University of Wales, Trinity St Davids, where she is also a Fellow. She has widely exhibited her photography and has also created an artist book, AfterShadows - A Grand Canyon Narrative, and a graphic script, Under Paradise Valley.

Pre-order a signed copy of Pamela's memoir - https://francieandfinch.indielite.org/book/9781956763676

Reviews:
-Thomas Swick, (author of The Joys of Travel)
“Pamela Petro’s The Long Field is more than a beautiful memoir of the author’s long-time fascination with Wales. It is a profound and sparking exploration of ideas of home, loss, love, family, and sexuality. You come away from it not just in awe of her ability to seamlessly weave all of these themes into a rich and moving narrative, but with something much deeper: a new view of the world and your place in it.”

-Jay Griffiths (author of A Sideways Look at Time)
 "An exquisite unfolding of the truths of language and the human heart."

-Menna Elfyn (most-translated minority-language poet in the world):
"Petro writes with passion and precision in a style that is both intimate and profound. There’s an old saying in Welsh-- dechrau wrth dy draed; it means “start with your feet”—that originally referred to the moving of stones from a field. Here Petro digs into the landscape of Wales and that of her own life in America to unearth not stones, but deep truths with which she surprises and delights the reader."