Pamela Petro: THE LONG FIELD (With Sally Shivnan)
Join us at The Ivy Bookshop to celebrate The Long Field! Authors Pamela Petro and Sally Shivnan will be in conversation to discuss this great novel.
The Long Field burrows deep into the Welsh countryside to tell how this small country became a big part of Pam’s life as an American writer. The book’s format twines her story around that of Wales by viewing both through the lens of hiraeth, a Welsh word that’s famously hard to translate (one literal meaning of hiraeth is ‘long field’). It is also the name for the bone-deep longing for something or someone – a home, culture, language, or even a younger self. The Long Field braids memoir with the essential hiraeth stories of Wales, and in doing so creates a radical new vision of place and belonging.
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 Guardian, The Sunday Telegraph, The Atlantic, Granta, Guernica, The Paris Review, and others. The Long Field was shortlisted for The Wales Book of the Year Award and was named a Top Ten Travel Book of the Year by The Financial Times and The Sunday Telegraph. 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.
Sally Shivnan is the author of the short story collection Piranhas & Quicksand & Love, and her fiction and essays have appeared in journals including The Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Glimmer Train, and Rosebud. Her travel writing has been featured in The Best American Travel Writing anthology series and Travelers’ Tales Best Travel Writing, and in The Washington Post, Miami Herald, The Nature Conservancy Magazine, Washingtonian, baltimore.org, rails-to-trails.org, and many other publications and websites. She is the winner of a Travel Classics International Travel Writing Prize and a Silver Rose Award for Short Fiction, among other awards. Sally teaches creative writing at UMBC. Her website: SallyShivnan.com.
