Arwen Donahue presents Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year

2720 Frankfort Avenue,Louisville KY 40206

20 October, 2022

Description

In 130 ink-and-watercolor drawings, the story of one year on a family farm in Kentucky unfolds in captured moments of daily life. Foreword by Barbara Kingsolver. "Generational memory seems to have fed a modern assumption that manual labor is for the wretched, and farm life is something to be escaped. For all those of who have returned to it, or elected not to leave at all, there is so much more to the story. It's a kind of mission work to explain that land itself holds wisdom, and grace comes from reading it every day. The world needs books like Landings to record 'the joy, delight and awe of our creaturely lives on earth.' To reveal daily labors like these from the inside out, and explain how Efficiency, the god that rules so much of modern life, can be a soul-killing taskmaster. The revelations hold a much-needed redemption of labor itself." -Barbara Kingsolver, from the introduction "In your life and work as farmers you and David have enacted for nearly all other people the difficulty and the satisfactions, the happiness and the peril of human life on earth. Now you have extended the art of farming into the arts, equally fine and necessary, of story telling and picture making. This is a distinguished book that puts you into the company of Aldo Leopold, Harlan Hubbard, and David Kline. Anybody who passes attentively through its pages will love it." -Wendell Berry "Her writing is exquisite and charming, with touches of humor. When the lettuces go to seed in summer, they 'shoot the moon.' And the moon is 'tongue-shaped.' Her artistic sensibility embraces both nature and agriculture, which are different angles, it seems. The infinite variety of nature is there for the noticing, and it helps that her farm isn't industrial beans and corn and big noisy machines. It's everything glorious you can fit into an enormous pleasure garden. And its food keeps us alive in more ways than one. This book is extraordinary. It will show you how to be amazed." -Bobbie Ann Mason (6/14/2022) Arwen Donahue's comics and graphic stories have been featured in The Nib, The Rumpus, The Indiana Review, and the forthcoming Field Guide to Graphic Literature. She has received grants from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Humanities Council, and an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council. She lives on a farm in Kentucky, where her family has raised produce for local markets for over 20 years.