Overview

A hybrid memoir / art book, with an introduction by New York Times Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver. In 130 ink-and-watercolor drawings, the story of one year on a family farm in Kentucky unfolds in captured moments of daily life: Donahue chopping wood, a cow sniffing her head, her daughter tending to goats after a hard day at school. Each visual is paired with a written reflection on the day's doings, interwoven with the longer-arc history of her family, the farm, and their community. In telling the story of a farm family's struggle to survive and thrive, Landings grapples with the legacy of our cultural divide between art and land, and celebrates the beauty discovered along the way.

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Reviews

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. --From Wendell Berry's letter to the author If you want to become wealthy, read this book and live this life. Arwen Donahue is rich beyond measure because her careful attention to each glimpse of the natural world brings joy and awe. Although farming is harsh and unpredictable, she finds in it deep purpose, beauty, art, love, and amazement. She celebrates the unrelenting work and the surprises of farm life, whether she is canning an overload of garden growth ( my inner squirrel, she says), or conversing with the snake in the bookcase. 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, author of In Country and Dear Ann

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

Author Information

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. Barbara Kingsolver is the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, Flight Behavior, The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her work of narrative nonfiction is the influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life. Kingsolver's work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has earned literary awards and a devoted readership at home and abroad. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal, our country's highest honor for service through the arts, as well as the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for the body of her work. She lives with her family on a farm in southern Appalachia.

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