Virtual/Hybrid Event: Arwen Donahue in conversation w/ Barbara Kingsolver

Join us for a virtual conversation between Hub City Press author of Landings Arwen Donahue and NYT bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver on Thursday, March 30th at 7PM! We published Landings, a hybrid art memoir, this past fall. It received extensive coverage and was included in many holiday gift guides. We are thrilled to host these authors in conversation.

Though Arwen and Barbara will be in conversation virtually, any attendees in Spartanburg are welcome to gather in-person and watch a livestream of the event on a large TV screen at the bookshop. Snacks and beverages will be provided. Books will be available for pick up and additional titles will be available for sale.

The price of admission includes a copy of one of the event books (select at checkout on Eventbrite).

Tickets Here!

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Landings by Arwen Donahue

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.

"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 us 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

Arwen Donahue lives on a farm in Kentucky, where her family has raised produce for local markets for over 20 years. Her comics and graphic stories have been featured in LitHub, The Nib, The Rumpus, the Field Guide to Graphic Literature, and elsewhere. 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.

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.