Please join MainStreet BookEnds of Warner to celebrate the US book launch of The Long Field: Wales and the Presence of Absence – A Memoir with author Pamela Petro (Nonfiction/Graphic Novels & Comics, MFA Writing Faculty) in conversation with David Elliott (WFYP, MFA Writing Faculty).

Hiraeth is a Welsh word that’s famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean “long field” but generally translates into English, inadequately, as “homesickness.” At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence.

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.

Pamela Petro is a writer, artist, and educator and the author of four books, including Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South (published by Arcade) and Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Atlantic, Granta, Guernica, Paris Review, and others. Pamela teaches creative writing at Smith College and on Lesley University’s MFA Program, and is co-director of the Dylan Thomas Summer School at the University of Wales, where she is also a Fellow. Pamela is also a visual artist who lives in in Northampton, MA, with her partner, Marguerite, and Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Topaz.