Author event: Pamela Petro – The Long Field

7.30pm Friday 17th March

American author Pamela Petro will be joining us to celebrate the paperback release of her critically acclaimed memoir The Long Field.

Entry is FREE.

Tickets can be reserved here

Coffee shop and bar will be open for refreshments.

The Long Field by Pamela Petro

The Long Field burrows deep into the Welsh countryside to tell how this small country became a big part of an American writer’s life. Petro twines her story around that of Wales by viewing both through the lens of hiraeth, a quintessential Welsh word, that is famously hard to translate. It means far more than its English approximation of ‘homesickness’; it is something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time. An acute awareness of the presence of absence.

Through the pull and tangle of these stories we find both traditional and radical new ways of looking at hiraeth. The hiraeth of place and home, yes. But also queer hiraeth. And hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics.On this journey the notion of hiraeth begins to morph, from a uniquely Welsh experience to one endemic to the human condition, from deep longing towards the sort of creative responses to loss which Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture.

Pamela Petro is the author of three previous creative nonfiction books, including Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh. She is a Fellow at the University of Wales, Trinity St David, where she directs the Dylan Thomas Summer School in Creative Writing. Pamela is also a photographer and word-and-image artist. She teaches creative nonfiction and graphic novel to undergraduate and postgrad students in the U.S., and holds a BA from Brown University and an MA from the University of Wales.