Landings
A Crooked Creek Farm Year
We had been farming for fifteen years when I started drawing our daily lives in this place. During those years, as I worked on the land, the land also worked on me. It wove its way into my imagination like the bindweed that stitches our tomato cages to the soil. After a year of drawing, I had filled four sketchbooks with ink and watercolor images, side by side with short written reflections on the day’s doings.
In telling the story of my family’s struggle to survive and thrive on the farm, 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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Scroll down to see a sample of drawings from Landings in their original sketchbooks.
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
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
From a 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.
Author of In Country and Dear Ann
Click on an image below to see the corresponding pages above.
