Dobree Adams & Jonathan Greene
Adams and Greene in the greens patch on a May afternoon.
Dobree Adams has always felt most at home in the country. Jonathan Greene was originally from New York City, and before moving to Riverbend Farm in Franklin County, Kentucky, he had little experience with rural living. When the couple purchased the farm in the 1970s, there was no electricity, and the only building was a tobacco barn.
Since then, Greene and Adams’ partnership has become a collaboration of many facets: artmaking (together, they make broadsides that combine Adams’ photographs with Greene’s poems), farming, parenting, traveling. They also each have a good share of solitude for their own creative pursuits. Greene is a book designer and publisher, and is the author of more than thirty books. He mows, cuts firewood, and takes care of house, animals and garden. Adams is a weaver and photographer, keeper of sheep, trainer and rider of horses, gardener, cook, and avid seed-saver (she is co-author, with Bill Best, of a book on Kentucky’s heirloom seeds).
Both view their artmaking as being of a piece with the land on which they live. “I used to say that the sheep connected me to the earth,” says Adams, who hand-weaves her tapestries from handspun fleeces of Lincoln longwool sheep. “I feel that my passion for my animals, and the gardening, and the way the landscape looks, is deeply in everything.”
“I’ve been writing from here so long, and my world is here,” says Greene. “I find it difficult to imagine writing out of someplace else, or living someplace else.”
Listen to Dobree Adams talk about being a woman who raises sheep.
Dobree Adams at home.
Listen to Jonathan Greene talk about living and writing in one place.
Greene standing downhill from his writing hut.