About this Event
Titcomb's Bookshop and Barnstable Land Trust present author Cara Benson to speak about her memoir An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment on Monday, July 13th at 6:30 PM at Fuller Farm. Benson will be in conversation with Elspeth Hay, author of Feed Us with Trees.
Books will be for sale at the event, and Benson and Hay will sign them after their presentation. Those who cannot attend may order a signed copy here.
Free RSVP is requested and can be completed on this page or by calling Titcomb's Bookshop at 508-888-2331. Carpooling is encouraged due to limited parking space!
ABOUT THE BOOK
A story of recovery, love, and loss—a memoir of healing ourselves and the natural world.
Cara Benson did not come to love easy. As a low bottom addict, she crawled through subway tunnels and partnered with an abusive man. When she came face to face with her own death, she chose life. Her journey of survival led her into recovery, to climbing mountains, and ultimately to Jon, the man with whom she cultivated a relationship that began as “second chance lovers” and slowly developed into one as lifetime partners.
Years later, Benson unexpectedly found herself in devastation as she came to terms with losing Jon to suicide. As she retreated into her grief, she also retreated into the woods of upstate New York, exploring the forests not as the avid hiker she’d become in recovery, but as a meanderer who had lost her way. Here she found more grief in her observation of the effects of climate change.
In confronting her loss, Benson came to realize that the lessons she learned from loving Jon in sickness, health, and death could be applied to her relationship with the non-human world. From squirreling away oak acorns for reforestation of a logged property to maintaining feeders for the birds Jon adored, Benson’s daily life became a sort of field guide for how to live with a deep and abiding commitment to the future of the planet despite challenging odds.
Moving through the intensely personal and kindred terrain of love, recovery, and loss, An Armsfull of Birds is a climate memoir that tells the story of developing deeply held commitments to ourselves, to those we love, and ultimately to the ailing natural world.
ABOUT CARA BENSON
Cara Benson is the author of the memoir An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, Orion, Sierra, The Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and selected for Best American Poetry. She's received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and lives in a former church in upstate NY on the ancestral lands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohican Indians.
ABOUT ELSPETH HAY
Elspeth Hay is the creator and host of the Local Food Report, a weekly feature that has aired on the Cape and Islands National Public Radio station since 2008, and the author of the award-winning book Feed Us with Trees: Nuts and the Future of Food. Deeply immersed in her own local-food system, Elspeth's work focuses on the people, places, and ideas that feed us. You can learn more at elspethhay.com.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Fuller Farm, 995 Massachusetts 149, Barnstable, United States
USD 0.00
