Discipline: Literature – nonfiction

Pamela Petro

Discipline: Literature – nonfiction
Region: Northampton, MA
MacDowell Fellowships: 2014

Pamela is delighted that her 2014 residency provided a foundation for all her recent work. The book she worked on at Monday Music, The Long Field – Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir, was published in the UK in 2021 and shortlisted for The Wales Book of the Year and named to top 10 lists by The Financial Times and The Sunday Telegraph. A braided memoir that uses “hiraeth” — a Welsh word meaning an impossible longing for something or someone in the past, future, or imagination — to look at her life and the life of the Welsh nation. The Long Field will be published in the U.S. in August 2023. At MacDowell, when she couldn’t write another word, Pamela began taking moved-camera photos in the woods. These became the basis for The Dusk Series, which expanded to include locations all over the world and an exhibition at Brown University’s Watson Institute called “In The Blink of Our Lifetimes: The Ecology of Dusk.” Pamela teaches creative writing in Lesley University’s M.F.A. Program and at Smith College and The University of Wales.

Studios

Monday Music

Pamela Petro worked in the Monday Music studio.

Given to the residency by the Monday Music Club of Orange, NJ, Monday Music Studio is sited next to an enormous boulder deposited by glaciers thousands of years ago. A small dormer once pierced the east slope of the roof, but after damage suffered in the 1938 hurricane, the roof was rebuilt without the dormer. The interior…

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