Pamela Petro is delighted that her 2014 MacDowell residency provided a foundation for all her subsequent creative work. The book she labored over 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 a Travel Book of the Year by The Financial Times and The Sunday Telegraph. “TLF” uses “hiraeth” — a Welsh word meaning an impossible longing for something or someone in the past, future, or imagination — to braid the hiraeth in Petro's life with that of the Welsh nation. It was published in the US in 2023. At MacDowell, when she couldn’t write another word, Petro 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 is included in the permanent collection of Brown University’s Watson Institute. Petro formerly taught creative writing to MFA students and undergrads, and currently directs the Dylan Thomas Summer School at The University of Wales Trinity St David. She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2026 in support of her new book about haunts, hauntings, and ghost-making.
Pamela Petro
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…