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In 130 ink-and-watercolor drawings, the story of
one year on a family farm in Kentucky unfolds
in captured moments of daily life: Donahue’s
husband chopping wood, a cow sniffing her
head, her daughter tending to goats after a hard
day at school. Each visual is paired with a written
reflection on the day’s doings, interwoven with
the longer-arc history of her family, the farm,
and their community.
In telling the story of a farm family’s struggle
to survive and thrive, Landings grapples with
the legacy of our cultural divide between art
and land, and celebrates the beauty discovered
along the way.
"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 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." From Wendell Berry's letter to the author