I keep slipping out the back door of whatever discipline I settle on.
Introduction
Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year (Hub City Press, 2022) is Arwen Donahue’s written and illustrated account of a year on the Kentucky farm where she lives with her husband and daughter. The book’s first page sets up some of the thematic threads followed throughout the book: the way life “interrupts” art-making, Donahue’s sense of distance from her own life as a farmer in rural Kentucky, and the way this distance from—or resistance to—the work of the farm is “cured,” in a way, by the work itself.
Donahue’s previous work is wildly varied. Her first book, This is Home Now: Kentucky’s Holocaust Survivors Speak (The University Press of Kentucky, 2009) collects oral histories and photographs to tell the stories of nine Holocaust survivors who settled in Kentucky. Next, from 2009 to 2017, Donahue conducted oral histories with Kentucky writers on their relationships to the land. The Kentucky Writers on the Land Oral History Project is archived at the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky. Several years into this project, Donahue began painting watercolor portraits of the writers she interviewed for an exhibition titled, Rooted Words: Kentucky Writers on the Land.
She has also published a series of comics in the Rumpus, The Nib, LitHub, and elsewhere on a wide range of topics: farming, her mother’s death, reproductive health, and Donahue’s own experience getting an abortion at the last abortion clinic in Kentucky. Old Man Gloom, a 16-page, full-color Xeric Award-winning comic, focuses on Zozobra, is a 50-foot-tall paper effigy of gloom that is burned annually in Donahue’s hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
As a person who also writes and makes art, I’m drawn to Donahue’s expansive and varied work, and was curious about her experience discerning the form for Landings, in which each short, written entry paired with a painting ushers the reader through a year on Donahue’s Kentucky farm.
Interview
Martha Park: How did you arrive at the structure of your book? Did you begin with paintings, or text, or both? How did you know you didn’t want to make a comic-style book, where text and images were fully integrated?
Arwen Donahue: There was precious little successful premeditation involved in creating Landings. It started out as a sort of technical exercise: I wanted to improve my skills with watercolors so that I could do a responsible job of painting those portraits you mention. I had sort of a grandiose idea that I was writing a big hybrid book—part oral history illuminated by portraiture, part graphic memoir, and part history of the peculiar role that the idea of agrarianism has played in American life.
The drawings of daily life on the farm became a small part of this rangy, years-long interdisciplinary process. After I finished the year of drawing Landings, I kept working on the oral histories and portraits, and worked on farm-related comics. I still had the idea that all of these things might come together in some singular work, but I could not get my arms around it.
After all that, I suppose it’s no surprise that Landings has such a simple form: every spread has a drawing on the recto and an accompanying piece of writing on the verso. Nearly a decade after finishing the drawings, I returned to the structure I started out with, and wrote the text. When I stopped pushing in various directions, it seemed to just fall into that form. It was a relief to work within such strict limits, after years of allowing my mind to wander. I knew each essay had to fit on a single page, and that it had to obey the prompt of the drawing it accompanied, but I aimed to bring something of what I had learned in the years-long process of interviewing, reading, and ruminating on farming, art, community, and history. Since it is in part a book about accepting the requirements and limits of each day, and the limits of the land and our human lives on Earth, this form feels about right.
Martha Park: One of my favorite themes of the book is the sense of friction between yourself as an artist and as a farmer. Early on in the book, you write, “Since we moved to the farm 14 years ago, I’ve attempted to protect that practice by segregating art and farming, by building a moat around my artmaking and retreating to it as a refuge from the farm’s demands. Farming was David’s dream, not mine. Art has been an act of resistance to the reality of my life on the ground. But what is happening here…? I’m still defiant of the farm’s relentless need… but these drawings are also leading me deeper into my life in this place.”
As a mom to a toddler, I’ve had to intentionally work on welcoming interruption and accommodating art into my life, rather than the other way around. As much as I dream about escaping to some hermitage where I can seal myself off from distraction and responsibilities to write, I’ve found that it’s healthier for me to abandon attempts to compartmentalize art, writing, and motherhood in favor of trying, instead, to see them as deeply related and in conversation with each other. At the same time as I seek a sense of integration, I am also aware that living in this tension also seems integral to actually being able to make art and to write about my life.
I’m curious about how the making of this book affected the way you see yourself as an artist, a writer, a farmer, and a mother, and the ways these roles work with each other. I am wondering if you feel like you are in a different place now than you were when you were making this book.
Arwen Donahue: I love these observations, and how you have come to an understanding of needing to work in a way that is not only creatively sparky, but healthy. Art and healing have a mysterious relationship, it seems to me. I see the danger of freighting art with such a utilitarian burden, yet culturally, of course, we have a long habit of setting art too far away from spheres that are considered the province of women, such as motherhood and domesticity. I find in the farm I call home a fascinating interplay of the wild and domestic; of drudgery and fascination; of terror and joy; of scarcity and abundance. Here on the farm, we deal in the building blocks of human survival—and yet I grew up thinking farms and farmers were not particularly interesting. In a world that is so fractured, why not call upon art to make us more whole?
It’s hard to pin down how exactly I am in a different place now than I was while making the book, since making it was such a long, meandering process. One obvious shift is that I am in my 50s now, my daughter is in college, and I am able to claim more time and space exclusively for writing and drawing. I am, of course, grateful.
Martha Park: Much of Landings runs counter to any expectations of what a “year in nature” book or an agrarian story would feel like or be about. On a page when you write about visiting a scenic farm retreat, you draw the junk cars and wheel tracks, the “broken and raw” land you pass along the way. A beautiful painting showing you in tree pose in a field is accompanied by a story about a neighbor telling you to wear orange to protect yourself from hunters on your own land. You draw your daughter in the barn, wearing a red knit cap with devil horns.
I love the way the life of the farm is melded with life that might otherwise seem apart from the farm: arts funding for schools, the freelance work you take on to help pay the bills, tax returns, a dinner of stale popcorn and beer. While you’re drawing and writing about farm life, is it ever hard to avoid romanticizing or aestheticizing your daily views and experiences? Was it ever difficult to really see and describe it honestly?
Arwen Donahue: There is no shortage of memoirs that aestheticize or romanticize farm life, and I had no interest in contributing to those dusty stacks, but I also did not want to tilt the scales over to the side of ugliness and complaint. The fact is that David and I are reasonably well-educated cisgender white people from more or less middle-class families, and cultural and familial support enabled us to undertake our long adventure in farming. In other words, we are among the world’s most privileged citizens.
There is a wide range of experience in what our government defines as “poverty”—on paper, we have been impoverished for most of our farming years, and yet by any reasonable, historical measure, we should be considered wealthy. I have hoped that Landings might add a touch of nuance to our cultural conversations about what both poverty and wealth look like, and what those words really mean.
The way our globalist, capitalist culture segregates art and land is a symptom of our Earth-desecrating disease.
Martha Park: What was it like to go back through illustrations and structure a year-in-the-life book while in another stage of your life entirely? I personally find this very heartening—time seems to be moving at such a warp speed at this stage of parenting, and I worry if I don’t capture something now, I’ll miss it entirely—it is very lovely and encouraging to think about revisiting a time that has passed and being able to make such a cohesive work of art about it.
Arwen Donahue: This is a question I often asked myself while working on the book. If the writing was purely retrospective, it risked being an exercise in nostalgia. Right now, we don’t milk goats and cows every day; I’m not canning tomatoes in the steamy kitchen throughout the month of August; I’m not struggling to get our local elementary school to value an arts education. Yet the past is still present, in many ways. We keep returning to questions we had at the beginning of our lives here, such as: How can we learn to be better caretakers of this land that sustains us? What does a life guided by the limits of the land really look like, especially in an era of radical climate instability? What does success look like here, and what does failure look like?
These questions, embedded in years of work, have yielded some stories I could not have told when I was right in the midst of the toil. It was essential to ground the narrative in its particular moment, while recognizing that I still have something crucial at stake in the unfolding story of my life in this place. If I catch myself thinking that I have some grand wisdom now that I did not have then, I remind myself that I am mistaken. I’m still right in the middle of this life, which has always been and will always be in motion.
Martha Park: You mentioned in a previous interview that you have felt pressure to choose to be either an artist or a writer, and that you finally realized you are both. I have also felt this pressure to specialize or focus on one thing. And while I was initially drawn to your work as a visual artist, I really fell in love with your gorgeous writing in Landings. I am wondering if Landings changed your relationship with writing, specifically?
Arwen Donahue: One of the tricky things about working in multiple forms is recognizing which best suits a particular piece of work. I have just finished a draft of a book that began as a graphic memoir. About a year into the process of drawing and writing, it became clear that I needed to tell the story entirely in words and not concern myself with how to represent it visually. It is a story about my mother’s life and death; more specifically, it is about how her voice was violently stolen from her at a very young age, and my posthumous attempt to reclaim a conversation with her about our matrilineal inheritance. I did not learn a very crucial piece of her life history, the most violent piece of it, until after she had died.
There were so many stories that had been forced upon and taken from my mother (and, by extension, me, and my daughter) that I really needed to write the whole thing out. It took a while to accept that, because I had started to think of myself as a graphic memoirist. I keep slipping out the back door of whatever discipline I settle on. Yet I trust that all of the back doors are connected to one central chamber.
Martha Park: I’m curious about your journey to find a publisher for Landings. How did you make your way to Hub City Press? What was the experience like, finding and working with a publisher?
Arwen Donahue: Landings’s journey to publication was—in keeping with everything else about its creation—meandering. After finishing the year of drawings, I put a bunch of them up on my website. People would tell me now and then that the drawings should be made into a book, and I would agree with them, but I knew it would be hard to find a publisher for a full-color book about a year on a farm. What would the hook be?
Several years later, after publishing a story for The Nib about my own abortion experience and the challenges for rural women and pregnant people in abortion access, I heard from Sam Stoloff of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency. Sam had visited my website—he told me he loved the Landings drawings, and would be happy to help me try to find a publisher. He agreed it was going to be a challenge, but was motivated to give it a shot. He was an incredible friend and guide in the process of writing and submitting the book. But we did not find a publisher, and I regretfully turned my attention to other things.
I gradually came to understand what Landings’s “hook” was: it is the story of an artist’s journey to understanding that care of the land is a creative act, and that the way our globalist, capitalist culture segregates art and land is a symptom of our Earth-desecrating disease. It was not really surprising that no major publisher was willing to take it on. A year or so passed before it occurred to me that I still had some options to pursue in the indie press world. I especially liked what Hub City Press was doing, and I submitted the manuscript to them. Hub City had never published a graphic memoir before, but they loved the book, and were willing to venture into this new terrain. It seems to me that the book could not have found a better publisher—if Landings had been taken on by a larger house, it likely would not have gotten anywhere near the thoughtful attention, care, and hard work that the Hub City team gives to all of its titles.
Martha Park: Could you tell us a little more about your next, forthcoming project?
Arwen Donahue: I just finished a draft of the manuscript recently, so its fate is still very uncertain. The working title is Matrilineal. That story reaches back to my mother’s maternal grandmother, who came to the U.S. alone from Poland as a 12-year-old girl—part of the wave of Jewish immigrants to this country around the beginning of the 20th century. She landed in New York, married an abusive man, and lived in poverty, and the family she left behind was later annihilated in the Holocaust. Her daughter (my grandmother) struggled with mental illness and was abused by her own father. My mother inherited all of this, and had the further great misfortune of being violently attacked as a child. Because of the sexual nature of that attack, her own confused mother burdened her with shame and blame. My mother struggled throughout her life between the desire to speak the truth of her life and the desire to be free of her own history.
Matrilineal is an unpacking of this inter-generational voicelessness. It is me asking my mother after her death for guidance, in light of this history, in how to be a daughter, and how to be a mother to my own daughter. I could not fully ask her these questions while she was alive, because I did not learn the whole story of what had happened to her until after she died, when I read her journals.
Now that I’ve finished a draft of that manuscript, I have returned to work on the graphic memoir out of which it was born. It’s interesting to notice how some stories seem to want to be told in words, and others in pictures!
I am delighted to share that I have just been awarded the 2023 Cornish Residency Fellowship from the Center for Cartoon Studies to work on this graphic memoir. I’m so grateful for the opportunity dive deeply into this work.
Catch up with Arwen Donahue at arwendonahue.com.
Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She is a 2022-2023 Fellow with the Religion & Environment Story Project and a recipient of the William Graves Sackett Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Oxford American, The Guardian, Grist, The Bitter Southerner, ProPublica, and elsewhere. Follow her on Instagram.
Read two essays by Martha Park appearing in Terrain.org: “The Last Time,” prose and illustrations, and “Depth Sounding,” prose by Martha Park and photos by Brandon Dahlberg, in Terrain.org.
Header image by Arwen Donahue.
