Jim Vieira will be speaking at Elmer’s Thursday night, January 26th. (His Rock Talk with Jim.)
Live music, drinks and appetizers beginning at 5:30 -
Jim’s talk begins at 7pm
For more information go to our WinklePicker Page.
FREE Textile Exchange
Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 1PM
Congregational Church, Main Street, Ashfield
Ashfield Needles and Threads (ANTS) is hosting a free materials swap–Fabrics, Notions, Yarn, Needles, Patterns, plus Ideas & Encouragement!!!
*Clear out some of your clutter while enabling another’s creative genius!
*Leave with ingredients & ideas for some terrific new projects for the New Year!
*Enjoy connecting with folks who share your interest as well as with folks who can help you learn a new craft!
*Help choose & plan a couple of ANTS events for 2012!
All are welcome to come pick out materials whether they have some to donate or not.
Items that aren’t adopted by 2:45PM will …
A) go back home with their donor OR
B) become the property of ANTS to use or dispose of wisely.
Bring a pile to pass on! Bring a bag for your new materials! Bring your kids and friends!
And then go across the street to Elmer’s where
Jane Roy Brown will be here reading from her new book
One Writer’s Garden
Eudora Welty’s Home Place
By the time she reached her late twenties, Eudora Welty (1909-2001) was launching a distinguished literary career. She was also becoming a capable gardener under the tutelage of her mother, Chestina Welty, who designed their modest garden in Jackson, Mississippi. From the beginning, Eudora wove images of southern flora and gardens into her writing, yet few outside her personal circle knew that the images were drawn directly from her passionate connection to and abiding knowledge of her own garden.
Near the end of her life, Welty still resided in her parents’ house, but the garden-and the friends who remembered it-had all but vanished. When a local garden designer offered to help bring it back, Welty began remembering the flowers that had grown in what she called “my mother’s garden.” By the time Eudora died, that gardener, Susan Haltom, was leading a historic restoration. When Welty’s private papers were released several years after her death, they confirmed that the writer had sought both inspiration and a creative outlet there. This book contains many previously unpublished writings, including literary passages and excerpts from Welty’s private correspondence about the garden.
The authors of One Writer’s Garden also draw connections between Welty’s gardening and her writing. They show how the garden echoed the prevailing style of Welty’s mother’s generation, which in turn mirrored wider trends in American life: Progressive-era optimism, a rising middle class, prosperity, new technology, women’s clubs, garden clubs, streetcar suburbs, civic beautification, conservation, plant introductions, and garden writing. The authors illustrate this garden’s history–and the broader story of how American gardens evolved in the early twentieth century-with images from contemporary garden literature, seed catalogs, and advertisements, as well as unique historic photographs. Noted landscape photographer Langdon Clay captures the restored garden through the seasons.
It’s a gardening book and here’s what The Daily Beast had to say about it when they added to their list of recommended books for the holiday season:
In the mid-20th century, around the same time that Eudora Welty launched a prolific literary career, she was honing her horticultural skills in her modest Mississippi garden. The importance of place was a recurring theme in Welty’s work. Even in her earliest short stories, her images of gardens and flora evoke a distinctive Southern ambiance. One Writer’s Garden is a richly illustrated tour of the backyard garden Welty helped restore before she died in 2001. Set against the historical events of the early 20th century, the book also sheds light on the social mores that characterized the South during that period. It also paints a vivid portrait of Welty through the years, a writer who tended to her daylilies and roses with the same passion and precision as she did to her prose.
Then, after the reading and signing, Ashfield’s Share the Warmth will maintain the gardening theme with group discount seed-buying from Fedco and seeds from Red Gate Farm. So come and dream of and get ready for happy days in the garden with Jane Roy Brown and the Seed-buying group! (And Jane will be donating a portion of her book sales to Share the Warmth.)
That’s Sunday, January 22nd at 3:00 pm at Elmer’s – 1:00 for Fabric Trade at the Church.