December Book Review: Landings
A sketchbook-style book that documents the highs and lows of Kentucky farm life, by Arwen Donahue
Hello and happy December! Today we’re sitting down with Arwen Donahue, a Kentucky-based writer, artist, and produce farmer who wrote the illustrated book, Landings: A Crooked Creek Farm Year.
Landings recounts both the joyous and mundane aspects of farm life through 130 ink & watercolor sketchbook illustrations and short essays. In her diary-style entries, Arwen gives readers a bird’s-eye view of all the tasks that are required to keep a produce business up and running. We experience the busy seasons of planting and harvest, tending to sick animals, the first frost, equipment breaking down and getting fixed, and we even meet the neighbors who live down the road.
The first time I laid eyes on the book was in Malaprop’s Bookstore in Asheville, North Carolina. I leafed through and added it to my book wishlist, intrigued by any book that’s filled with so many hand-painted illustrations AND set in Appalachia AND boasts a forward by Barbara Kingsolver (!!!). A year later, during a conversation with a poet friend who had attended a writer’s workshop with Arwen, he asked, “You know what book I think you’d love? Landings!” I took this as a sign to finally get my copy.
Having grown up on a farm myself—although my parents only produced food for our family and not to make a living—flipping through this book felt like a trip home to our farm in northern West Virginia. It contains countless sketched scenes that look just like the views of my childhood: flooded fields, chickens running loose in the yard, frozen ponds, Dad’s sawmill, canning equipment and buckets of peaches cluttering the countertops, a tractor stuck in the ditch. I find these scenes both nostalgic and refreshing, especially during the social media age when oftentimes, our limited exposure to modern farm life comes from farmer-influencers who share only the most idyllic aspects. Arwen’s approach pairs the sweet and sacred moments with the difficult and monotonous to offer up an honest glimpse at this way of life.
Rosalie Haizlett: Hey, Arwen! Thanks for being willing to share a bit about Landings with us. You write in the book that for a while, you kept your art and farm life separate. How many years did you live on the farm before you started sketching your surroundings, and do you remember the first farm sketch you made?
Arwen Donahue: For the first several years after moving to the farm, I really wasn't drawing much at all--I was focusing on my writing. I go through cycles in my work in which writing is more in the foreground of my practice than drawing, and I was in a years-long writing cycle. I started keeping a sketchbook again because I had hit a wall with a novel I was working on. By then, I had lived on the farm for about ten years, so it took awhile! I think the first farm-based sketch I made may have been of a pair of sleeping puppies. (Who wouldn't want to draw a pair of sleeping puppies?)
Rosalie: Prior to living on the farm, what did your connection to the natural world look like? How has living there influenced your relationship with nature?
Arwen: I spent much of my childhood in Santa Fe, New Mexico, living in an earth-sheltered house with no running water or electricity. It seemed to me that we were perched right at the edge of human civilization—if we walked out the door and headed East, we immediately entered a mountainous wilderness, without houses or roads. The stars overhead compounded my sense that the universe was vast and wild. My father frequently took my brother and me hiking, camping, climbing, cross country skiing, and kayaking. When I stayed at my mom's house, about a mile away, I used to walk around the neighborhood with a garbage bag, picking up trash, because I thought the land was beautiful and that garbage defiled it. (Needless to say, this did not help my social standing among neighborhood kids, who called me "Garbage Girl.")
In short, I have always been in love with the natural world. Living on the farm has been an ongoing wonder and source of amazement, especially now that I've lived there almost three decades, long enough to witness the land and its inhabitants change--open spaces have become wooded; pioneer trees such as sumac and cedars have been overshadowed by hardwoods; the whippoorwills and bobwhites have disappeared, and the wood thrushes have multiplied.
Rosalie: 130 sketches is quite a large number! Did you create a routine to make yourself sit down and create, or did you allow yourself to only sketch on days when you felt energized by the project?
Arwen: I did not have a strict schedule for making the drawings, but I aimed to do at least three drawings a week, so that the full spectrum of a year would be represented in the drawings. We were very busy with the farm the year that I made the drawings, so I didn't want to sabotage the process by forcing myself to stick to a schedule that would have been unrealistic.
Rosalie: Can you share a quick overview of your artistic process for making this book? I'd love to know if you did the sketches first and then wrote about the moment, or vice versa. I'd also love to hear about the watercolor and ink supplies that you used!
Arwen: I carried a camera everywhere with me during the year I made the drawings, and took pictures of everything that caught my eye throughout the day. That in itself was fascinating, because I don't have a habit of taking a lot of pictures, and the camera helped me see the world I was in differently. I didn't have a cell phone then-- I used a digital camera. When I was ready to draw, I would go through all of the photos I had taken and decide on a subject.
The camera had a tiny little screen so I couldn't be too literal about representing exactly what I'd photographed. In the beginning, I used a nib pen and water-soluble ink, which I liked because after I did the drawing I could dip a brush in water and make a wash by drawing my brush over the ink lines. After I had a grayscale image, I'd add some watercolors. I never sketched anything, so my errors of scale and ink splotches were plain to see.
Eventually, I used waterproof ink, because I wanted to be able to do color washes without completely losing my lines. I usually started coloring with Payne's Gray, which I found to be a unifying color, and I began to see it everywhere. Then I started seeing the land in certain colors ("Oh, that cedar is a surprising combination of hooker's green and burnt siena!") There was a short phase in there when I used walnut ink, but it didn't last long--it wasn't high-contrast enough. Basically, I was just flying by the seat of my pants. I wasn't trying to write a book; I was just trying to draw my daily life. After I finished a drawing, I'd jot some notes down about it on the facing page. You can see a few examples of this in the attached images. The notes I jotted were on the back side of the drawing from the previous page.
I've always kept a journal, so when I took the leap into making Landings a book, I went back through the many years of journal entries I had kept, and drew from them to create the short essays that accompany each drawing.
“I wasn't trying to write a book; I was just trying to draw my daily life.”
Rosalie: Did you share the final book with members of your regional community? If so, I'm interested to hear about their reactions.
Arwen: Many of our community of CSA subscribers have showed up for book-related events and been super supportive. Back when I started doing the drawings, I invited them to subscribe (for free) to weekly emails that included the drawings and writings, and their enthusiasm helped me understand that perhaps these drawings could become a book.
Rosalie: Thanks for your time and for creating this beautiful book, Arwen! This is one that I will treasure for a long time.
The illustration below looks nearly identical to a spot on the creek that runs through my family’s farm. I love how Arwen captured the muddiness of the water in winter and spring, the skeletal trees along the banks, and the scraggly riparian plants.
The illustration below caught my eye because it reminded me of all the walks I’ve taken with my dad on the farm, conversing about life and the changing forest as we meander through the woods.
Thanks for reading this month’s book review! Wishing you a cozy holiday season, and I’ll see you in January. 📖☕️
Every book reviewed so far has ended up on my wishlist. This one looks beautiful!
Really enjoyed reading this post! I lived at my grandparents farm off and on growing up and it brought back memories. One of the “lessons” I learned through this interview is to never give up even if it takes a while.