Poetry State Forest at The Spotty Dog
Saturday, Feb. 8, 7pm
A Reading
Hosted by Philip Good
Featuring Ellyn Gaydos, author of Pig Years (Knopf)
Plus Iemanja Brown, Russell Day, Katie Fowley, Annabel Lee, John Mason, Emma Parrish Post, Karen Schoemer, Sarah Steadman, and Katie Taylor
The Spotty Dog
440 Warren Street
Hudson, NY 12534
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Ellyn Gaydos’ first book, Pig Years, came out in 2022 and was a New Yorker best book of the year. Her writing has appeared in Harper’s, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Paris Review and others. She lives in New York with her family and two cats and works on a vegetable farm.
Pig Years catapults American nature writing into the 21st century, and has been hailed by Lydia Davis and Aimee Nezhukumatathil as “engrossing” and “a marvel.” As a farmer in Upstate New York and Vermont, Ellyn Gaydos lives on the knife edge between loss and gain. Her debut memoir draws us into this precarious world, conjuring with stark simplicity the lifeblood of the farm: its livestock and crisp full moons, the sharp cold days lived near to the land. Joy and tragedy are frequent bedfellows. Fields go barren and animals meet their end too soon, but then their bodies become food in a time-old human ritual. Seasonal hands are ground down by the hard work, but new relationships are formed, love blossoms and Gaydos yearns to become a mother. As winter’s dark descends, Pig Years draws us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are star-bright symbols of hope and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, even in the slaughter.
In hardy, lyrical prose that recalls the agrarian writing of Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all and to reconsider what we know of survival and what saves us. Pig Years is a rapturous reckoning of love, labor and loss within a landscape given to flux.
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Poetry State Forest is located at the edge of the Rensselaer Plateau where two creeks meet. It preserves the legacy of renowned poet Bernadette Mayer through programming in her home and writing spaces including her poetry library and the surrounding landscape.
Philip Good, who helped Mayer lead writing workshops for decades, has continued the tradition with local writers who meet once a week to enjoy experimentation in poetry.