Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh

Petro, Pamela

Travel

HarperCollins Canada / Trade

An absorbing travel book, a meditation on geology, photography, Romanesque art, and the romance of physical decline, The Slow Breath of Stone throws a mirror on Europe of the Middle Ages and its hold on us today. In the years following the devastations of the first world war, a brilliant, young American couple, Kingsley and Lucy Porter, traveled to south-west France to document the abbeys and basilicas of the Romanesque period. Their extraordinary photographs revealed some of the most feverishly inventive stonescapes in Europe, stories chiselled from the Bible and nightmares: rams playing harps and devils eating men's brains; a female centaur pulling a mermaid's hair; women suckling snakes at their breasts. For the Porters, these were images of an imagined world that unlocked secrets of the 11th century but, menacingly, cast a dark shadow over their marriage. In The Slow Breath of Stone, Pamela Petro rents a car and, using the Porter's photographs and Lucy's journal as her map, retraces their journey through the wild landscapes of the Rouergue. She visits the beautiful and disturbing sculptures of monsters and animals devouring prey that adorn the cathedrals of Cahors and Carcassonne, and she explores a limestone quarry from where these great slabs of stone were hewn a thousand years ago. She walks the routes of pilgrimages, testaments to the tenacity of human hope, meeting people along the way and savoring the local food and wine. Above all, she journeys deep into the strange relationship of the sexually incompatible Lucy and Kingsley, following them to Donegal where their marriage was to end tragically and mysteriously on the cliffs of Inishbofin.

The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story

Travel Writing

Harpercollins Pub, Ltd.

The idiosyncratic and witty travelogue of a young Welsh-speaking woman who travels the globe in search of Welsh communities.

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

Flamingo

Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South

An enthralling, rollicking tour among the storytellers of the American Deep South. The story of the South is not finished. The southeastern states of America, the old Confederacy, bristle with storytellers who refuse to be silent. Many of the tales passed down from generation to generation to be told and re-told continue to change their shape to suit their time, stretching elastically to find new ways of retailing the People's Truth. Travelling back and forth, from the Carolinas to Louisiana, from the Appalachians to Atlantic islands, from Virginian valleys to Florida swamps, and sitting before bewitching storytellers who tell her tales that hold her hard, Pamela Petro gathers up a fistful of history, and sieves out of it the shiny truths that these stories have been polishing over the years. Here is another America altogether, lingering on behind the façade of the ubiquitous strip-mall of anodyne, branded commerce and communication, moving to other rhythms, reaching back into the past to clutch at the shattering events that shaped it and haunt it still.

Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

The Newport & Narragansett Bay Book: A Complete Guide : with Block Island (The Great Destinations Series)

Reference

Woodstock, VT, U.S.A.: Countryman Press, 1994

This is one guidebook anyone visiting the state would want to have.--Rhode Islander Magazine

Great Destinations Newport and Narragansett Bay Book

Berkshire House Pub

Including Jack the trickster, boo-bags and plat-eyes, ghosts, and singing turtles, an enchanting and entertaining collection of tales, culminated from the author's journey to the South and filled with the rich history and culture of each location, from some of the most colorful and creative storytellers in the world celebrates the South's oral tradition. 20,000 first printing.

Arcade Publishing

An inspired road trip through the South to uncover some of America’s most talented and colorful storytellers, their tales, and the lush land that links them.

Literary

For the first time in paperback, an acclaimed look at the American South through the lenses of its most acclaimed storytellers and their tales. Rarely does a nonfiction work come along that is as original and refreshing as Sitting Up with the Dead. Here, take a ride with Pamela Petro as she embarks on a series of road trips through the states of the Old South to collect its stories and meet its tellers of traditional tales. Some of them are local celebrities, others national treasures. Among them are Ray Hicks, a National Heritage Fellow; Kathryn Windham, the ghost lady”; Nancy Basket, a kudzu paper-maker; Colonel Rod, self-proclaimed Florida cracker”; and Grammy Award-winner David Holt. You encounter plat-eyes and boo-hags, Jack the trickster and Brer Rabbit, mule eggs, singing turtles, talking corpses, and flying Africans from the sea islands of South Carolina. Stories provide the connective tissue of the South, linking the past with the present. They join communities as widespread as the coastal plains of the Carolinas and Georgia, the swamps of the Gulf Coast, and the mountains and valleys of Appalachia. As distinctly American as jazz, they blend cultures and oral traditions as diverse as those of southern England, Ireland, West Africa, and native America. They contain bits of lived history, both from before the Civil War and after. In Sitting Up with the Dead, Pamela Petro offers a paradoxical wake for the undying body of the Old South, to hear its truths and contemplate its robust afterlife in the tallest, lyingest,” most fruitful, and most haunting of its tales.

Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South

Essays & Correspondence

Arcade

The Long Field burrows deep into the Welsh countryside to tell how this small country became a big part of an American writer's life. Petro, author of Travels in an Old Tongue, twines her story around that of Wales by viewing both through the lens of hiraeth, a quintessential Welsh word famously hard to translate. It literally means "long field," but is also more than the English approximation of "homesickness." It's a name for the bone-deep longing felt for someone or something--a home, culture, language, a younger self--that you've lost or left behind. Hiraeth is embodied by Arthur, King of the Once and Future, but never the Present. It is, above all, an acknowledgement of the presence of absence in our lives. The Long Field braids the hiraeth Petro has experienced personally--as an American who pines for Wales; as a gay woman in a same-sex relationship; as the survivor of a horrific train crash; as the daughter of a parent with dementia--into the essential hiraeth stories of Wales. Along the way Petro looks at hiraeth in traditional and radically new ways: queer hiraeth, the hiraeth of technology, ancestry, minorities, the environment, and politics in the age of Brexit and Trump. Petro's hiraeth is not only an awareness of loss and longing but also a creative response to absence and loss, which she sees as the genius of Welsh culture and the wellspring of all creativity.

The Long Field: A memoir

Memoirs

Little Toller Books

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Books by Petro, Pamela

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Petro, Pamela. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh

The Slow Breath of Stone: A Romanesque Love Story

Travels in an Old Tongue: Touring the World Speaking Welsh

Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South

The Newport & Narragansett Bay Book: A Complete Guide : with Block Island (The Great Destinations Series)

Great Destinations Newport and Narragansett Bay Book

Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South

Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South

Sitting Up with the Dead: A Storied Journey through the American South

The Long Field: A memoir