“Book Descriptions:The Long Field burrows deep into the Welsh countryside to tell two stories--mine and the nation of Wales’--through the lens of hiraeth, a quintessential Welsh word famously hard to translate. It literally means “long field,” which is appropriate as the Welsh landscape is at the heart of the story. But it also means far more than its English approximation of "homesickness"--something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable elsewhere or other. An acute awareness of the presence of absence. It’s a universal human emotion that the Welsh language has honored with a name.
The book is a nonfiction hybrid, part research, part nature and travel experience, part memoir. Its chapters braid hiraeth I’ve 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 wreck; as the daughter of a parent with dementia--with the essential hiraeth stories of Wales, and then embeds both in hiraeth endemic to the human condition. Along the way I look at hiraeth in both traditional and radically new ways. The hiraeth of land and home. The hiraeth of religion. Of technology. Of ancestry. Of minorities and gender. Of the environment. Of politics in the age of Brexit and Trump. Over the course of the book my view of hiraeth evolves from an awareness of loss and longing to a creative response to loss, which I see as the genius of Welsh culture--indeed, the wellspring of all creativity.” DRIVE
Read Ebook 
