In Conversation With Margaret Renkl

Join Hub City Writers Project in welcoming author Margaret Renkl for her newest book, The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year! She will be in conversation with HCWP Executive Director Meg Reid. The ticket price includes a book.

Tickets

About the Book

“The Comfort of Crows is a howling love letter to the world, the story of what we’ve lost and what we can save and the abundance of wonder in our own backyard. Margaret Renkl is a singular, spectacular writer, and this book, like life itself, is a cause for celebration.

—Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House

From the author of Late Migrations comes a luminous book tracing the passing of seasons, personal and natural.

In The Comfort of Crows, New York Times opinion writer and bestselling author Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year—what develops is a portrait of joy and grief. Joy at the ongoing pleasures of the natural world: “Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will always find a reason to love the world.” And grief at a shifting climate, at winters that end too soon, at songbirds growing fewer and fewer.

Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with every passing day. How can one person make a difference amid such destabilizing changes?

With fifty-two original color artworks by Billy Renkl, the author’s brother, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a beloved writer.

About the Author

Margaret Renkl is the author of The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, which will be published on October 24, 2023. Her earlier books are Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss and Graceland, At Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache From the American South. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. The founding editor of Chapter 16, a daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.