PIG YEARS

An itinerant farmhand's account on the wonders hidden within the ever-blooming seasons of life, death, and rebirth.

As a seasonal farmer in upstate New York and Vermont - living hand-to-mouth, but in love with the land and its creatures - Ellyn Gaydos understands the delicate balance between loss and gain. Choosing such work, Gaydos recognizes her role in cycles bigger than herself; yearning to be a mother, she recognizes, too, how new life is mirrored in everything that surrounds her: livestock, full moons, endless acres of green that seem to blossom overnight. But there's tragedy on the farms as well: fields gone barren and animals meeting their end too soon. While small farms struggle to survive in the face of industrial operations, low wages, and loneliness, Gaydos takes us into a violent and gorgeous world where pigs are turned into star-bright symbols of hope, and beauty surfaces in the furrows, the sow, and the slaughter.

In shimmering prose that is as lyric as it is hardscrabbled, Gaydos asks us to bear witness to the work that sustains us all, and 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.

ELLYN GAYDOS received an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University. Her work has received the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism, and appeared in The Texas Review, The Columbia Journal, and Ninth Letter, where she received the 2017 award for creative nonfiction. She lives in New Lebanon, NY, currently.