Friends of the Chatham Public Library Author & Artist Series:
Outsiders, Unseen Observers, and the Virtues of Preserving the Private Self: A Talk with Authors Andrea Barnet and Akiko Busch
The work of Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, Rachel Carson, and Alice Waters ignited a transformative progressive movement and helped form the bedrock of 1960s counterculture. In Visionary Women, published in 2018, author Andrea Barnet considers those ways in which these women did their pioneering and vastly influential work—in very different fields of interest—with limited support, few academic credentials, little public recognition. A year later, Akiko Busch came out with How to Disappear, a consideration of invisibility today, a moment in history when the pressure to be public comes not just from our peers, but from massive and pervasive technology companies hoping to profit from patterns in our behavior; social media, the surveillance economy, and facial recognition systems all conspire to put a disproportionately high value on public identity.
Longtime friends, the two writers were not initially aware of the connections and intersections between their two books. But as they read each other’s work and swapped stories about how it evolved and was later received, they came to realize certain similarities and themes in subject matter. Both writers explored those ways in which working inconspicuously, discreetly, and otherwise under the radar can serve thinking, writing, being. And common themes proved to be interconnection of systems; the value of working unseen and undisturbed; the meaning and merit of the small self; and those ways in which wonder leads to empathy.
Join the authors at the Friends of the Chatham Public Library’s Author & Artist Series - Saturday, May 7th at 2pm - as they read from their books and discuss some of these ideas. This program will be held in the Chatham Middle School Library, directly next door to the Public Library. Advance registration is requested but not required at https://bit.ly/CPL_050722.
Andrea Barnet is the author of Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall and Alice Waters Changed Our World, which was a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ Bograd Weld Award for Biography and one of Booklist’s four “2018 Editors’ choice for biography” selections. Her previous book, All-Night Party: The Women of Bohemian Greenwich Village and Harlem, 1913-1930 was a Lambda Literary award finalist. Her journalism has appeared in the New York Times, Smithsonian Magazine, Harpers Bazaar and The Toronto Globe and Mail, among other publications. She splits her time between the Hudson Valley and New York City.
Akiko Busch is the author of several essay collections, including Geography of Home, Nine Ways to Cross a River, and most recently, How to Disappear. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for twenty years, and her essays have appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogs. She lives in the Hudson Valley.