Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Pamela Petro, American author, artist and teacher based in Massachusetts. Pamela has just published a memoir called The Long Field in which we learn about her passion for Wales as an American, based around the concept of hiraeth. Pamela did an MA in The Word and the Visual Imagination at Lampeter and she talks about how she never got over her ‘Welsh thing’. In the last 35 years she has been back something like 28 times. Lampeter has affected her in a way no other place has. Pamela talks about how she felt instantly at home there and about being comfortable on the margins looking critically at the centre. She felt that she was in touch with the world in this intimate place, and she talks about using our own stories as a jumping off place to a universal plane. We learn about the importance of hiraeth, which might be thought of as a form of homesickness and longing and as the presence of absence – perhaps a longing for the self that we once were. We hear about the time a man app