Savoy Bookshop & Café presents an author talk and signing with Carla Panciera for the book Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir
About the Book
About the BookOsborndale Ivanhoe was a bull who became an unlikely celebrity. He defied expectations and challenged long-established notions of what constituted a champion Holstein. But his fame was dependent on one man’s stubborn insistence that the animal was, indeed, special. Carla Panciera spent years with her father and his famous herd traveling from county fair to county fair, and answering the same questions: “Is that Aldo Panciera?” and “Are you Aldo’s daughter?” This memoir is based on the real man and his very real effort to make a living at what he loved. He was a demanding teacher and an unappeasable boss, but he was also a father who finished night milking and took his daughter for sled rides down a frozen hillside, or for a spin on the local carnival’s Ferris wheel, or who paused, plowing fields, to pick her the first wildflowers of the season. Barnflower is about a man and his work and what that life demanded of his family. Read about the bond between a father and daughter and their love for the kind of life they shared, a kind of life that is both a critical and a vanishing part of our history.
About the Author
Born in Westerly, RI, Carla Panciera was raised on her family’s dairy farm. She graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a BA in English and has a graduate degree in poetry from Boston University where she studied with George Starbuck and Derek Walcott.
She has published two collections of poetry: One of the Cimalores (Cider Press) and No Day, No Dusk, No Love (Bordighera). Her poetry has appeared in numerous magazines including Poetry, Painted Bride Quarterly, Nimrod, the Carolina Quarterly, and the Los Angeles Review. Poems have also been nominated for three Pushcart Awards. She received the Aghda Ali Scholarship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and has twice presented at the Student Day of Poetry for the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.
Her first collection of short stories, Bewildered, received the 2013 Grace Paley Short Fiction Award from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (Pam Houston, judge) and was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in the fall of 2014. Her short stories have appeared in the New England Review, the Clackamas Review, Slice, and other magazines. Her short story, “The Kind of People Who Look at Art” was chosen by Junot Diaz as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories for 2017.
A second collection of short stories, Barnflower: A Rhode Island Farm Memoir, will be released in the spring of 2023 by Loom Press, Amesbury, MA.
She received the James A. Kilgore Scholarship in Nonfiction from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and is a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant in nonfiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
Her blogsite is I Am a Part of All That I Have Met. A high school English teacher, Ms. Panciera lives with her husband, Dennis Donoghue, and their three daughters in Rowley, MA.
Osborndale Ivanhoe was a bull who became
an unlikely celebrity. He defied e
xpectations and challenged long-established
notions of what constituted a champion
Holstein. But his fame was dependent on one
man's stubborn insistence that the animal
was, indeed, special. Carla Panciera spent
years with her father and his famous herd