Wednesday, September 16 at 6:00 pm
Talking Leaves…Books and Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center presents
Join us at Hallwalls for an evening with Cara Benson and Janet McNally discussing Benson's new memoir, An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment. The conversation will be followed by book signing. This presentation is free and open to the public with books for purchase available from Talking Leaves. The best ways to show your support are purchase of a book from Talking Leaves and donation to Hallwalls via donation station at the event.
"A story of recovery, love, and loss—a memoir of healing ourselves and the natural world."
Cara Benson did not come to love easy. As a low bottom addict, she crawled through subway tunnels and partnered with an abusive man. When she came face to face with her own death, she chose life. Her journey of survival led her into recovery, to climbing mountains, and ultimately to Jon, the man with whom she cultivated a relationship that began as "second chance lovers" and slowly developed into one as lifetime partners.
Years later, Benson unexpectedly found herself in devastation as she came to terms with losing Jon to suicide. As she retreated into her grief, she also retreated into the woods of upstate New York, exploring the forests not as the avid hiker she'd become in recovery, but as a meanderer who had lost her way. Here she found more grief in her observation of the effects of climate change.
In confronting her loss, Benson came to realize that the lessons she learned from loving Jon in sickness, health, and death could be applied to her relationship with the non-human world. From squirreling away oak acorns for reforestation of a logged property to maintaining feeders for the birds Jon adored, Benson's daily life became a sort of field guide for how to live with a deep and abiding commitment to the future of the planet despite challenging odds.
Moving through the intensely personal and kindred terrain of love, recovery, and loss, An Armsfull of Birds is a climate memoir that tells the story of developing deeply held commitments to ourselves, to those we love, and ultimately to the ailing natural world.
Cara Benson is author of the memoir An Armsfull of Birds: A Personal Field Guide to Love, Loss, and Commitment (2026). Other writing has appeared in The New York Times, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Orion, Sierra Magazine, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and selected for Best American Poetry. She has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and wrote a series on walking in the woods for the Best American Poetry website. Benson lives in a former church on the ancestral homelands of the Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Mohicans in upstate NY.
Janet McNally is a local author, prizewinning poet, and professor at Canisius University. You can listen to her chat more about birds on The Spark Bird Podcast