Reading: Carol Ann Davis, "The Nail in the Tree"

Fairfield University English Professor Carol Ann Davis reads from her forthcoming book, The Nail in the Tree: On Art, Violence, and Parenting, which narrates her experience of raising two sons in Sandy Hook, CT, on the day of and during the aftermath of the shooting there. The image of the nail in the tree comes from the way in which her older son described the traumatic experience of Sandy Hook as a nail driven into a tree, around which the tree continued to grow.

Davis uses her experience of poetry and visual art to contextualize her own parenting within a broader history of violence. Her work seeks agency both for her children and for any person who, by the accident of histories—of war, gun violence, the Holocaust—faces childhood striated with trauma.