Join NYT bestseller and founder of The Old Knitting Factory, Betsy Cornwell, at Baltimore Community Midwives for a reading and Q&A in celebration of her debut memoir Ring of Salt. Betsy will speak about survivorship, writing queer retellings of fairy tales and classic novels, and the power of community in supporting single parents.

After moving to Ireland to finish her first young adult novel, novelist Betsy Cornwell fell in love, both with the country itself and a handsome horse trainer. On her baby's first birthday, she flees an abusive marriage and, on a single-digit bank account balance, barely gets by with writing gigs and the support of both an online community of Smith College alumnae and a domestic abuse service in Galway. As she navigates the constraints of being a homeless single mother in a foreign country, she dreams of one day being able to provide a home for her son – a home where she could also offer artist retreats for other single mothers, with childcare included. When she starts writing online about her dream of buying a home no one can take away from her, a global network of women, most of them strangers, step in and slowly help her achieve an unlikely dream: crowdfunding a rent-to-own offer on a 1906 knitting factory in rural Ireland, originally meant as a school to teach textile skills to unmarried women as a means of self-sufficiency, and transforming it into a safe home for herself and her son and a residency space for other single moms, cultivating community by offering free, childcare-inclusive retreat space to make art.
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Maid meets Under the Tuscan Sun in this inspiring memoir as Cornwell combines a powerful and relatable narrative of survivorship and healing with lush writing about the windswept landscapes and rich mythology of rural Ireland to craft a real-world fairy tale about the ordinary, but no less life-changing, forms of magic we can all access: vulnerability, community, and the power of telling your own story.
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A limited number of books will be available on site, or can be pre-ordered at a 15% discount from your favorite local bookstore via Bookshop.org with code Betsy15.Before your copy arrives, get a flavor for the story in Betsy's NYT Modern Love essay.