A Conversation Between Collaborators: The Weeds and Botanical Art

with Katy Simpson Smith, Author; Kathy Schermer-Gramm, Professional Artist

The registration period has closed for this event.

Date: Thursday, April 20, 2023

Time: 12:00 PM-1:00 PM EST, followed by a book-signing in the Pegg Exhibit Hall

Location: Hybrid - Virtual and In-person attendance options (see below for more information)

Free; $5 suggested fee; preregistration required
 

This program will be delivered in a hybrid format.

In-person option: Seats are available in the Reeves Auditorium. Please register all members of your party separately to ensure we have enough seats. 

Virtual option: We will stream the lecture live via Zoom Webinar. Links for accessing the program will be emailed to registered participants in advance of the program.

Author Katy Simpson Smith and botanical artist Kathy Schermer-Gramm discuss Simpson Smith's new novel, The Weeds, a story of love, survival, revenge, and botany set in the surprisingly verdant Roman Colosseum. Schermer-Gramm provided the art for the book, in the form of twelve eerily beautiful botanical illustrations. Now, the two speak on their creative practices, their collaboration, and all things plants.

About The Weeds

“Brilliant, poetic, unnerving, wholly original. What else would you expect from Katy Simpson Smith? With The Weeds, she has written another masterpiece.” —Julia Phillips, author of Disappearing Earth

In 2018, a Mississippi graduate student pushes through the ruin of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. She has escaped her life, apprenticed herself to catalog all the species growing in this place. Crawling along the stones, she wonders how she has landed here, a reluctant botanist amid a snarl of tourists in comfortable sandals. She hunts for a scientific agenda and a direction of her own.

In 1854, a well-born thief pushes through the jungle of the Roman Colosseum, searching for plants. As punishment for her misbehavior, she has been indentured to the English botanist Richard Deakin, for whom she will compile a flora. If only the woman she loves weren't on a boat, with a husband, hundreds of miles away. But love isn't always possible. She logs 420 species.

Through a list of seemingly minor plants and their uses—medical, agricultural, culinary—these women calculate intangible threats: a changing climate, the cost of knowledge, and the ways that repeated violence can upend women's lives. They must forge their own small acts of defiance and slip through whatever cracks they find. How can anyone survive?

Lush, intoxicating, and teeming with mischief, Katy Simpson Smith's The Weeds is a tense, mesmerizing page-turner about science and survival, the roles women are given and have taken from them, and the lives they make for themselves.