FROM Beacon Press (publisher)

Author and longtime midwife Patricia Harman will be reading from her new book, Arms Wide Open: A Midwife's Journey on Friday, April 22, at Malaprops at 7 p.m. As her publicist notes, "The new book goes back to the hippie homebirth homesteading days when she and her partner went back to the land to experiment with living sustainably."

Here's more: This April, Patricia Harman releases a prequel to the stories that first brought readers into her exam room-turned-confessional.

Drawing heavily from Harman’s personal journals, Arms Wide Open goes back to a time of counterculture idealism when Harman taught herself to deliver babies. Midwifery started by accident for her—she coached a friend living on a commune through labor—but natural childbirth became Harman’s life for the next 30 years, delivering thousands of babies throughout her career.

Harman shared some of her patients’ most personal stories in her best-selling memoir The Blue Cotton Gown (October 2008, Beacon Press), which People magazine called “sweetly perceptive.” Her new book opens with stories of living in the wilds of Minnesota—in a log cabin built by hand—and moves on to how Harman became a self-taught midwife before her professional training.

“Patricia Harman’s unflinching honesty and soaring poetry unfold the dream and the reality of the rural communes, political activism and urban counterculture in the 1970s, and what we, the veterans of that particular era of bohemian life, have become today,” says Alicia Bay Laurel, author and illustrator of Living on the Earth.

Harman lives and works with her husband in Morgantown at their clinic (http://womenshealthwv.com/). She has been published in The Journal of Midwifery & Women’s Health and The Journal of Sigma Theta Tau for Nursing Scholarship, amoung other publications, and is a regular presenter at national midwifery conferences.

Learn more about Harman and Arms Wide Open at http://www.patriciaharman.com.

Harman hits the road for her book tour mid-April. Confirmed tour stops throughout the Southeast found online: http://booktour.com/author/24543. Read the full article