The Porch welcomes Memphis-based writer Martha Park as part of our FY25 Visiting Writers Series. Park will be in conversation with Porch codirector Susannah Felts and will lead attendees in a writing exercise based on her debut illustrated essay collection, World Without End. Books will be available for signing and purchase. 

This event is free to attend, but if you’re able, please consider making a donation of $10–$30 to help us sustain these valuable programs at The Porch.

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About the writer: Martha Park is a writer and illustrator from Memphis, Tennessee. She received an MFA from the Jackson Center for Creative Writing at Hollins University, and was the Spring 2016 Philip Roth Writer-in-Residence at Bucknell University’s Stadler Center for Poetry. She has received fellowships and grants from the Religion & Environment Story Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Her collaborative illustrated journalism has been recognized with an EPPY Award for Best use of Data/Infographics and was a finalist for the Institute for Nonprofit News’ Insight Award for Visual Journalism. Martha’s work has appeared in Orion, Oxford American, The Guardian, Grist, Guernica, The Bitter Southerner, ProPublica, and elsewhere.

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‍About the book: 

For fans of Margaret Renkl and Lisa Wells’s Believers, World Without End circles the connections between climate change and faith in the fear and fascination of the end of the world.

When Martha Park’s father announced he was retiring from the ministry after forty-two years, she moved home to Memphis to attend his United Methodist church for his last year in the pulpit. She hoped to encounter a more certain sense of herself as secular or religious. Instead, she became increasingly compelled by uncertainty itself, curious about whether doubt could be a kind of faith, one that more closely echoed the world itself, one marked by loss, beauty, and constant change.

In illustrated essays, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After explores the intersections of faith, motherhood, and the climate crisis across the South, from man-made wetlands in Arkansas to conservation cemeteries in South Carolina; from a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark in Kentucky to the reenactment of the Scopes Monkey Trial. Park chronicles the ways the faith she was raised in now seems like an exception to the rule, and explores this divide with compassion and empathy.

World Without End considers the way religion shapes how Southerners understand and interact with the world—and how faith can compel us to work to save the places we love.

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