Author to Read From her Chicken-Keeping Memoir, “Under the Henfluence”

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Tove Danovich, author of “Under the Henfluence: Inside the World of Chickens and the People Who Love Them,” will discuss her chicken-keeping memoir in a presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 24 at the Cannon Beach Library.

This will be a hybrid event: The talk will be offered in person at the library and online through the library’s website, cannonbeachlibrary.org.

“Under the Henfluence” blends Danovich’s personal experience as an obsessed chicken keeper with her animal welfare reporting. While she offers a sobering picture of the cruel treatment inherent in the industrial agriculture approach to chicken farming, Danovich also recounts her initial chicken-keeping efforts in charming, often-funny and sometimes heart-breaking detail, as she welcomes her first four, fuzzy chicks.

The lives of these quirky and mysterious birds are told through interviews with the people breeding, training, healing and adoring chickens. Perhaps most endearing are her interviews with people who own and interact with chickens as they groom them as show animals, raise them as 4-H projects, use them as therapy animals or rescue them from inhumane treatment.

What emerges is an entertaining picture of an animal that is too-often overlooked and under-appreciated, and the people who are devoted to them.

Danovich is a freelance journalist and culture reporter who has written for the New York

Times, the Washington Post, and many others. She lives outside Portland, where she

keeps eight chickens.

Danovich’s talk is sponsored by the library’s NW Authors Series Committee that hosts authors monthly from September through May. The committee also conducts the Writers Read Celebration, which offers local writers an opportunity to write and read their own work on a specific theme. This year, the Writers Read Celebration is March 22, in the library and on Zoom. The theme is “Beach Noir.”