Arms Wide Open ─ A Midwife's Journey

In this prequel to the highly praised The Blue Cotton Gown, Patricia Harman reaches back to her youthful experiments in living a fully sustainable and natural life in the 1960s and ’70s in rural Minnesota and on a commune in Ohio, forming alliances with the eco-minded and antiwar counterculture. From those riveting days as a self-taught midwife, delivering babies in cabins and on farms, sometimes in harrowing circumstances, Patsy takes us into the present day, where she faces the challenges of running a women’s health clinic with her husband, mothering adult sons, and holding true to her principles and passions in the twenty-first century.

Author of The Midwife of Hope River, Patricia Harman's first book, The Blue Cotton Gown, was called “luminescent, ruthlessly authentic, humane, and brilliantly written” by author Samuel Shem. Harman lives and works near Morgantown, West Virginia, and has three sons.