The Roots That Clutch by Beth Ann Hooper

Join us for a presentation by author Beth Ann Hooper! Free with museum admission. Books will be available for sale! The Roots That Clutch is a novel about the unexpected journey a young budding poet and writer takes as she discovers a disturbing family secret: her paternal grandmother had had an affair with one of the greatest poets of the 20th century around the time her father was conceived. But while this secret remained sheltered behind New England stoicism, any budding artist has to feed their creative development somehow. For Beth Ann Hooper, in the absence of any family stories from her father’s side, it was her mother’s Johnstown roots that fed her young imagination. The granddaughter of people like Jozef and Anna, the children in the Heritage Discovery Centers’ characters, it was Beth’s family stories from Johnstown and Eastern Europe that provided amply for a young imagination yearning to create.