Blue Hill festival features art, authors, and foliage
The poetry of storm in Portland author’s new collection
A snowstorm arrives and changes the world. Intimacy is upped as the outdoors itself has its own round-edged walls; the mind widens and tightens. In the heaving swirl, new clarity. Such is the case in Portland, Maine-based poet Mike Bove’s recent collection “Eye” (Spuyten Duyvil), which he wrote in a five-day span as a March nor’easter moved through Maine. “All outside/ is sugar-shook,” he writes, and a plow’s “an angel’s wing of steel.” The storm pushes him backward into childhood where he sees the quiet rage of his father, a mother “not awake and not asleep” on the bedroom floor in a drunken stupor. He writes of thin ice and the brittle fragility of life: “though things look safe/ our lives here are glass,” and describes the special kind of light that snow emits, “even at night/ it does,” causing one to sense that maybe the darkness gives light to see by, too. For Bove, the eye and the I and the island blur into each other — our selves, our seeing, our solitude creating a snowblind snowsighted vision. “The sky in storm is worth our pause,” he writes, and reminds us, “reverence is reverence.”
Literary festival in Concord opens next Friday
The Concord Festival of Authors begins next Friday and runs through the end of the month with readings, workshops, walking tours, and discussions, this year celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Concord Free Public Library. The festival includes the awarding of two literary prizes. This year’s Ruth Ratner Miller Memorial Award for Excellence in American History goes to Robert Gross, author, most recently, of “The Transcendentalists and Their World” (FSG), with a ceremony on Oct. 21 at 7 p.m. This year’s Thoreau Prize, an annual award honoring a writer who “wishes to speak for nature and embodies the spirit of Thoreau as a gifted writer, insightful naturalist, and ethical thinker,” goes to Terry Tempest Williams, author of numerous books including “Erosion” (FSG), “The Hour of Land” (FSG), and “When Women Were
Birds” (Sarah Crichton Books). Jennifer De Leon (pictured), author of “Borderless” and “Don’t Ask Me Where I’m From,” will give the keynote address on Oct. 20 at 7 p.m. Ray Anthony Shepard will discuss his book “A Long Time Coming: A Lyrical Biography of Race in America from Ona Judge to Barack Obama” (Mahogany Books). Next Saturday, Oct. 21, brings a series of workshops on “The Nature of Self-Expression.” Annie Gauger will discuss the stories behind “The Wind in the Willows” on Oct. 22 at 1 p.m. And further ahead, Dan McKanan will give a lecture on the spiritual practices of the Transcendentalists and Unitarians. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fischer will speak on his work and career. And a Walking Book Club will ramble the Bruce Freeman Rail Trail while disicussing Tracy Kidder’s “Rough Sleepers.” For more information and a complete schedule, visit concordfestivalofauthors.org. by Marie Ndiaye (Astra House)
“Vengeance Is Mine” “The Life and Times of Hannah Crafts: The True Story of the Bondwoman’s Narrative” by Gregg
Hecimovich (Ecco)
“Tremor” by Teju Cole (Random House)
Pick of the week
Up in Maine, Word, the Blue Hill literary arts festival, takes place next weekend, at the blazing height of the coast’s fall foliage. The fest opens on Oct. 19 with an art opening and reading with Warren Lehrer and Adeena Karasick. On Friday, Oct. 20, Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Visit from the Goon Squad,” will be in conversation with author and critic Laura Miller. Poet Chen Chen will lead a workshop on “Happy Poems!” on Oct. 21 at 10 a.m. Movie and book critic A.O. Scott will be in conversation with Alicia Anstead on the art of criticism. Other workshop and panel topics include “Podcasts and How to Write Them”; an introduction to screenwriting with Jim Picariello; a generative memoir workshop on “A Window into Memory” with Meg Weston; songcrafting with Noel Paul Stookey and George Emlen; bookmaking; and “Spoiling a Notebook” with Dan Kois, “designed for anyone who, faced with a blank page, isn’t sure where to start.” And on Oct. 22, John Farrell will make a performance of the complete “Four Quartets” by T. S. Eliot. For more information and a complete schedule, visit wordfestival.org.
Beth Reynolds at Norwich Bookstore in Norwich, Vt., recommends “Pete and Alice in Maine” by Caitlin Shetterly (Harper): “Shetterly explores the intricacies and intimacies of a marriage, intensified by the pandemic and the need to flee the city. Putting the couple under a microscope, the inner workings of a family and what we desire and yearn for most in this world comes blazing into focus. Her descriptions of the world in 2020 felt so real. It’s so true that the smallest part of ourselves is the most universal, and so much of this book resonates here in New England for all of us.”