A love for literature, food and writing

Mark Scarbrough brings books to life at libraries

By his own definition, Mark Scarbrough is a prolific cookbook author, along with his husband, Bruce

Weinstein. He’s also a memoir writer, an on-andoff pianist, a former French horn player, former seminarian, former academic and former screenwriter; and a social media presence who shares his knowledge of cooking, literature and gardening.

Scarbrough is in midst of a free, eight-week program on the poetry of Emily Dickinson at the Cornwall Library.

“By Zoom, of course,” he said. “I just came off four weeks on the novels of Toni Morrison at the Scoville Memorial Library in Salisbury. This program

was actually the back half of an eight-week program that got interrupted last March by COVID-19. Claudia Cayne and I kept hoping to bring the course back in person but eventually decided to finish it this March via Zoom.”

Scarbrough is “thinking through” the eight-week course at the Cornwall Library. He’s doing the same for a program at the Bushnell-Sage Library in Sheffield, Mass., in fall, and a possible six-week program for the Norfolk Library in January 2022. No decision on subject matter has been made.

The programs are attractive to people these days, likely as a way to interact with others while learning about an author, an art form or some other cultural lesson, where Scarbrough discusses writers and thinkers with participants over a series of weeks.

“In essence, I have the luxury of deciding how I want to spend my time with these courses: what do I want to read about, what catches my interest,” Scarbrough said.

“This could have never happened in my former life as an

academic in English departments at UW-Madison (Wisconsin) and St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. I would have been locked into 19th century American lit,” he continued. “I’m freer now. I did eight weeks on Virginia Woolf at the Scoville Library three years ago. And I once taught a 16-week session in two parts on ‘The Canterbury Tales’ for The Taconic Learning Center.”

In 2010, Scarbrough was invited to lead a book group at the Norfolk Library. It was and still is a discussion group; he chose the titles.

“Sometimes, there’s a theme to my list — American novels you didn’t read in college but your kids and grandkids are reading now — and sometimes it’s a loose collection of modern novels,” he said. “The book group grew from eight original members to about 30. Then, I was asked to teach a course at the Taconic Learning Center,” an adult-education program in Salisbury.

Claudia Cayne at the Scoville Memorial Library contacted Scarbrough in 2013 about offering a similar course. “We chose an eight-week program on the short stories of Flannery O’Connor,” he said.

He has offered seven- or eightweek

seminars at Scoville annually ever since, and has added libraries in Cornwall, Norfolk, the Gunn Memorial in Washington and the Bushnell-Sage in Sheffield, Mass., presenting the same programs.

Scarbrough also leads book discussions at the Hotchkiss Library in Sharon and at the Oliver Wolcott Library in Litchfield.

“Needless to say, this teaching and discussion-leading has overwhelmed my ‘other’ life — which is writing cookbooks with my husband, Bruce,” he said. “We will publish our 36th cookbook this fall.”

He decides his topics mostly by his own interests.

“In January, 2020, just before COVID-19 hit, I offered a six-week course at the Norfolk Library on Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio,” one cantata per session,” Scarbrough said. “Once, long before academia, I’d been a musician, a trained pianist and singer, who worked in some pop and jazz bands, as well as sang in some semi-professional settings. I’ve always wanted to get back to my musical self; so I thought, ‘Hey, Bach!’”

He spent a year researching the cultural and historical moment in which Bach wrote — the rise of Prussia, the aftermath of the

Thirty Years War, the destruction of Sweden as a European power, the tension between Calvinists and Lutherans in central Europe — then designed a course that helped explain Bach’s master work, while setting it in its cultural moment.

As for the Cornwall Library class now in progress, Scarbrough has always had a passion for Dickinson’s work and he’s “thrilled” to reconnect with her poetry every time. “Back when I was an academic, some students called my American-lit survey for majors ‘Dickinson, Faulkner, and the Also-Rans.’”

Scarbrough hopes those who participate in his seminars will connect emotionally with the material.

“Some of this stuff is tough: Faulkner, Woolf, Stevens. Some of it is esoteric. But the point is to find a way to open the admittedly rigorous work up to the emotional landscape of the attendees,” he said. “And, of course, I hope they learn a little bit about the cultural and historical backgrounds of whatever we’re studying.

“Frankly, the way I approach lit is not very much in favor these days, he said. “Not the cultural/ historical part. That’s very current. I mean, people don’t offer

courses on a single writer in college much anymore.”

When he taught Faulkner two years ago at the Scoville, on four Faulkner novels in eight weeks, he had a friend who teaches at a boarding school up here tell him, “You know, we don’t do literature like that these days.”

“He meant that they teach, oh, say, questions of identity in a group of texts, ‘The Tempest’ to ‘Mrs. Dalloway.’ I’m certainly interested in questions of identity,” he said. “But, in the end, I respect the text a great deal. I want it to be the center of our discussions and lectures, not some thematic I’ve cooked up.”

Among other tasks, Scarbrough and Weinstein published two cookbooks last year, and wrote another through fall 2020 and into late winter 2021. Weinstein is a chef, trained at Johnson and Wales; Scarbrough is the writer.

They also have a show on YouTube, “Cooking with Bruce and Mark”; Scarbrough also does a podcast that began last September, “Walking with Dante.”

To learn more about Scarbrough and Weinstein’s cookbooks, YouTube channel and podcasts, go to markscarbrough.com.

Contributed photo Mark Scarbrough