So excited that I get to read again with the Local Writers Read series, in the ether for the second year.
Before I get rambly about it, here’s the date so you can mark your calendar (post-it, napkin, stray wisp of paper, the app on your phone): SATURDAY, 6/19, at 3 p.m. ET on their Facebook page linked here.
They always have a theme, and this Saturday is ADORNMENT & DISGUISE, to be as loosely interpreted as each writer sees it. Good thing because I don’t write something specifically for it but find something I have written that speaks that language. Somehow I have always had work that relates. Last year’s was Hard Exit.
I rarely write to a “theme,” and struggle when I do. Last weekend, as I was driving to Camden, I was musing about collections of poetry and realized that I never write poems that are intended to thematically hold together, that could become a book, spidery word things of similar direction. Here’s the problem—or the gift—everything I write rises up with its own little germ of who and how it wants to be. It’s like birthing a baby and then trying to make that dancer into an accountant. No, I want what it wants. So, you’re a dancer? Fab. Or an accountant? Fab too.
A word baby erupts and there it is, telling me it’s a poem or a prose poem, a story, an essay, and what it will take on.
I stumbled on the Local Writers Read series in 2019 when I drove to Quiet City Books, a tiny Lewiston bookstore in a basement run by now-pink-haired Courtney Schlachter, who hosts the events when we’re in physical face-to-face life. An older writer was reading from her first book. I am always moved by first books by older writers, even if I’m not exactly moved by the book or all of the book. The readers run the gamut in age and genre, experience.
The series is the creation of Claire Guyton and Josh Gauthier, writers—very different fabulous writers—who also work at the Lewiston Public Library.
THIS SATURDAY I get to read with Claire and with Jodi Paloni. I can’t wait to hear their take on this Adornment & Disguise thing. I hope you can join us.