Brown Bag Lecture Series

Portland Public Library's Brown Bag Lecture Series features bi-weekly reading and question-and-answer sessions with authors from around the nation as well as those who hail from right here in Maine.  All Brown Bag Lectures are free to the public.  Guests are encouraged to bring their lunch, coffee provided by Coffee By Design. 
Special thanks to our Brown Bag Lecture Series coffee sponsor, Coffee by Design
Books on sale at each lecture courtesy of Longfellow Books, who generously donates a portion of the proceeds to the Portland Public Library.  Questions about our Brown Bag Lectures or to be added to our weekly calendar e-mail, send us an e-mail!

Programs take place on Wednesdays from 12pm-1pm in the newly renovated Rines Auditorium of the Portland Public Library at 5 Monument Square. unless otherwise noted.
Wednesday, September 15, Gerry Boyle, author of Damaged Goods
Gerry Boyle is an American novelist. He attended Colby College in Maine, majoring in literature, and began to write short stories and poetry. Boyle's first career was in journalism. He began as a reporter at the Rumford Falls Times, a weekly in Rumford, a Maine paper-mill town, then moved to the Morning Sentinel, a daily in Waterville, Maine, his old college town, going on to become a full-time columnist on the paper. As Boyle traveled around Maine looking for stories, he invented a freelance journalist-detective called Jack McMorrow. The first McMorrow mystery, Deadline, was published in 1993. Two years later, it was followed by Bloodline, and there are now nine books in the series. Boyle left the Morning Sentinel in 1999 but until 2001 continued to write a column for the paper from time to time. In 2000, he became editor of Colby Magazine. 

“DAMAGED GOODS is so compelling, it’s like literary crack–I simply couldn’t stop reading.”
–Tess Gerritsen, author of THE KEEPSAKE.

Wednesday, September 29, Lily King, author of Father of the Rain
Lily King is the Whiting Award–winning author of The Pleasing Hour, a New York Times Notable Book, and The English Teacher, a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year. Now, King is back with her third and most ambitious novel to date, Father of the Rain, a sharply insightful family drama set in a Waspy, upper-middle-class suburb where she traces a volatile, addiction-plagued father–daughter relationship from the 1970s to the present day.

When eleven-year-old Daley Armory’s mother leaves her father, she is thrust into a chaotic adult world of competition, indulgence, and manipulation. Unable to place her allegiance, she vacillates between her parents’ worlds: the liberal, socially committed realm of her mother, and the conservative, liquor-soaked life of her father. Soon, Daley’s father’s basest impulses are unleashed, and Daley must choose between her own survival and the charismatic father she still deeply loves.

A provocative and masterfully told story of one woman’s life-long, primal loyalty to her father, Father of the Rain is a spellbinding journey into the emotional complexities, mercurial contours, and magnetic pull of families. 

 “Lily King's Father of the Rain is one of the most richly satisfying and haunting novels I've read in a long time.” —Richard Russo

“Haunting, incisive . . . King is brilliant when writing from the eyes of a tween, all self-conscious curiosity but bright and hopeful as a starry sky. And as Daley grows up and learns how to trust and to love in spite of herself, King cuts a fine, fluid line to the melancholy truth: Even when we’re grown and on our own— wives, mothers, CEOs—we still long to be someone’s daughter. The dream of an absent ideal father is like a thick, soft blanket; find one to burrow under, and enjoy.” —Elle

For more information, please visit www.lilykingbooks.com

Wednesday, October 6, David Morine, author of Two Coots in a Canoe
"Morine shares his most difficult, embarrassing, hilarious and unpredictable moments as a shirt-and-tie deal maker in the service of an untamed natural world." -- The New York Times Book Review.

Two Coots in a Canoe is a journey of whim, humor, and self-discovery along the Connecticut River.  When retired CEO Ramsay Peard, 61, called his old friend David Morine, 59, and asked the longtime conservationist if he wanted to canoe the Connecticut River, Morine said he'd do it under one condition: no camping. "We'll rely on the kindness of strangers." And that's what they did. Mooching their way down the river and staying with strangers every night, Morine and Peard got an inside look at such issues as the demise of farming, the loss of manufacturing, gay rights, and Wal-Mart versus Main Street, and they were able to delve deep into the lives of complete strangers. But Morine soon realized the one life he never dug into was Peard's. After spending a month with him in a canoe, he had no idea that his friend's innermost thoughts had taken a fateful course. Written in the tradition of Bill Bryson's "A Walk in the Woods" this book will be treasured by conservationists, canoeists, and old friends still seeking a thrill. Everyone else will be delightfully entertained. 

Wednesday, October 20, Geoffrey Wolff, author of The Hard Way Around
An acclaimed novelist, essayist, biographer, and critic, Geoffrey Wolff is a prominent voice in contemporary American literature. Educated at Cambridge and at Princeton, from which he graduated summa cum laude, he is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, where he was the Director of the Graduate Fiction Program from 1995 to 2006. Previously, he served on the faculties of Istanbul

University and Princeton University and has been a book editor at the Washington Post and Newsweek. He is the author of six novels, including The Age of Consent (Knopf, 1995), set in a close-knit utopian community in upstate New York, and The Final Club (Knopf, 1990), about secretive social networks at Princeton. His nonfiction books include Black Sun (Random House, 1976), on the short-lived avant-garde poet Harry Crosby; The Art of Burning Bridges: A Life of John O’Hara (Knopf, 2003), a literary biography of the American fiction writer; The Duke of Deception (Random House, 1979), a memoir that was a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize; and The Edge of Maine (National Geographic, 2005), a rich portrayal of the salty, sea-pounded, and seasonally gentrified Maine coast. He received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1994 and his honors also include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. During 2007, he was a Fellow of the American Academy in Berlin. He lives in Bath, Maine with his family.  

His new book, The Hard Way Around: The Passages of Joshua Slocum, will be published by Knopf in October 2010.  A masterful biographer now gives us a thrilling, definitive portrait of the most legendary icon of adventure.  Joshua Slocum escaped a Dickensian childhood in Nova Scotia in 1860, at the age of sixteen, as an ordinary seaman. Despite his third-grade education, Slocum’s rise through the ranks was mercurial: just a decade later he was commander of his own ship, the first of many. His journey had already taken him nearly everywhere—Asia, South America, Australia—and through hurricanes, shipwrecks, pirate attacks, cholera, two marriages, and seven children.  But his crowning glory was yet to come. In 1895 he set sail—by himself—in the small sloop Spray. More than three years and forty-six thousand miles later, he became the first man to circumnavigate the globe solo, a feat that wouldn’t be replicated for another quarter century. His account of that voyage, Sailing Alone Around the World, soon made him famous. A decade later, he set off alone once more—and was lost at sea.

Wolff captures this singular life and its flamboyant times so vividly that readers with any historical imagination are sure to be swept away.

Wednesday, November 3, Elyssa East, author of Dogtown
“A true-crime story, an art appreciation course and an American history lesson stitched together, and it succeeds at all three… East deserves credit for bringing the [murder] case to light and for reporting it with deft, moving details… An ambitious and worthy book.” —New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice

Elyssa East first discovered Dogtown—3,000 abandoned acres in Gloucester, Massachusetts—through the arresting landscapes of the American Modernist Marsden Hartley. These odd, primitivistic paintings and Hartley’s story that Dogtown had changed his life initially drew East to this strange, dark wilderness in Cape Ann. Here she discovered that the Dogtown of Hartley’s paintings was more than an unusually striking landscape; it is also a polarizing place with a history rich in intrigue and mystery. 

In Dogtown: Death and Enchantment in a New England Ghost Town (Free Press; December 1, 2009; $26.00), East explores the enigmatic past that makes this area so fascinating while structuring her story around a senseless 1984 murder that occurred there. Anne Natti was a teacher and well-known member of the community who was found stripped naked and beaten to death in the very place that Hartley painted a half-century before. Natti was so perfect a victim, and her murder so random, that the story defied any rational, logical motive. Dogtown’s eerie history and peculiar atmosphere deepened the pall of her death, a tragedy that residents have tried to forget but cannot help but remember. From this story, East learned how a community can remain haunted by violence even decades after it takes place, and how such events can have a lasting impact upon people’s perceptions.

Wednesday, November 17, Maine in Four Seasons
Wesley McNair, Thomas Carper, Martin Steingesser, Gary Lawless and illustrator Owen Thomas
Four poets will give a reading about Maine seasons from a new book titled Maine in Four Seasons: 20 Poets Celebrate the Turning Year (Down East Books). Each of the participating poets has poems from a different season in the anthology and will read poetry about that season. Thomas Carper will represent spring; Martin Steingesser, summer; Gary Lawless, fall; and Wesley McNair, winter.

Maine in Four Seasons includes not only contemporary poets from around the state but a range of Maine’s earlier poets, from Longfellow to Robinson to Millay. The readers will sample some of the earlier work together with their own. Jan Owen, the book’s illustrator, will kick off the reading by showing some of her original work for the book and describing her creative process.  Owen’s work as an illustrator of Maine literature began with a commissioned piece featuring Maine writers for the Bangor Public Library. Her work with calligraphy has been widely exhibited and is represented at the Library of Congress and several museum and library collections.

Thomas Carper is the author of three books of metrical poems, Fiddle Lane , From Nature, and Distant Blue, recipient of the 2003 Richard Wilbur Award. With Derek Attridge, he is coauthor of Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry. He and his wife, Janet, live in Cornish.

Martin Steingesser's collection of poems, Brothers of Morning, has just been re-issued in a second edition.  A burning, tender voice,  said former Maine Poet Laureate Baron Wormser. Individual poems have appeared in the national magazines The Sun, The Progressive and the Humanist. He is Portland, Maine's first Poet Laureate (2007-09).

Gary Lawless is co-owner of Gulf of Maine Bookstore in Brunswick, and publisher of Blackberry Books. Originally from Belfast, he now lives in Brunswick. He has published his poems over the years in a variety of literary magazines and in 14 poetry collections.

Wesley McNair has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller and NEA Fellowships, and was recently selected for a United States Artists Fellowship. He is the editor of Maine in Four Seasons and four other anthologies of Maine writing. His nine collections of verse include Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems.

The reading from Maine in Four Seasons will be followed by a group book-signing.

Wednesday, December 1, Rosemary Herbert, author of Front Page Teaser: A Liz Higgins Mystery
New mystery introduces Boston reporter-sleuth Liz Higgins. Was she attacked, abducted, or worse? Or did she strew signs of struggle across her gleaming kitchen and flee her home for mysterious reasons of her own?  Did an alarming New York City cab ride have anything to do with her disappearance?

These are the questions Liz Higgins must answer when devoted mother Ellen Johansson goes mysteriously missing from her comfortable suburban home. A reporter on Boston’s scrappy tabloid newspaper, the Beantown Banner, Liz chafes at being assigned only light features and community news – reporting that receives at best front-page teasers pointing to articles buried deep in the paper. Liz vows to change that when young Veronica Johansson begs her to find her missing mom. Liz promises to do just that – while finally nailing front-page news in the process. In a thrilling mystery that is also a love song to the reporter’s life and a tribute to librarians and librarianship, Liz Higgins finds ways to use even her silliest soft-news assignments to advantage while following up the missing-woman story.

 
Rosemary Herbert is a fresh and compelling new voice in crime fiction. Like a shot of good whiskey, Front Page Teaser is short and bracing. You’ll love it. I did. Robert B. Parker

“…intelligent and thought-provoking.” -- Publishers Weekly

Rosemary Herbert brings a decade of experience as the Boston Herald’s former book review editor and features writer to the writing of her first mystery novel. She is the Edgar Award-nominated editor-in-chief of The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, co-editor, with Tony Hillerman, of A New Omnibus of Crime, and editor of several other mystery anthologies. A popular broadcast guest and public speaker, particularly at libraries and library conferences, Herbert resides on Boston’s North Shore.

Wednesday, December 15, Neil Rolde, author of Maine in the World
Author Neil Rolde has once again crafted a book of Maine history that draws in and satisfies the reader. He tells of Mainers who are well recorded in historical works and of some whose names are less familiar, each of whom left a distinct mark far outside the state's boundaries. Rolde begins with the legendary Gluskabe (Glooskap), the creator of the Wabanaki native peoples. Lore has it that he roamed great distances from the Northeast. Rolde includes the stories of poets, politicians, missionaries, an engineer, a knight, an opera singer, a pirate, a Hollywood director, and a ten-year-old diplomat named Samantha Smith. The book is arranged chronologically and includes contemporary examples of those who have made an impact far from the Pine Tree Sate. It also includes a bibliography and is well indexed. Maine Antique Digest, January 2010 

Mr. Rolde served for 16 years as a member of the Maine House of Representative and 6 years as assistant to Governor Kenneth Curtis. In 1990, Neil was the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Maine. Neil has served on the following governmental committees: Maine Health Care Reform Commission; Maine Children’s Health Care Task Force, Laptop Learning Task Force, Maine Arts Commission and the Maine Humanities Council. He has also served with the following private, non-profit endeavors: former Trustee, University of New England (from which he received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters); Former Board Chair, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences; Former Chair, SALT Institute; Former Chair, Maine Public Broadcasting Network; Trustee, York County Shelters; Trustee, National Tropical Botanical Garden (Hawaii); Former Trustee, Heller Graduate School of Social Work, Brandeis University; former Trustee Maine Audubon Society; former trustee, National Resources Council of Maine; Member President’s Circle; National Academy of Sciences (Washington, D.C.). He is the author of 11 published books and received an award from the Maine Historical Society for one of them, The Baxters of Maine. Married for 47 years to the former Carlotta Florsheim of Kew Gardens, N.Y., the Roldes have 4 daughters and 8 grandchildren.

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