BLUE HILL— Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “A Visit from the Goon Squad” and other celebrated novels, will be the Friday evening speaker at the 2023 edition of Word, the Blue Hill literary arts festival scheduled for Oct. 19-22.
Also featured during the weekend will be a Saturday evening conversation with A.O. Scott, former movie critic and now critic-at-large for The New York Times, and a Sunday afternoon dramatic reading of T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” by John Farrell, co-founder of Freeport’s Figures of Speech Theatre.
Laura Miller, Slate books and culture columnist and a Word committee member, will interview Egan. Journalist Alicia Anstead will interview Scott.
Craft workshops will be offered on memoir (Meg Weston, “Letters from the White Queen”), poetry (Chen Chen, “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency”), screenwriting (Jim Picariello, “The Mushroom Hunter”), overcoming writer’s block (Dan Kois, the novel “Vintage Contemporaries”), songwriting (folksinger Noel Paul Stookey and composer George Emlen) and book arts (Kristy Cunnane, book artist). Register at http://www.wordfestival.org.
All speaking events except the workshops are free and open to the public.
Among the free events will be Saturday morning children’s program by Marty Kelley, author and illustrator of “Pugnapped,” “Almost Everybody Farts” and many other children’s books. The program is sponsored by Bar Harbor Bank and Trust. Kelley will visit local schools before the festival begins.
A panel discussion on the ins and outs of podcasting will feature Kois, of Slate’s “Decoder Ring” podcast, Jason Moon (“Bear Brook”) of New Hampshire Public Radio and Emily Greenberg (“The Maine Conversation”).
Chen Chen and Meg Weston will participate in Word’s annual poetry reading along with Meghan Sterling (“These Few Seeds”) and special guest Stuart Kestenbaum, Maine’s fifth Poet Laureate, who will read poems by the late Paul Nemser (“Break On Through”).
The annual Word.Art show of visual art featuring the written word will open the festival at Winings Gallery Thursday evening, October 19, with a multimedia performance by poet Adeena Karasick and writer/designer Warren Lehrer. The two have collaborated on “Ouvert Oeuvre: Openings,” a book of Karasick’s poems designed by Lehrer. The show will include work by Lehrer as well as Buzz Masters, Margaret Rizzio, Susan Webster and Stuart Kestenbaum. It will be open to the public through the weekend.
Word-related art by Julie Jo Fehrle will be on display at the Blue Hill Co-op.
Word is funded by the Stephen and Tabitha King Foundation and other generous donors. The festival’s media partner is WERU-FM. Its fiscal sponsor is Blue Hill Community Development. Information: http://www.wordfestival.org or 207-374-5632.
