Upcoming events, literary news, workshops, and more
If you're having trouble viewing this email, you cansee it online.
#1 Mary Oliver Film
Mary Oliver fans, take note! Coming up on July 21 at 7 PM, we're co-hosting a screening of Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World at SPACE in Portland. Tickets are required, and MWPA and SPACE members receive a discount.
Featuring interviews with her close friends, including John Waters, never-before-seen personal photos, notebooks, and correspondence from her archive, and recitations of her work by Stephen Colbert, Lucy Dacus, Steve Buscemi, and Oprah Winfrey, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World considers the poet’s long lifetime of work in context, capturing the uniqueness of her world and the natural beauty that inspired her.
Ali Lake will be joining us for the PITCH Conference on Saturday, September 12 in Portland. Alli joined O’Connor Literary Agency in 2023. Previously, she worked at Janklow & Nesbit Associates and ICM Partners (now part of Creative Artists Agency). She studied English and French Literature at Columbia University, during which time she interned selling English-language rights for French publisher Présence Africaine Éditions. She’s drawn to stories that show her a new corner of the world or unexpected facet of human experience through an original, surprising voice.
Looking For: Blended memoir, sports/adventure narratives, pop science, thrillers, romcoms, book club fiction, new adult, and young adult.
Not Looking For: Picture books, middle grade, poetry, and graphic novels.
Featured Clients: Casey Scieszka, Andrea Max, Elliot Lichtman, Eva Langston, Melanie Jennings, and Raquel Villagra.
+ Agents Who Are Full/Waitling List Only: Nicole Cunningham, Christopher Combemale, Zoe-Aline Howard, Phoebe Rhinehart, & Madeline Ticknor
+ Agents & Editors with Limited Space Available: KJ Grow, Lauren Liebow & Mackenzie Williams
+ Newly Added Agent: Ali Lake, O’Connor Literary Agency (Fiction, Nonfiction, Memoir, YA)
#3 Mira Ptacin on Leading Workshop with Women Who Are Incarcerated
This week we continue our series of brief interviews with 2026 Maine Literary Award winners with Mira Ptacin. An anthology she edited, All Along You Were Blooming: Collected Writings by Incarcerated Women at the Maine Correctional Center and Their Allies, won the MLA for Anthology.
Thinking about what she's learned from 13 years of writing workshops with women at the Maine Correctional Center, Ptacin says, "Their writing has reminded me that what matters most on the page is not cleverness but truth. These women write with urgency and purpose, and being in that room has made me a more attentive writer and reader. I'm increasingly drawn to books that embrace complexity, contradiction, and the possibility of transformation."
Delvyn C. Case, Jr.'s plays One, Two, Three Words You're Out, Peter Pan was a Girl, Some Beautiful Baby, and Prophetess of Change were produced by North Port Plays in New York in June. Prophetess of Change was also produced at the Playwrights Center of San Francisco in June and by the Gulf Coast Theatre Writers Circle in New York in June.
Charlotte Crowder’s novel in progress, Paprika, has been shortlisted for the 2026 Fiction Factory First Chapter Competition.
Kathy Eliscu was awarded a Next Generation Indie Book award alongside her late husband and co-author, Ted, for Brain Tumor: A Love Story.
Stuart Kestenbaum has a new essay for the American Craft Council's Craft Coalition column. He writes, "The ideas emerge from our process, and any process begins with questions. We don’t embark on a journey to arrive at the answer we know, but we discover one as we work."
Robert Klose’s essay, “Rainy Day in Reykjavík,” won a Silver Award for Best Travel Writing sponsored by Travelers’ Tales.
Paul Kuehernt’s poem “Nursing (In Honor of Alex Pretti)” was published in Voices of Neighbors, edited by Katie Foag.
After an eight-year hiatus, Maine Literary Award winner Elizabeth Peavey returns to the stage with her new one-woman show, "Quartet: Four Lenses on Love, Loss, and Letting Go," at the Downeast Storytellers event in Eastport, on July 18. INFO
Carlos Perez's feature screenplay, "The Decision" was named a Top Finalist in the 2026 Creative World Awards.
Joan Silverman's newsletter, Away from It All, highlights "essays by leading writers on any and everything, but the news." The latest issue features work by Roger Rosenblatt, Darien Gee, and Suzanne Roberts. INFO
"Writing whenever I could—on my commute, in evenings and weekends—all the clichés became suddenly true. I was transcribing a story that already existed; I was a conduit, hijacked by something outside myself. What I hadn’t anticipated was that the experience would be scary as well as exciting. I felt possessed. I had vivid dreams and nightmares; I was violently impatient with anything that wasn’t the book. I remember the itchy rage I felt when my regular train was canceled and I ended up standing on a crowded commuter service, unable to take out my laptop and write. I remember going to the cinema with my husband and ignoring anything that was happening on screen, fixating instead on a few key words in an attempt to remember the new scenes I wanted to add to the draft.” —Catriona Silvey
Wednesdays, July 1 - August 19 | 6 to 9 PM | Online
How do we turn the raw material of private experience into something that speaks beyond ourselves? How can a poem hold both the personal and the communal, the solitary voice and the shared world? ...We will seek inspiration from acclaimed poets such as Natasha Tretheway, Sylvia Plath, Ross Gay, Terrance Hayes, Jaswinder Bolina, Patricia Smith, Louise Glück, Elizabeth Bishop, francine j. harris, Mary Ruefle, Michael Dumanis, and David Berman...MORE
Jalen Eutsey is a writer from Miami, Florida. A recipient of the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, his poems have appeared in Best New Poets, The Yale Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Hopkins Review. His chapbook, Bubble Gum Stadium, was published by Button Poetry. Recently, his poem "Surprise Visit" was published in the Cincinnati Review and a poem titled "Confessional" was in Tri-Quarterly.
TONIGHT at 7 PM Margie Patlak will give a PowerPoint presentation on her new book Insect Safari: Exploring the Wondrous World of Everyday Bugs at the Schoodic Institute in Winter Harbor. INFO
TONIGHT at 6 PM Valerie Lawson, Cynthia Reeves, Catherine J.S. Lee, Douglas Wright, Richard Forester, Melodie Prescott Greene, Leslie Bowman, and Annaliese Jakimides will read from Echoes in the Fog: Literary Reflections on the Liminal Spaces of Maine's Coast, with Steven Long, editor and publisher of 12 Willows Press, at the Eastport Arts Center in Eastport. INFO
SATURDAY, JUNE 27 at 7 PMPlease join MWPA and Belleflower Brewing as we celebrate the launch of Judson Merrill’s debut novel Paranoid Storytelling. Judson will be in conversation with award-winning journalist and writer Chelsea Conaboy. INFO
SATURDAY, JUNE 27, 11AM-1PM Authors Cheryl Gillespie, Lauren Mae, and Kathy Eliscu will sign their many and varied books at Letterpress Bookstore, 91 Auburn St./Northgate Plaza, Portland. INFO
SUNDAY, JUNE 28 at 3 PM Back Cove Books and Littoral Books host environmentalist Alice Hotopp, author of Atlas of Kinship: Stories of Connection Between Seabirds, People and Place for an afternoon of stories about Maine's seabirds, especially Puffins. Alice will be in conversation with Littoral's co-founder Marcia Brown at Back Cove Books, 651 Forest Ave, Portland. INFO
TUESDAY JUNE 30, 11 AM to 1 PM Paul Doiron signs copies of his latest Mike Bowditch mystery, Storm Tide, which launches at Left Bank Books in Belfast.
TUESDAY, JUNE 30, 6:30 PM Gulf of Maine Books (134 Maine Street, Brunswick) will host a poetry reading by Norman Fisher, a poet, zen priest, teacher, former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation, and author of many books. The event is free and open to the public. For more information please call the bookstore at 729-5083.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 1 at 5:30 PM Catherine Schmitt celebrates the release of her new book, Trees of Acadia: The Past, Present, and Future of Park Forests, with a reading and signing at Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor. INFO
THURSDAY, JULY 2, 5 to 7 PM Laura Bonazzoli will interview author Gigi Georges at the Villager Café's monthly Book Chat. Gigi will chat about researching and writing her bestselling book, Downeast: Five Maine Girls and the Unseen Story of Rural America. This is a free event. Food and beverages available for purchase from the café, located at 25 Mechanic Street in Camden. INFO
THURSDAY, July 2 at 5:30 PM Cynthia Reeves will present Sailing Svalbard: The Last Imaginary Place, including inspirations from her Arctic travels for her Maine Public Book Club June 2026 Pick The Last Whaler at Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor. INFO
MONDAY, JULY 6 at 6 PM Book Launch: Ron Currie discusses his new crime novel We Will See You Bleed, a prequel to The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, with Richard Russo at Print: A Bookstore, 273 Congress St in Portland. INFO
WEDNESDAY, JULY 8 at 5 PM Ecologist Alice Hotopp will give a talk about her new book Atlas of Kinship: Connections between Seabirds, People and Place, which focuses on Maine seabirds, particularly puffins, and the biologists who care for them, at the Project Puffin Visitors Center, 311 Main St, Rockland. INFO
THURSDAY, JULY 9 at 7 PM Christina Baker Kline presents her new novel The Foursome at The First Church in Belfast, hosted by Left Bank Books. INFO + Tickets
THURSDAY, JULY 9 at 7 PM Maine Literary Award winner Eleanor Morse presents her new novel This Foreign Land at Print: A Bookstore, 273 Congress St in Portland. The event also features the Rio Valley Relief Project and 15% of proceeds will be donated to RVRP & the Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project. INFO
Save the Date: THURSDAY, JULY 16 at 7 PM Freeport Speech hosts two celebrated authors and master storytellers, Jennifer Finney Boylan and Ernest Thompson, for a conversation about the ways Maine has shaped their lives and stories. Boylan is a best-selling memoirist (She's Not There) and novelist (Mad Honey, co-authored with Jodi Picoult). Thompson is an Academy Award winner (On Golden Pond, and his latest book is a thriller, Out Clause. The event will be held at the Kresge Auditorium at Bowdoin College, and ticket sales benefit the MWPA.INFO
As usual, I'm keeping an eye on summer reading lists, and Emily Temple over at Lit Hub has compiled the best of the best, compiling 25 summer lists from reputable sources for the 60 most popular book recommendations. These kinds of lists are sometimes based as much on hype as on actual, you know, reading, so take this with a grain of salt, but this list of lists does capture the books being talked about the most.
I'm personally excited to see Valeria Luiselli's new novel on this list, as well as new books by Colson Whitehead, Ann Patchett,Maggie O'Farrell, and Jesmyn Ward, not to mention Ben Fountain, Paul Yoon (whose new novel is from the POV of a working dog), and Daniel Mason, who will be in Portland this summer. For Maine writers, Richard Russo and Elizabeth Strout's new novels are on here as well.
+ Agents Who Are Full/Waitling List Only: Nicole Cunningham, Christopher Combemale, Zoe-Aline Howard, Phoebe Rhinehart, & Madeline Ticknor
.png)
.jpg)
