Please join us for the hybrid edition of MWPA’s beloved GATHER event series! On Wednesday, November 20, 2024 at 6:00 PM, MWPA members & friends can attend an in-person Gather at one of several locations around the state OR choose to participate in an online Gather.

To sign up for an online Gather, click the corresponding RSVP link below. On the afternoon of the Gather date, you’ll receive an email with a link to join your Gather on Zoom.

To join an in-person event, find the most convenient location below, and gather with us!

Please note: A couple of our regular Gather locations will not be meeting this month, and some new Gathers have begun or recently rejoined the mix. Please check the details below very closely. You can reach out to your local Gather host for questions and concerns surrounding COVID protocols and precautions, and we encourage you to join an online Gather if in-person events become unsafe or inaccessible for you. For more information, contact Samara at: samara@mainewriters.org.

About GATHER: GATHER encourages members (and their friends!) to meet and mingle with fellow members in locations around Maine for camaraderie and conversation. There is no agenda to GATHER besides getting together with your community of fellow writers and literary professionals to talk writing, reading, and life.

While GATHER events are not open readings, manuscript exchanges, or organized writing-prompt sessions, they are opportunities for literary-minded folks to meet and plan any of those things and more. Food and drink is most always available for purchase.

Online Gathers:

POETRY
Host: Jefferson Navicky
RSVP HERE

In-Person Events:

BANGOR
Host: Annaliese Jakimides (a.jakimides@gmail.com)
Location: Sea Dog Brewing (26 Front St, Bangor)

BELFAST
Host: Beckie Weinheimer & Rob Bywater (beckieweinheimer@gmail.com , robbywater@fastmail.us)
Location: Darby's (155 High St, Belfast, ME)

BLUE HILL
Host: Marie Epply (mmepply@yahoo.com)
Location: Marlintini's Grill (83 Mines Rd, Blue Hill)

BRUNSWICK AREA
Hosts: Molly McGrath & Alix Morris (molly@pinkeraserpress.com , alix.morris@gmail.com)
Location: Sea Dog Brewing (1 Bowdoin Mill Island, Topsham)

DAMARISCOTTA
Host: Andrea Vassallo (andrea.granted@gmail.com)
Location: TBA

SOUTH PORTLAND
Host: Cheryl Gillespie (cherylgillespie88@gmail.com)
Location: Bridgeway Restaurant (71 Ocean St, South Portland)

WATERVILLE
Host: Tyler French & Catie Joyce Bulay (tfrench@colby.edu, catiejoycebulay@gmail.com)
Location: The Lounge of Front & Main (9 Main St, Waterville)

Portland Greendrinks will hold its November gathering at Mechanics’ Hall, and MWPA is the featured nonprofit! If you don’t know Greendrinks, they note, “The goal of Greendrinks is pretty simple: good times shared among people working in, or interested in, environmental and sustainability issues. Portland Greendrinks is a project of the Maine-based non-profit, Triceratops Group, started by Elliott May in 2007/2008.”

Here is the Important  Information: ​​​​​

• Register for the event!

• 21+ Event

• Bring Your ID

• $10 with vessel

• Please leave your pups at home

• Babies are welcome as long as they are worn

• Please be kind and respectful to all of your fellow Greendrinkers!

• Be kind, respectful, and make sure to say hi to someone you don't know!

The Beverage Partners for this event include: ​

• Maine Craft Distilling

• Blue Lobster Wines

• Bissell Brothers

• Barreled Souls Brewing

• Non-alcoholic options will be available

Please join the MWPA and three previous chapbook winners, Zanne Langlois, Brandon Dudley, and Coco McCracken, for a reading and celebration of Aliza Dube’s The Dependents. Award-winning fiction writer Manuel Gonzales chose Aliza Dube’s The Dependents as the winner of the 2023 Maine Chapbook Series in fiction, and now the book is in print thanks to editing and design help from Pink Eraser Press.

Gonzales writes that Dube “writes nimbly, offering the reader simple and readable yet wrenching sentences, complex characters that shift in and out of view from one story to the next, and that move us inexorably through disappointment, regret, hope, love, and time.”

Zanne Langlois chapbook Bright Glint Gone was chosen by award-winning poet Martha Collins in 2019. Brandon Dudley’s Hazards of Nature was chosen by award-winning novelist Sigrid Nunez in 2020. Coco McCracken’s The Rabbit was chosen by award-winning memoirist Melissa Febos in 2021. Copies of all of these will be for sale.

Aliza Dube graduated from the University of Maine at Farmington with a degree in Creative Writing in 2018. After graduation, she married and became an Army wife in the Midwest. On post, she found herself in a world of fascinating characters and irreconcilable contradictions. The people she met and the places she visited would have a lasting impact on her work. She is currently a student in the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA program in creative writing. She is the author of the memoir The Newly Tattooed’s Guide to Aftercare (2020). She strives to tell stories for people like her who grew up struggling to find characters like themselves in books.

Brandon Dudley’s chapbook Hazards of Nature: Stories was selected by National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez for the 2020 Maine Chapbook Series. Dudley is a graduate of the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, where he was managing editor of the Sierra Nevada Review. His short fiction has won a Maine Literary Award and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His stories, essays, interviews and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in New South, The Millions, The Forge, Fiction Writers Review, and others. A former journalist, he now teaches high school English in Brunswick, where he lives with his wife and two sons.

Suzanne Langlois’s chapbook Bright Glint Gone was chosen by award-winning poet Martha Collins as the winner of the 2019 Maine Chapbook Series. Her poems have appeared in The Maine Review, NAILED Magazine, Cider Press Review, The Fourth River, Off The Coast, Rattle, and on the Button Poetry channel. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Independent Best American Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize. She holds a BA in English from Tufts University, an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. She lives in Portland and teaches high school English in Falmouth.

Coco McCracken is a Chinese-Canadian author and writer living in Portland, Maine. Her chapbook, The Rabbit, was selected by bestselling author Melissa Febos as the winner of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance’s 2021 Maine Chapbook Series. She was the recipient of a 2022 Ashley Bryan Fellowship. She was named a Lit Fest Fellow by the MWPA, in which capacity she helped organize the state’s first inaugural Maine Lit Fest. She also serves on the Community Advisory Board for the MWPA. She was accepted for a residency for the 2022 summer season at Hewnoaks, where she was additionally awarded a grant from the Maine Arts Commission to complete her first manuscript. In 2023, she was chosen to be on the jury for the Maine Literary Awards. Her work has been featured in Wirecutter’s (The New York Times) Baby + Kid Section, Maine Magazine, and Copy Mag, among others.