Maine Lit Fest Event - Day 2
A collection of local cookbook writers, food journalists, and bloggers will share what it means to be a food writer and how they came to their respective professions. Panelists include Margaret Hathaway (Maine Community Cookbook and The Year of the Goat), Kate Shaffer (owner of Ragged Coast Chocolates), Peggy Grodinsky (Food Editor and Books Editor at the Portland Press Herald), and Karen Watterson (a former food editor and freelance writer). All are contributors to Breaking Bread: Essays from New England On Food, Hunger, and Family, an anthology co-edited by Deborah Joy Corey and Debra Spark.
Debra Spark (author of Unknown Caller, co-editor of the Breaking Bread Anthology, and Colby College creative writing professor) will facilitate.
This event is free.
Books will be sold by Devaney, Doak & Garrett.
Peggy Grodinsky is Food Editor and Books Editor at the Portland Press Herald. Previously, she was for five years executive editor of Cook’s Country, a Boston-based national magazine published by America’s Test Kitchen. She spent several years in Texas as food editor at the Houston Chronicle. Grodinsky has taught food writing to graduate students at New York University and Harvard Extension School. She worked for seven years at the James Beard Foundation in New York, and her stories have appeared in Best of Food Writing (2017) and Cornbread Nation 4: The Best of Southern Food Writing (2008). Her story “Is the Well at Jordan Farm the most pandemic proof restaurant in Maine?” took second place in Maine Press Association 2021 awards, features category.
Margaret Hathaway is the author of the memoir The Year of the Goat: 40,000 Miles and the Quest for the Perfect Cheese, the guides Living With Goats: Everything You Need to Know to Raise Your Own Backyard Herd and Food Lovers' Guide to Maine, and the cookbook, the Portland, Maine Chef's Table: Extraordinary Recipes from Casco Bay. A native of Wichita, Kansas, Margaret is a graduate of Wellesley College and a former Fulbright scholar to Tunisia. She worked in book publishing and as a manager of New York City's famed Magnolia Bakery before settling with her husband, Karl Schatz, and their three daughters on Ten Apple Farm, a homestead in southern Maine where they tend dairy goats, assorted poultry, a large garden, and a small orchard.
Kate Shaffer is a cook book author and owns Ragged Coast Chocolates, an award-winning confectionery now located in Westbrook.
Karen Watterson once wrote an article with the opening sentence, “Bakery is my favorite word,” and she stands by it to this day, unabashedly. She’s here to wholeheartedly embrace her love of all things sugar, and to share the sweet part of life with you. While Maine’s reputation rests on lobsters and blueberries, and she does love both those foods, it’s Maine’s sweet stuff that calls to her. But why start a blog about sweets now, with so many people facing serious issues in the midst of a global pandemic? These are difficult, challenging times. Dessert, always her favorite part of the meal, brings small joys into our lives, and who doesn’t need a little extra joy right now? And when we get to whatever the new “normal” is, that will still be true.
Debra Spark is the author of four novels, two collections of short stories, and two books of essays on fiction writing. Her most recent books are the novel Unknown Caller and the essay collection And Then Something Happened. With Deborah Joy Corey, she co-edited Breaking Bread, a book of food essays by Maine writers to raise funds for a hunger nonprofit. It is due out in May 2022. Four Way Books will publish her fifth novel in 2024.
Her short work has appeared in Agni, AWP Writers’ Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Cincinnati Review, the Chicago Tribune, Epoch, Esquire, Five Points, Food and Wine, Harvard Review, Huffington Post, Maine Magazine, Narrative, New England Travel and Life, the New England Review, the New York Times, Ploughshares, salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, Yankee, and Yale Alumni Quarterly, among other places. In addition to writing book reviews, fiction, articles, and essays, she spent a decade writing about home, art, and design for Maine Home+Design, Decor Maine, Down East, Dwell, Elysian, Interiors Boston, New England Home, and Yankee. She has been the recipient of several awards including Maine’s 2017 READ ME series, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College, Wisconsin Institute Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, Michigan Literary Fiction Award, and John Zacharis/Ploughshares award for best first book. A graduate of Yale University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.