Meetinghouse Arts in Freeport will host a book launch and reception for Jefferson Navicky's Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (AC Books, 2023). Navicky will read from the book, engage in discussion with former Maine Poet Laureate Betsy Sholl, and take questions from the audience. Music will be provided by Eric Schwan.
When William Harrison Brown (aka Bird) returns to the island of his youth, he attempts to take his place in the long line of landscape painters in his family. Bird, however, paints with a 1961 Underwood typewriter. A series of interlinked prose poems, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands follows Bird as he attempts to make peace with his identity as a son, islander, and writer in a family of visual artists. The book is part history of grief, part exploration of ghosts and hauntings, part philosophy of landscape painting, and part meditation on the nature of islands.
This event is co-sponsored by the Maine Writers and Publisher's Alliance, Sherman's Maine Coast Bookshop of Freeport, and Meetinghouse Arts.
This event is free, and RSVP is required—please click on the button above to save your seat.
Jefferson Navicky was born in Chicago and grew up in Southeastern Ohio. He is the author of four books: Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023); Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021), winner of the 2022 Maine Literary Book Award for Poetry, as well as the poetic novel The Book of Transparencies (2018) and the story collection, The Paper Coast (2018). He earned a B.A. in English Literature from Denison University, and an M.F.A. in writing and poetics from Naropa University. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection and teaches English at Southern Maine Community College.
Betsy Sholl served as Poet Laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011, and her most recent book is As If a Song Could Save You (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022). Her ninth collection of poetry is House of Sparrows, New and Selected Poems (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019). Otherwise Unseeable won the 2015 Maine Literary Award for poetry. Other awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, MWPA’s Distinguished Achievement Award, and an Honorary Doctorate from USM. She currently teaches in the MFA Program of Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives in Portland.