4/30/18

Book of the Week (4/30/2018)

"Oh, My Word!": A Memoir by Sally Maude ([N.H. : S. Maude, 2018?]).

Local author Sally Maude presents an interesting look into 1950's era Keene, NH and beyond; including her experiences growing up as a twin.
Life begins with this identical twin in a small New Hampshire city. The reader is invited to experience her adventures as she journeys through self-identity. There is humor throughout as the reader is fascinated by ESP between twins. The excitement of travel, love of art, and the business success are conscripted by this risk-taker. Follow the years of a happy childhood; the contentment of senior citizen years with a few ups and downs along the way… Knowing in the end “one can come home again”. --Publisher's blurb.

Twins Susan, left, and Sally when they were young.
Join Sally on the following dates where she will be discussing her new book:

Toadstool Bookshop in Keene, NH on Saturday, May 5 at 2 p.m.

The Historical Society of Cheshire County in
Keene, NH on Wednesday, May 9 at 7 p.m.
 

4/26/18

Frost Farm Celebrates 10th Year of Hyla Brook Reading Series


Frost Farm Conference on Metrical Poetry in June 

DERRY, NH, April 25, 2018 – The Robert Frost Farm kicks off its 10th year of the Hyla Brook Reading Series on Thursday, May 17, 2018, 6:30-8:30pm with featured poet David Davis and Hyla Brook Poet Bob Moore. 

David Davis has been a member of the Powow River Poets of Newburyport, Mass., since 2005. He is currently the Poet-in-Residence at the Mass. Audubon's Joppa Flats Eduction Center. He has published three books of poetry: Crossing Streams on RocksJoppa Flats, and The Joy PoemsThe Joy Poems have been described as "an instruction manual for feeling more joy in life." Davis will read primarily from The Joy Poems at The Frost Farm. 

Hyla Brook Poet Bob Moore will also read. Moore has been writing poetry and songs since the early 1990’s. He self-published a collection of poems in 1997 entitled, “A Bridge with a View.” In 2009, he released a second collection of poems entitled “Unexpected Colors,” published by Beech River Books. A third collection of poems and songs, “Body and Soul,” is scheduled for release in the spring of 2018. By day, Moore works as a science teacher at Pelham High School. 
The event launches this year's series of nationally acclaimed poets reading in the intimate setting of Robert Frost’s barn. The season also features appearances by: 

·      Friday, June 15 — Melissa Balmain is the 2018 Frost Farm Prize Judge and Editor of Light, America's premier journal of comic verse. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (Able Muse Press) won the Able Muse Book Award.
·      Thursday, July 12 — January Gill O’Neil, the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival and a teacher at Salem State University, is the author of Misery Islands (CavanKerry Press, 2014), winner of a 2015 Paterson Award for Literary Excellence, Underlife (CavanKerry Press, 2009) and Rewilding (CavanKerry Press, 2018). A recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, her poems and articles have appeared in American Poetry Review, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among others.
·      Thursday, Aug. 9 — Marilyn Nelson’s Carver: A Life in Poems (2001) won Newbery Honors, Coretta Scott King Honors, and others. A Wreath for Emmett Till (2005), How I Discovered Poetry (2014), and My Seneca Village (2015) received similar acclaim. The Poet Laureate of Connecticut (2001-2006), she has won the NSK Neustadt Award and the NCTE Award for Excellence in Children’s Poetry. She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and Poet-in-Residence of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.
·      Thursday, Sept. 13 — Dudley LaufmanWhile enrolled at the Stockbridge School of Agriculture in Amherst, MA. Laufman intended to become a dairy farmer but developed an interest in poetry. A dance caller from the age of eighteen, Laufman began with lyrical and prose poems for his first book of poetry, I Hear Ringing Reels (1962). At age 87, Laufman is still fully engaged as a dance caller, poet, and musician. He plays melodeon, harmonica and sometimes, when his fingers allow, fiddle. 

The series, held in the Frost Farm located at 122 Rockingham Rd (Rt 28), is free and open to the public. An Open Mic follows the readings and all audience members are invited to share their work. 

Frost Farm Conference
The June reading highlights the winner of the Annual Frost Farm Prize for metrical poetry, and is the kick off event for the 4th Annual Frost Farm Poetry Conference on June 15-17, 2018. 
Founded in 2015, the conference provides two days of intense instruction by award-winning poets including featured reader Melissa Balmain, along with William Baer, Bill Coyle, Len Krisak, Alfred Nicol, and Deborah Warren. Daniel Brown is the 2018 Frost Farm Poet-in-Residence and will provide individual critiques. Claudia Gary will chair a panel on “Music and Poetry.” 
The instructors will immerse participants in the art and craft of formal poetry writing, valuable skills for both free verse poets and formalists. Through generous support, this special weekend has been modestly priced for all participants. For more information or to register, please visit: http://www.frostfarmpoetry.org
Starting in May, the Hyla Brook Poets’ monthly writing workshop will meet on the third Saturday of the month at 10am at its summer home at the Frost Farm. 

About Frost Farm Poetry
Under the leadership of Robert W. Crawford, Derry Poet Laureate, Frost Farm Poetry’s mission is to support the writing and teaching of metrical poetry. The Hyla Brook Poets started in 2008 as a monthly poetry workshop. In March 2009, the monthly Hyla Brook Reading Series launched with readings by emerging poets as well as luminaries such as Maxine Kumin, Sharon Olds and Richard Blanco. From there, the Frost Farm Poetry Prize for metrical poetry was introduced in 2010, with the Frost Farm Conference beginning in 2015. 

4/23/18

Book of the Week (4/23/2018)

The Pilot's Wife: A Novel by Anita Shreve (Boston, Mass. : Little, Brown & Co., 1998).

With the recent passing of author Anita Shreve at her home in Newfields, NH, it only seemed appropriate to feature one of her best known novels this week. "The Pilot's Wife" is the third novel in Shreve's informal trilogy that is set in a large beach house on the New Hampshire coast that used to be a convent. Her two previous novels in the trilogy are "Fortune's Rocks" and "Sea Glass".
As a pilot's wife, Kathryn has learned to expect both intense exhilaration and long periods alone, but nothing has prepared her for a late-night knock that lets her know her husband has died in a crash.
Until now, Kathryn Lyons's life has been peaceful if unextraordinary: a satisfying job teaching high school in the New England mill town of her childhood; a picture-perfect home by the ocean; a precocious, independent-minded fifteen-year-old daughter; and a happy marriage whose occasional dull passages she attributes to the unavoidable deadening of time.
As Kathryn struggles with her grief, she descends into a maelstrom of publicity stirred up by the modern hunger for the details of tragedy. Even before the plane is located in waters off the Irish coast, the relentless scrutiny of her husband's life begins to bring a bizarre personal mystery into focus. Could there be any truth to the increasingly disturbing rumors that he had a secret life?-- Amazon.com

4/16/18

Book of the Week (4/16/2018)

Small Town, Big Oil: The Untold Story of the Women Who Took on the Richest Man in the World--And Won by David W. Moore (New York, N.Y. : Diversion Books, 2018).
Never underestimate the underdog.
In the fall of 1973, the Greek oil shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, husband of President John F. Kennedy's widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and arguably the richest man in the world, proposed to build an oil refinery on the narrow New Hampshire coast, in the town of Durham. At the time, it would have cost $600 million to build and was expected to generate 400,000 barrels of oil per day, making it the largest oil refinery in the world. The project was vigorously supported by the governor, Meldrim Thomson, and by William Loeb, the notorious publisher of the only statewide newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader.
But three women vehemently opposed the project--Nancy Sandberg, the town leader who founded and headed Save Our Shores; Dudley Dudley, the freshman state rep who took the fight to the state legislature; and Phyllis Bennett, the publisher of the local newspaper that alerted the public to Onassis' secret acquisition of the land. Small Town, Big Oil is the story of how the residents of Durham, led by these three women, out-organized, out-witted, and out-maneuvered the governor, the media, and the Onassis cartel to hand the powerful Greek billionaire the most humiliating defeat of his business career, and spare the New Hampshire seacoast from becoming an industrial wasteland.-- Publisher's blurb.
Join David Moore on Tuesday, April 24, 2018 at 7:00pm at the Water Street Bookstore in Exeter to discuss his book! 

4/9/18

Congratulations to the 2018 NH LAL Semi-Finalists!


  • Joshua Army, Milford
  • Anya Bakin, Durham
  • Rylie Blanchard, Pembroke
  • Jensen Casassa, Exeter
  • Ruth Cassidy, Nashua
  • Ryan Cavanaugh, Milford
  • Rosalyn Caza, Pembroke
  • Jake Demers, Pembroke
  • Colin Gregg, Milford
  • Matthew Harry, Somersworth
  • Johnathan Holler, Pembroke
  • Emily Johnston, Londonderry
  • Julianna Kajka, Hampstead
  • Andrew Kelly, Durham
  • Brianna Leo, Milford
  • Joshua Ma, Nashua
  • Samantha MacAvoy, Atkinson
  • Carson Morgan, Somersworth
  • Paeton Moul, Milford
  • Nancy Poore, Exeter
  • Caroline Raiano, Milford
  • Jaden Russell, Pembroke
  • Alexander Shutt, Hollis
  • Elisabeth Stapelfeld, Hollis
  • Greta Stevens, Exeter
  • Michaela Thibault, Exeter
  • Olivia Wood, Exeter
  • Mehli Yoder, Somersworth
  • Alyssa Zimont, Pembroke

 Please note that there were 2 other students whose letters were selected as semi-finalists. As of this afternoon we had not received permission to announce their names.   


New Hampshire's winning letters will be selected from these semi-finalist letters and announced in early May. The Center for the Book at the New Hampshire State Library will award $100 to each first place winner. State winners will advance to the national Letters About Literature competition.  If you want to get the latest LAL news, you can subscribe to LAL news email feed at the NH Letters About Literature page.

Book of the Week (4/9/2018)

The Hidden Life of Life: A Walk Through the Reaches of Time by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas (University Park, Pa. : Penn State University Press, 2018).

NH author and anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas brings us another fascinating and thought provoking book that focuses on the connections and similarities between very different species.
An iconoclast and best-selling author of both nonfiction and fiction, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas has spent a lifetime observing, thinking, and writing about the cultures of animals such as lions, wolves, dogs, deer, and humans. In this compulsively readable book, she provides a plainspoken, big-picture look at the commonality of life on our planet, from the littlest microbes to the largest lizards.
Inspired by the idea of symbiosis in evolution—that all living things evolve in a series of cooperative relationships—Thomas takes readers on a journey through the progression of life. Along the way she shares the universal likenesses, experiences, and environments of “Gaia’s creatures,” from amoebas in plant soil to the pets we love, from proud primates to Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers on the African savanna. Fervently rejecting “anthropodenial,” the notion that nonhuman life does not share characteristics with humans, Thomas instead shows that paramecia can learn, plants can communicate, humans aren’t really as special as we think we are—and that it doesn’t take a scientist to marvel at the smallest inhabitants of the natural world and their connections to all living things.
A unique voice on anthropology and animal behavior, Thomas challenges scientific convention and the jargon that prevents us all from understanding all living things better. This joyfully written book is a fascinating look at the challenges and behaviors shared by creatures from bacteria to larvae to parasitic fungi, a potted hyacinth to the author herself, and all those in between.-- Publisher's website
Join Elizabeth on the following dates where she will be discussing her new book:

Tuesday, April 10th at 7:00 PM at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, NH
Saturday, May 19th at 2:00 PM at Gibson's Bookstore in Concord, NH

NHPR will also be interviewing Elizabeth Marshall Thomas at the Toadstool Bookstore in Peterborough on Wednesday, April 25th from 7:00 to 8:00 PM. All are welcome to attend.

4/2/18

Book of the Week (4/2/2018)

Mary's Monster: Love, Madness, and How Mary Shelley Created Frankenstein by Lita Judge (New York, N.Y. : Roaring Brook Press, 2018).

Peterborough, NH author/illustrator Lita Judge is well known for her many children's books, including "Flight School" and "Red Sled". Judge has recently released a dark, enthralling, and beautiful telling of Mary Shelley's life leading up to and including the writing of her best known masterpiece.
Pairing free verse with over three hundred pages of black-and-white watercolor illustrations, Mary’s Monster is a unique and stunning biography of Mary Shelley, the pregnant teenage runaway who became one of the greatest authors of all time.
Legend is correct that Mary Shelley began penning Frankenstein in answer to a dare to write a ghost story. What most people don't know, however, is that the seeds of her novel had been planted long before that night. By age nineteen, she had been disowned by her family, was living in scandal with a married man, and had lost her baby daughter just days after her birth. Mary poured her grief, pain, and passion into the powerful book still revered two hundred years later, and in Mary's Monster, author/illustrator Lita Judge has poured her own passion into a gorgeous book that pays tribute to the life of this incredible author.-- Amazon.com