A scandalous Provincetown novel, the Telling Room turns 20, lit-festing in Marblehead
New England Literary News
The temperatures whipsaw, heatwaving to cool rain, the days are long but getting shorter, we’re oozing towards the 4th of July, but celebrating the United States of America feels increasingly fraught. I’ll eat a hotdog anyway. And I’m hoping the season is offering the best of itself to you. Is it? You can let me know. In the meantime, here’s the literary news.
A revivified Provincetown novel and a norm-defying author
Judith, the narrator of Hazel Hawthorne’s novel Salt House, originally published in 1934 and recently reissued by Provincetown Arts Press, is a writer with two lovers. She stays out late; she drinks; she spends her time in New York and on the dunes of Provincetown. She bucks norms and finds her own way. The book documents the seething bohemia of 1930s on the Outer Cape; it was scandalous when it arrived and quickly forgotten. Told in journal form from June to October, Judith recounts her life, the characters, her loves, and finding her way at the edge of the world. “Just then I was a woman who could sit a glittering horse . . . drink whisky neat, and take any man she wanted.” As the season unfolds she turns away from the men. “Just now there is nothing I can see to want, without them! Except to stay here, and to work. . . I have outlived the unformed tenderness of those first days in June.”
Hawthorne’s life stretched across the twentieth century, from 1901 to 2000, and in her 99 years, she was a writer, publishing novels and work in The New Yorker, a mother, a lover, an environmental advocate working to conserve land in Provincetown, where she was pals with Eugene O’Neill, Edmund Wilson, Mary Oliver, Norman Mailer, Franz Kline, Jack Kerouac. Salt House shows what it was to dwell in the dunes, capturing the heady foment of artistic production and debauch. Hawthorne illuminates a moment in time, a moment in place, and one that’s timeless, too, raising the ongoing questions, as Allison Bass-Riccio writes in her elegant afterword: “Who owns the self? Who owns women and their bodies? Who owns the Earth, its creatures, its seas, its dunes, its landscapes? . . . What can purposeful disobedience look like?” It’s good this book is back.
The Telling Room turns 20 and celebrates with a powerful new anthology
The Telling Room, the Portland, Maine-based youth writing and literary organization, recently published a new anthology of student work in celebration of the org’s twentieth anniversary. It Rains Diamonds on Neptune gathers twenty pieces of student writing from the last decade, with each piece accompanied by a response from an established Maine author. Hailey Talbert writes of hiding in the museum as the city burns: “I pretended paintings were windows, / Impressionist iris fields outside / replacing smokestacks spewing / shadows and smog over the sun.” And Samaa Abdurraqib writes in response in part, “Love in a time of cracked ground and submerged / lands may not be fit for us.” In the title poem, Noor Sager writes “It rains diamonds on Neptune and you’re queer as fuck / Isn’t that beautiful / Isn’t that everything.” And Arisa White responds: “We take out our umbrellas / because the weather is queer / on seasonal average / and love is always in the air.” Taken as a whole, the anthology, in its multigenerationality, its genre-blending, its urgency, showcases the range, depth, and variety of Maine voices, established and upcoming, as they reckon with the bewilderment, the beauty, the fear and grief and joy of the cracked and confusing world right now.
Lit Festing in Marblehead
The Marblehead Literary Festival unfolds this week and weekend with a full schedule of workshops, author talks, panel discussions, and more. This year they’re also offering an event inspired by NPR’s storytelling show, the Moth Radio Hour where audience members are invited to share true stories, noteless. The festival opens with a silent book reading party on July 2. There are workshops on storytelling techniques, how to market your writing, writing through life’s transitions, and writing for tweens and teens. Poet and artist M.P. Carver will lead a workshop on erasure poetry, and Margo Steiner will lead one on writing your own obituary. There’s a two-hour literary walking tour, and author talks with Eric Jay Dolin and Joan Leegant. Tickets to most events are $20 and you can find the full schedule here.
Bookseller’s Best: Staff Picks from New England Independent Bookstores
Ben Rybeck of House of Books in Kent, Connecticut, recommends No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai, translated from the Japanese by Donald Keene (New Directions): “Where had this novel been all my life? I've never read anything that feels so aching, so human. Dazai lived a tragic life, and so does his protagonist, a young man who cannot connect with anyone or anything. Somehow nothing happens, yet everything happens.”
Chloe Garcia Roberts with Fanny Howe
Another quick recommendation: Chloe Garcia Roberts, poet, translator, essayist, has a mind I admire a lot. Her recent essay collection, Fire Eater: A Translator’s Theology, is breathtaking in the heft of its thinking and the lyricism of its language. She spent the last months talking with poet legend Fanny Howe for one of the Paris Review’s ranging, depthy Art of Poetry interviews. It appears in the Summer issue, out now. “If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean,” says Howe, “and to not let anything bring it down.” You can read a good chunk of the interview online here.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. This is a joy to do, and it is work. If you can afford to pay, please pay.
Thank you my friend ❤️
Yay Chloe and Fanny. https://substack.com/@lindaenorton/note/p-162650659?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2rqdm