Conversations From the Pointed Firs

This month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs we have Martha White, writer, editor and literary executor for the estate of her grandfather, E.B. White.  
In 2006, White edited the revised and updated Letters of E. B. White (HarperCollins) and, since then, she has compiled three more collections of E. B. White's work: In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers (Cornell University Press, 2011) and E. B. White on Dogs (Tilbury House, Publishers, 2013). Her most editorial endeavor is Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship, The Correspondence of E.B. White and Edmund Ware Smith (DownEast Books, 2020.) 

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Dean Lunt, Editor-in-Chief, Islandport Press on the writings of Ruth Moore.

DEAN LUNT is founder and the editor-in-chief at Islandport Press, an award-winning publisher of books and other media that strives to tell stories that are rooted in the sensibilities of Maine and New England. An eighth-generation native of downeast Maine, Dean Lunt was born and raised in the island fishing village of Frenchboro. His ancestors arrived on Mount Desert Island in the late 1700s and many of them moved across the bay to settle Long Island in the early 1800s. In 1999, Lunt founded Islandport Press, an award-winning independent book publishing company that produces books with New England themes. The company published its first book, Hauling by Hand: The Life and Times of a Maine Island, in the spring of 2000. Lunt has edited dozens of books as is the author of Here for Generations: The Story of a Maine Bank and its City. Later this year he will release an anthology of Ruth Moore’s work for which he is writing a lengthy forward describing the ways in which their lives intersected, and the encuring importance of Moore’s work. 

The guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Samaa Abdurraqib, Executive Director of the Maine Humanities Council, educator, poet, writer, advocate and justice organizer.  

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Stuart Kestenbaum, arts innovator and poet.

STUART KESTENBAUM is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Things Seem to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions 2021), and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press).  He was the host of the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here and was the host/curator of the podcast Make/Time. He was the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 1988 until 2015. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts. Stuart Kestenbaum has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines. 

 He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021.

CONVERSATIONS FROM THE POINTED FIRS is a monthly audio series with Maine-connected authors and artists discussing new books and creative projects that invoke the spirit of Maine, its history, its ecology, its culture, and its contribution to community and quality of life.

Learn more at pointedfirs.org

November's guests on Conversations from the Pointed Firs are David Greenham, Executive Director of the Maine Arts Commission, and David Hopkins, Chair. They and host Peter Neill discuss the arts in Maine, the creative economy, and the essential contribution and expression of the arts and the creative spirit of Maine. 

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Jefferson Navicky, author, poet, playwright, and archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection. He and host Peter Neill  discuss the long history of women writers in Maine, their work well-known and sometimes forgotten, representing an essential contribution and expression of the unique place and creative spirit of Maine.  

Conversations from the Pointed Firs is a monthly interview-style podcast wherein Peter Neill talks with authors and artists who live in Maine, work in Maine, or otherwise derive their creativity from the essence of Maine.

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, poet, fiction writer, teacher and non-profit leader. Gibson's first collection of poems, "Death of a Ventriloquist", won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. His second book, "Deke Dangle Dive" was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. Gibson’s poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and Orion, and his prose in Kenyon Review online, Portland Magazine, and Slice. He has taught writing at conferences, schools and universities including Fordham, Haystack, and University of Southern Maine, and helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks Artist Colony. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland with his family. 

Our guest for this month is Kerri Arsenault, author of “Milltown: Reckoning with What Remains”, published in 2020 by St. Martins Press.  Kerri is winner of many distinguished literary prizes such as the 2021 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award and the Maine Literary Award for Non-Fiction. “Milltown” is a book of narrative non-fiction, investigative memoir and cultural criticism that illiminates the rise and collapse of  the working class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxins and disease with the central question: Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Julia Bouwsma, poet laureate of Maine and author of “Midden”, an award-winning collection of poems published by Fordham University Press in 2018, an intimate and raw set of poems addressing a dark and important piece of Maine history that transpired on Malaga Island in Casco Bay in 1912.

Host Peter Neill's guest this month is Gretchen Legler, author of Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life published by Trinity University Press, an evocative examination of the back-to-the-land experience in Maine with her partner, Ruth Hill. Gretchen is a professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington where she lives. She and Peter discuss her most recent book, an intimate portrait of life in Maine, as well as the power of observation for creative writers, and her Master’s of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School, where her interests focused on exploring human connections to the sacred in the natural world.