The Hog Island Lecture
Toward the end of the conference, participants will spend a day at Audubon’s facility on Hog Island, a 330 acre gem in Muscongus Bay. Each year, an established writer will join our community’s foray to the coast to deliver the Hog Island Lecture: a workshop/class in the afternoon, followed by a reading of his/her work that evening. The Hog Island Lecturer for the summer of 2012 is Bill Roorbach.
The island was owned by Mabel Loomis Todd, the environmental activist from Amherst who had not only corresponded with Emily Dickinson, but who also developed an influential editorial relationship with the body of Dickinson’s work after the poet’s death. Hog Island, which became associated with the Audubon Society in 1935 through a partnership with Todd’s family, has hosted some of the world’s most famous naturalists and environmental educators, including Roger Tory Peterson and Rachel Carson.
The Damariscotta Writers’ Conference is fortunate to have access to this facility and its literary legacy, but is also privileged to be so close to another ecosystem: from our principle residency on an idyllic lake to an experiential taste of Maine’s evocative coast.
Learn more at these two websites:
