Maine Humanities Council

View from Strip Road, Fort Kent: Maine's northern border is a landscape of rolling hills, fields, and lots of sky. Credit: Erik Jorgensen

by Kathryn Olmstead

What do borders mean? It is a provocative question that captured the imaginations of participants in two discussions sponsored by the Maine Humanities Council Sept. 16 and 17. Held in the border towns of Houlton and Frenchville, the discussions brought together residents of varied ages and walks of life from both Maine and Canada to examine and expand their views of a border’s significance.

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by Martina Duncan

Over 120 new friends, as well as long-time friends, of the Maine Humanities Council gathered on April 28th to celebrate  the re-release by Down East Books of Good Maine Food, a cookbook originally published in 1939 by renowned Maine author Kenneth Roberts and his niece and secretary, Marjorie Mosser. When Kenneth Roberts wrote about the food of his childhood in Trending into Maine, it kicked up a storm of recipes and recollections from readers. Roberts asked Mosser to assemble a cookbook of traditional Maine recipes, and Good Maine Food was the result. Roberts’s personal favorites are included along with those of his readers, occasionally seasoned by his characteristically pungent comments.

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Wesley McNair presents at the Blaine House, photo: Patricia O'Donnell

by Patricia O’Donnell

What a pleasure it was to sit next to Shanna McNair on a rainy Wednesday last week in the Governor’s mansion in Augusta, and watch her father, Wesley McNair, be inaugurated as Maine’s 4^th Poet Laureate. Wes has been my colleague in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Maine Farmington since we both arrived in 1987, continuing past his retirement to the present, as he remains active in the Program as Writer in Residence. I settled in to enjoy the talk, knowing that—for a shy person—Wes is a consummate public speaker.  I was not disappointed.

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Literature & Medicine‘s highly successful conference last November brought together some of the finest speakers in the literature and medicine world in talks and discussions about health care professionals and situations of trauma they treat and experience. Podcasts of their talks are now online.

“Two Heads and the Things They Carried” with Tim O’Brien

Tim O’Brien, author of Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods, speaks as a veteran about the moral responsibility that veterans hold for their actions. Providers often tell veterans and others who have experienced traumatic acts that the haunting actions they committed were not their fault since they were merely doing what they were told to do. Instead, O’Brien recommends, providers should remember that these men and women have done and seen things for which they need to hold responsibility. Moral injury, he says, is more than simply moral responsibility; it is a wound that veterans will carry with them for life. And to O’Brien, from his own experience, this is a crucial means of keeping one’s humanity.

“Learning About Combat Trauma From Homer’s Iliad” with Dr. Jonathan Shay

Jonathan Shay, MD, PhD, clinical psychiatrist and author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, worked in the VA system treating combat veterans with severe PTSD.  Shay has written extensively on an interesting connection between literature and medicine: much of what he needed to know about the experience of combat he learned from The Iliad—both what the experience of combat is like and the effects on soldiers. Texts like The Iliad helped him develop an attitude that he found instrumental in treating soldiers. In this talk, Shay discusses specific problems that veterans experience and how such problems are present in stark detail in The Iliad and The Odyssey.

“The Bad News and the Good News” with Kate Braestrup

In this uplifting talk, Kate Braestrup, author of Here If You Need Me, speaks about death, death notification, and what she has witnessed about love, human connections, grief and human creativity through working intimately with sudden, unexpected death in her work as chaplain for the Maine Warden Service. In this talk, she explores the trauma of finding people in the wilderness, an acknowledgment of the difficult work she does as well as what caregivers do, and how she approaches both. To Braestrup, there is privilege in experiencing these painful yet very real moments with the family members of those lost in the wilderness, and also hope.

Marionettes for the upcoming performance of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." credit: Blainor McGough

In the fall of 2010, the MHC awarded a $1,000 to Mayo Street Arts in Portland for “The Children’s Puppet Workshop,” teaching puppetry, reading, and creative writing to low-income youth from the Kennedy Park neighborhood, culminating in a performance and art exhibit.

The first performances were in March, and now the puppets and scripts are displayed in the Mayo Street Arts gallery. But there is more:  on Friday April 22 and Saturday April 23 at 2:00 pm, the Children’s Puppet Workshop will present Goldilocks and the Three Bears performed with vintage marionettes carved especially for the musical performance.

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Foxcroft Academy students show their nations' flags.

By Tom Lizotte

Five years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the Maine Humanities Council to produce a day-long forum on East Asia in Dover-Foxcroft. There would simply not have been an audience in my small town.

That was before Foxcroft Academy, the local independent secondary school, built an on-campus dormitory and grew what had been a small international student presence into a 98-student boarding program with representatives from 10 foreign countries. Foxcroft, like other “town academies” in rural Maine, figured out that a great way to reverse declining enrollment (and revenues), while also increasing diversity, was to look to the East. And I don’t mean East Dover.

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It is with regret that the MHC announces its decision to cancel its program Coming to America: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Immigration, planned for October 29th in Ellsworth. Unfortunately, registration numbers were not sufficiently robust.

Many thanks to everyone who helped plan for the program.

Joseph Conforti, credit: Diane Hudson

The room was packed at USM’s Glickman Library on April 2, 2010, which was hardly a surprise: the MHC was honoring USM’s Distinguished University Professor Joseph Conforti with the Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize. Joe is one of the top regional history scholars in New England, founder of USM’s American and New England Studies Program, and a friend to all organizations and students working in this field. There are a lot of them, and many joined us on April 2.

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This weekend I attended the Maine Festival of the Book, which was organized by Maine Reads, a non-profit dedicated to promoting increased literacy in Maine. The MHC has given the book festival small grants for several years. This is the first year I had an opportunity to attend, as a new board member for Maine Reads, and I am glad that I did.  This is a too-little known Maine gem. All but one event was free to the public, and the fee for the opening presentations by authors Tess Gerritsen and Anita Shreve was nominal. I recorded each of the talks that I attended for the MHC’s collection of podcasts.

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Inspired by Picturing America reproductions, children create their own art. (credit: Diane Hudson)

On a Friday evening in early November, nearly 150 Head Start children and their parents attended a Picturing America celebration event at the Portland Museum of Art.  When they arrived, they went on a treasure hunt that took them through museum galleries, dabbled in art activities in the museum’s education studio, heard stories read aloud, ate pizza, and went home with a book and a coupon for free Museum attendance for each family.

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