DENMARK, ME – JULY 11 4pm Authors Series - The Lowering Days with Gregory Brown
Join us as Denmark Historical Society, Public Library and Arts Center Collaborative presents the Authors Series with Maine author and songwriter, Gregory Brown. Gregory will join us for an afternoon reading in the park and discuss the writing of his new novel, The Lowering Days.
A little history of Gregory Brown. His first two years in the world were defined by a tiny attic bedroom window looking out on Swan Lake and Mount Waldo on the far shore. Later, his parents moved back into town, returning to the house where his father had grown up in. Belfast was a deep-water harbor town in the end days of an environmentally catastrophic poultry processing era. The ocean stretched along the land to the east. The Little River picked its way through the woods near our house. And the Penobscot River, a constant presence, stretched from the bay up through the outlying small towns in which his aunts and uncles and grandparents lived. All of the area he describes are Penobscot Nation territory. It had become his family's home as well. No matter where you're from or where your feet take you in this country, Greg invites you to remember that you are on indigenous land. If you paid attention, you could see the entire unfolding of human history in a story . . .
The Lowering Days is about Growing up, David Almerin Ames and his brothers, Link and Simon, thought of the wild patch of Maine where they lived along the Penobscot River as theirs. Running down the state like a spine, the river shared its name with the people of the Penobscot Nation, whose ancestral territory included the entire Penobscot watershed, the land upon which the Ames family eventually made their home. The brothers’ affinity for the natural world derives from their iconoclastic parents, Arnoux, a romantic artist and Vietnam War deserter who builds boats by hand, and Falon, an activist journalist who runs The Lowering Days, a community newspaper that gives equal voice to indigenous and white issues. But the boys’ childhood dreamscape is shattered when a Penobscot teenager sets fire to a shuttered area paper mill on the eve of its possible reopening in an act of defiance seeking to protect the land from further harm. The fire reveals a stark truth for the residents of the Penobscot Valley. For many, the mill is a lifeline, providing working class jobs they need to survive. Within the Penobscot Nation, the mill brings only heartache, spewing toxic chemicals and wastewater products that poison the river’s fish and plants.
Reading The Lowering Days and joining us for the Authors Series on Sunday, July 11 at 4pm is time well-spent and to be cherished.
Denmark Arts Center (DAC) Authors Series will be held at Bicentennial Park across from the Arts Center. DAC will follow CDC guidelines for outdoor events. A Pay-What-You-Can this summer. Pre-registration is requested.
