Thursday September 11
7:00 at Blue Hill Public Library
5 Parker Point Road
Blue Hill, Maine 04614
co-sponsored by Blue Hill Public Library
What is it like to train as a whitewater guide? What special skills do you need to forage for fiddlehead ferns? What do a handful of Maine auction houses have in common? Why did a village suddenly form on a frozen lake? What is it like to devote a summer to attending county fairs?
The Art of the Myth answers questions like these, and others, about life in Maine. A collection of essays on topics from sea kayaking to maple sugaring, from rural auctioneering to the “tallest lady in the world,” from the lost trains of the Allagash to winter camping, petroglyphs, and the history of hand-colored photographs, it is a work whose subject is whatever caught Michael Burke’s attention over a 35 year career of living in and writing about Maine.
Michael D. Burke is a writer of nonfiction, whose work has appeared in national and international forums, from The New York Times and Boston Globe, to the Sunday Times (South Africa), and in Down East, Outside, Yankee, Islands, and A/B Architecture Boston. His subjects range from snow camping to sea kayaking, from country fairs in Maine to travels in Sardinia, Basilicata, Scotland, and South Africa. His memoir/adventure, The Same River Twice (University of Arizona Press), documents his travels down a series of remote rivers in northern British Columbia, as well as his experiences as a river guide. For more than 30 years, he was a whitewater and wilderness river guide, running rivers in California, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, Mexico, and Alaska, where he made the first rafting descent of the Skwentna River in the Alaska Range in 1983.
He is also a playwright, having won the Maine Literary Arts Award for his play, The Town Meets, in 2018.
A native Californian, he is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley (B.A. Philosophy, 1977) and of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (M.F.A. in Fiction, 1984). He is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and English at Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, where he directed the Program in Creative Writing.
He lives in Wilton, Maine with his wife, the fiction writer Patricia O’Donnell.