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   Notes From an Open Book

 

Happy New Year! And welcome to the January 2014 issue of Notes from an Open Book.

 

The Council staff's New Year's resolutions include:

 

* To connect with community partners and involve them deeply within our work, for planning as well as implementing programs

* To listen to our constituents' voices and work even harder to improve programming based on what we hear

* To take chances and let "success" mean something powerful

* To think, reflect, inspire, and be inspired by our partners and constituents every day

 

We're looking forward to a year of increased programming - there's certainly a demand for it - and will share the stories of what it's all about in the months to come.

 

Read below for a taste!

 
In This Issue
Teach Me Now to Listen
Think & Drink
MHC Podcasts
Student Humanities Ambassador
Recent Grants
Recommending Reading
From Our Programs
Quick Links
 Like us on Facebook
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Our mission:
The Maine Humanities Council,
a statewide non-profit organization, uses the humanities-literature, history, philosophy, and culture-as a tool for positive change in Maine communities. Our programs and grants encourage critical thinking and conversations across social, economic, and cultural boundaries.


Teach Me Now to Listen: A Retrospective on Seamus Heaney    
 
On January 22, 2014, join the MHC and John Ward (formerly
Photograph courtesy of
The Kenyon Review
of Kenyon and Centre Colleges) for "Teach Me Now to Listen: A Retrospective on Seamus Heaney," a reading and discussion of Heaney's work.

This free, one-hour, brown bag lunch at One Longfellow Square in Portland will explore Heaney's ranging subjects and styles, from personal and familial to political and cultural. Heaney's death last year was a blow to poets and literature lovers alike. Through this discussion, we plan to keep Heaney's work in the present, where it belongs. Please register online through January 17.
 
Think & Drink

We've all had deep discussions with friends while we're out on the town-why not add a couple of experts to the mix and take it up a notch? That's the idea behind Think & Drink, a happy-hour series that the MHC is offering in partnership with Portland's SPACE Gallery to spark provocative conversations about big ideas. The series invites you to participate in a facilitated public conversation with two panelists who have expertise in the subject at hand. The idea isn't to create consensus but, rather, to foster an open interplay of viewpoints and perspectives.

 

The theme for this year's series is "In a Networked World." How does our highly networked, plugged-in culture affect the way we relate to each other and the world around us? Join bloggers, cultural scholars, and other thought leaders to explore each month's topic.

 

The first will take place on February 5, from 6:00 to 7:30 pm, featuring Pete Coviello (Bowdoin College; @pcoviell) and Eden Osucha (Bates College) on "Intimacy in a Networked World." Contact info@mainehumanities.org for more information.

 


Podcasts


If you missed out on Winter Weekend 2013, don't worry! You can listen to full recordings of some of the scholars' lectures on our 'Humanities on Demand' podcast series. This episode just came out:  

A Change That Did Him Good: Lillian Nayder on Dickens, Women, Violence, Cure

Lillian Nayder (The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth) is Professor and Chair of English at Bates College, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century British fiction. In this lecture, delivered as part of Winter Weekend 2013 programming on Dickens's Great Expectations, she discusses the implications of domestic violence in the novel. Nayder describes the legal position of wives in Dickens's time and the contemporary political debates surrounding their rights, both of which Dickens had in mind when writing Great Expectations. Her analysis of the two Mrs. Gargerys reveals his fascinating and disturbing portrayal of wife beating as both an evil and a cure.

 
An NEH Exhibit for a Small Venue Near You

 

NEH On the Road (a traveling exhibition of the National Endowment for the Humanities) tells the stories of American lives. The exhibits within this program include a compelling mix of artifacts, text, graphics, photographs, interactive elements, educational, and other community programming information, and is designed for smaller venues such as schools, libraries, and local museums, which then create their own programming.

 

Currently, NEH On the Road is touring the exhibit "Spirited: Prohibition in America," exploring the history of Prohibition from the early temperance movement through the passage and repeal of the 18th Amendment. It is being offered on loan to small and mid-sized museums, historical societies, and other small public venues across the country. The traveling exhibits are typically no larger than 2,000 square feet and include low-security objects. Each site receives the exhibit for 7 weeks, and NEH provides a grant of $1,000 to support public programs around the exhibition themes. 

 

"Spirited" begins its national tour in June 2014 and is already almost fully booked - but there is one open slot, June 16 - August 11, 2017. If you know a humanities-based public venue that would be interested in hosting this exhibit, please contact Kathy Dowell, director of Arts and Humanities Programming at the Mid America Arts Alliance, which administers the NEH On the Road program.

 

NEH On the Road has never been in Maine. The NEH is eager to see the exhibit here, and so they are encouraging applications for this and future exhibits. Read more information about Spirited and NEH On the Road.

 

 

Student Humanities Ambassador 

Do you know any teens obsessed with an issue or idea that they think they and their friends should be talking about?  Or teens who want to learn how to plan and run an event to prompt those conversations, and get some money to pay for it?

 

The Maine Humanities Council is looking for creative and energetic rising 10th or 11th graders interested in community engagement through the humanities. Through the Student Humanities Ambassador Program, teens will work with the MHC to identify a topic and, working with a budget of $1,000 given to them by the MHC, create, plan, run, and evaluate a humanities-based program or event within their communities.

 

Teens should start thinking. The deadline is March 31 with two Student Humanities Ambassador slots available. The MHC will announce the recipients in April.

 

For more information, visit this program's website and watch our video.

 

Questions? Contact Nicole Rancourt.

 
Upcoming Events
January is a busy month! As well as the Seamus Heaney brown bag lunch we're hosting on the 22nd (for a "Taste of the Humanities"), we're sponsoring or putting on a discussion of the Civil War children's book The Mostly True Adventures of Homer P. Figg in Presque Isle on January 9, a lecture with Carol Manchester ("Joseph K. Manchester, Northern Son in the South") on January 12 in Windham; and a talk by Robert "Maynard" Kufrovich on January 13 called "Who Were the Zuoaves?" For more information about these events and more, visit our calendar.
 
Recent Grant List 

In December, the MHC awarded the following grants:

 

$1,000 for The Kelly Reichardt Roundtable and Film Screening, University of Southern Maine, Portland (Community Outreach)

In conjunction with a Maine-wise symposium on women and film to be held in April 2014, the Cinema Studies Program and the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Southern Maine, partnering with the Portland Museum of Art and the Maine Humanities Council, will sponsor a roundtable discussion with Kelly Reichardt, a noted American independent filmmaker with credits including Night Moves, Meek's Cutoff, Old Joy, and Wendy and Lucy. The roundtable will address questions concerning the roles women play in front of and behind the camera.

 

$1,000 for Pictures, Postcards and Plates: Souvenirs of Presque Isle's Past, Presque Isle Historical Society, Presque Isle (Community Outreach)

The exhibit will feature pictures, postcards, and plates from Presque Isle's past. It will travel throughout the community over a calendar year to venues such as Northern Maine Community College, The Aroostook Medical Center, Turner Memorial Library, Northern Maine Fair's Historical Pavilion and more before landing in its permanent museum placement, each with an interpretive focus and public program.

 

$500 for Stories From the Grange and Kittery Foreside, The Dance Hall, Kittery (Discretionary/Planning)

The project's goal is to engage the community in capturing the living memories of the Kittery Grange and the surrounding neighborhood of the Kittery Foreside in the last century. The ultimate goal is to present these stories and history to the community and visitors through video, photos, walking tours, and performing arts.

 
Recommended Reading

The MHC is fortunate to have a group of wonderful scholars who facilitate our programs. They're fun to talk books with, too. To share some of the pleasure of those conversations, we asked a couple of the scholars who facilitate the MHC's New Books, New Readers program to let us know what books are inspiring them just now:

 

Erik Larson's In the Garden of the Beasts takes a look at Germany in 1933, six months after Hitler's rise to power, through the eyes of an American Ambassador (and his family) upon his arrival in Berlin. The U.S. was supportive of Hitler's efforts to bring Germany "back to stability," not aware of - and partly not wanting to see - the atrocities that were already occurring. This story is most informative of U.S./Germany relationship in the early 1930's, seen by an atypical ambassador whose eyes were slow to open to the truth.

--recommended by Elizabeth Cooke

 

 

The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean is a sensitive story about a woman who was once a young docent at the Hermitage, and is now elderly, living in America, and in the throes of encroaching Alzheimer's disease. It portrays her intense appreciation of the museum's art treasures, as she helps to pack them to be sent away for safekeeping in anticipation of the Nazi invasion of the city during WWII. She is then among those who endure the unspeakable privations of the subsequent Siege of Leningrad. As an old woman, struggling with her faltering memory, her recollections of her earlier years offer a kind of structure to her days. This book combines a compelling historical account, an appreciation of the role that art can play in our lives, and an exploration of the nourishing role of memory, albeit compromised, in the human experience.

--recommended by Mary Alice Brennan
From our programs:

 

"Having the opportunity to partner with the Maine Humanities Council on the production of A Streetcar Named Desire furthered our investment in the performing and visual arts as a powerful tool for engaging the public in a discussion of the dynamics of domestic violence. Live drama of the caliber that we witnessed in April cannot be kept at arm's length and draws the audience into a relationship requiring them to respond."

 

--from Spruce Run-Womancare Alliance, a partner in the MHC's live performance and panel discussion about domestic violence in Maine
On we go to ever more exciting work, just like these articles have described. Thank you for reading Notes from an Open Book to learn more about our programs. I hope you'll be able to participate in some of them.

Also, thanks so very much to those who made a donation in the last month. We had tremendous support in December, which will do much to help the humanities remain vivid and powerful in Maine. If you didn't have a chance to make a gift but are interested in supporting what we do, there's always time.

Happy New Year!


Warmly,


Diane Magras 
Director of Development 
Maine Humanities Council
Would you like to make a donation? Please contact Diane Magras  or call
(207)773-5051 ext. 208 (toll-free 1-866-637-3233, ext. 208) to discuss.