“This is something I've wanted to do for a long time,” says Joanne Hart, who will oversee the Gloucester Writers Center's International Women's Day celebration this Friday at Gloucester Unitarian Universalist Church.
The free event, “Readings of Selected Works by Cape Ann Women Authors by Cape Ann Women Authors!” begins at 7 p.m. The joint reading, held as part of International Women's Day on March 8, will feature notable figures as well. It celebrates the many talents, some of whom are not. Cape Ann women writers.
Friday night's event will be more structured than previous readings held at the Writers Center, Hart said. The texts are selected from the works of local writers (both present and past, poets and prose) researched by Writers Center officials.
Heather Atwood, who publishes a cooking magazine that explores New England's culinary culture, and Kim Smith, a one-woman filmmaker who writes gardening books and is probably known to locals as “BB Boudrea.” Some of the women's names seem familiar, such as BB Boudrea. Although she is a jazz singer, she is a novelist with two page-turning novels and another in print.
Dorothy Shubow Nelson, a prolific poetry publisher from Gloucester, whose body of work includes “The Dream of the Sea,'' “Early Poems, 2008,'' and “Something,'' as well as a collection of works specially created for the event. She wrote a new poem, “The History of the Women of Gloucester.'' near. “She is the editor of The Inner Voice and The Outer World, books by veterans and their families. She was one of the original founding committee members of the Gloucester Writers Center and currently serves on the advisory board. Masu.
Massachusetts women writers have produced a historically formidable body of work, foremost among them Judith Sargent Murray of Gloucester, without whom the Unitarian Universalist Church of Gloucester would not exist. It is no exaggeration to say that. She helped her husband John Murray establish a congregation in Gloucester after the Revolution, and with her writings she was instrumental in helping to fund the construction of the historic building, which was completed in 1810. .
Sargent-Murray can be said to have set the standard for women in Gloucester, not only as writers but also as leaders in nearly every aspect of the community, from politics to philanthropy. There are too many to mention her name here,” says Hart.
An award-winning author and board member of the town's more creative endeavors, Hart is a very powerful person in her own right.
It was Hart, founding director of the Gloucester Writers' Center, who started the first women's author reading event a few years ago, not as an International Women's Day event but as a “spontaneous” gathering of women. All I asked of each of them was to get up and read the works of their favorite women authors. It could have been Edna St. Vincent Millay or Sylvia Plath, but it didn't matter, Hart says.
Importantly, she said, it was a huge success, with an enthusiastic crowd filling the Writers Center's small cottage on East Main Street, the former home of the late Vincent Fellini, Gloucester's first poet laureate. says.
The success of this first reading led to a series of annual women writers' gatherings, which have been canceled around the world during the coronavirus pandemic.
When the event became viable again, it emerged as a much more evolved version of what Hart had envisioned as a 400+ event as chairman of the Gloucester 400+ Literary Committee. However, due to various circumstances, plans were delayed, so International Women's Day became the goal, which fell on March 8, and the venue was a rather large church that an actual Cape Ann woman writer helped build with her writing income, she said. To tell.
Although the meaning and observance of International Women's Day have changed since its creation in the early 19th century, its core remains a demonstration of the strength of women as a collective force. Born in this country by immigrant female garment workers in New York City, the movement began as a labor movement protesting inhumane sweatshop working conditions and was followed by the nearly 150 people who died in the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911. Activated by the death of a young female immigrant. This triggered a major reform of labor law.
Part of March's Women's History Month, International Women's Day is an official women's holiday in some countries. The theme changes each year, with this year's theme “recognizing women who understand the need to eliminate prejudice and discrimination for a positive future.”
