Narrowsburg June 17-19 2022

Narrowsburg June 17-19 2022Narrowsburg June 17-19 2022Narrowsburg June 17-19 2022

Narrowsburg June 17-19 2022

Narrowsburg June 17-19 2022Narrowsburg June 17-19 2022Narrowsburg June 17-19 2022
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FESTIVAL HIGHLIGHTS

At the Deepest Point of the Delaware...

After a two-year covid-induced hiatus Deep Water Literary Festival is back. Once again, Narrowsburg will play host to a star-studded three-day extravaganza in celebration of the written word, and we're inviting you to join us June 17-19 for what is certain to be the most memorable weekend of the year.  

A Book for the Ages (and all ages)

This year, Deep Water Literary Fest is focusing on a novel written by a teen runaway and unmarried mother that has had an unparalleled influence on popular culture since its publication in 1818. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley has gripped the collective consciousness for over 200 years. Two years into a global pandemic where the adage “science is real” has become a yard sign, this book interrogates what it means to be human at the precipice of the transhuman age.

Plus an evening of music, comedy, and poetry

Celebrate opening night of the festival  at 108 Main Street for a monster mash of poetry, music, and comedy, with our celebrated emcee Thomas March. Also: Poet Paul Legault with live saxophone accompaniment by Ben Bryden; poet Jubi Arriola-Headley;  dynamic duo Ryan Ward and Kenny Luck. Edison's Frankenstein: the original 14-minute movie with subtitles by Bizzy Coy. Plus Sullivan County sensation, Basic Bitches (pictured), and Mike Edison spinning.

108, Main Street, Narrowsburg. Free

misery made me a fiend

Opening Night: Cocktails on Main

We kick off Deep Water Festival 2022 with a display of neon lights, designed by artist extraordinaire Moonsign. Festival attendees are welcome to explore Main Street and beyond, sampling festival-themed cocktails at our local shops and galleries.  


Visit One Grand Books (60 Main Street) to find books by authors featured in this year's program, and head to Narrowsburg Union to experience our immersive installation, Letters Home, that brings to life Frankenstein's chilling opening sequence in which Captain Robert Walton, trapped between sheets of ice in the North Pole, rescues Victor Frankenstein, weak and emaciated from his long chase after the monster. 

Friday 17 June, 5pm

melissa gilbert opens deep water festival

Best known for playing Laura Ingalls Wilder in the wildly successful TV series, Little House on the Prairie, which ran for nine years, and nine seasons, Melissa Gilbert has written a wonderful new memoir, Back to the Prairie, a funny, charming, and inspiring account of leaving behind her Hollywood life for a dilapidated cottage in the Catskills, where she and her husband, the actor Timothy Busfield, found sanctuary during covid, and discovered an abiding love for nature, the garden, and the taste of a home grown tomato. Melissa will talk with actor (and festival co-producer) Lucy Taylor about her life and times. 


Join us for a short reading and signing over cocktails as we launch Deep Water Literary Fest 2022!

Fri, June 17 at 5.30pm

In front of the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, 37 Main St., Narrowsburg

Register

American Gothic

Opening Night Panel

An illuminating conversation on the relationship between gothic narratives, fictional monsters, and the history of American slavery, featuring the Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James in conversation with Leila Taylor, author of  Darkly: Blackness and the America's Gothic Soul, in which she synthesize her personal memoir with American history and cultural analysis to brilliant effect. 


Leila Taylor, graphic designer and Creative Director at the Brooklyn Public Library, grew up identifying as that rare person: a Black Goth. Her book, Darkly, is an ode to Goth sensibility, and  a meditation on Blackness and how America's sordid history has found expression in gothic narratives.  


Marlon James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. James is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award. His most recent novel, Moon Witch, Spider King is the critically-acclaimed follow-up to Black Leopard, Red Wolf, a New York Times bestseller, that draws on  African history and mythology. 

Friday, June 17, 7pm

Tusten Theatre

210 Bridge St.

Narrowsburg


Reserve Seat

On monsters, MOTHERS, and fathers

Joyce Carol Oates, Laurie Sheck, Susan Wolfson

In the summer of 1814, Mary Shelley (then Godwin) eloped to the continent with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley. She was 16. Two years later, during what is often referred to as the Year Without a Summer because of severe climate abnormalities caused by a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, she wrote what would become Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus while sitting out the endless rain on the shores of Lake Geneva. The story started out as a contest with Percy Bysshe Shelley; Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont; as well as Lord Byron and John Polidori, Byron’s doctor. When Frankenstein was published two years later, in an edition of 500 copies, Mary Shelley’s was not on it. Instead, it had a preface by Percy Bysshe Shelley. For this platform panel, the celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates is joined by poet Laurie Sheck, author of A Monster’s Notes, and Susan Wolfson, ​​Professor of English at Princeton University and author of The Annotated Frankenstein.


Joyce Carol Oates 

One of our prolific and versatile contemporary writers, Joyce Carol Oates has long focused on the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual decline of modern American society. She won the 1969 National Book Award for Fiction for them, the final volume of a celebrated trilogy that also includes A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) and Expensive People (1967). Among her many other books are Wonderland, The Assassins: A Book of Hours, and the multi-generational Gothic-inspired saga Bellefleur (1980), set in an enormous mansion on the shores of fictional Lake Noir. Her best-selling historical novel, Blonde, a finalist for the  Pulitzer Prize (2001) and the 2000 National Book Award (2000) has been adapted into a movie starring ​​Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe and will premiere on Netflix later this year.


Laurie Sheck 

The author of two hybrid works, A Monster’s Notes, long listed for the Dublin Impac International  Fiction Prize, and Island of the Mad, as well as five books of poems, including The Willow Grove, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and  at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and a Guggenheim Fellow. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Times, and the Paris Review. She is currently a member of the MFA Writing  faculty at the New School.


​​Susan J. Wolfson

Co-editor with Ronald Levau of The Annotated Frankenstein (Harvard Univ. Press, 2012), and editor of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: A Longman Cultural Edition  (2007), Wolfson is Professor of English at Princeton University, where she has taught since 1989. Recent publications   include “Frankenstein, Frankenstein, and the Dreams of Science,” in Frankenstein and STEAM (Rutgers Univ. Press, 2022); “Frankenstein’s Origin Stories,” in Huntington Library Quarterly (2021), and “Frankenstein, Race and Ethics,” in Keats-Shelley Review  2020). 


Where: Tusten Theatre, 210 Bridge Street, Narrowsburg

When: Saturday 18 June, 4pm

Reservation by Donation

Tusten Theatre 210 Bridge St. Narrowsburg. 

Sat 18 June at 4pm

Reserve a Seat

The New Confessions

From Sappho on, writers have often felt compelled to write in the first person about their own experiences. But in the modern era, the memoir has rarely been as popular as it is today, perhaps because it gives visibility to experiences that have so often been shut out of the literary space. For this panel, three memoirists with recent or upcoming memoirs discuss how they turned their own lives into art, and why our confessional culture shows no sign of slowing down. 


Panel


Joyce Maynard has written ten novels, including To Die For and Labor Day (both turned into acclaimed movies) and, most recently, Count the Ways, an epic portrait of an American family over four decades as it navigates a devastating accident against the backdrop of historical events and shifting  social attitudes. Maynard’s 2017 memoir, The Best of Us, tells the agonizing story of her second husband’s battle with pancreatic cancer, but she is best known for her 1998 memoir, At Home in the World, in which she wrote about her teenage relationship with J.D. Salinger.


Maud Newton is a writer and critic. Her first book, Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation (Random House, April 2022), has been called “a literary feat” by the New York Times Book Review and a “brilliant mix of personal memoir and cultural observation” by the Boston Globe. She has written for The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Oxford American, and more. Maud grew up in Miami and has degrees in English and law. 


Hafizah Augustus Geter is a Nigerian American writer, poet, and literary agent born in Zaria, Nigeria, and raised in Akron, Ohio, and Columbia, South Carolina. She is the author of the debut memoir, The Black Period: On Personhood, Race & Origin, forthcoming from Random House, and the poetry collection Un-American, which was an NAACP Image Award and PEN Open Book Award finalist. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Bomb Magazine, The Believer, and The Paris Review, among many others.  


Diana Goetsch is an American poet and essayist. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and Best American Poetry, among others. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and The New School, where she served as the Grace Paley Teaching Fellow. For twenty-one years Goetsch was a New York City public school teacher, at Stuyvesant High School and at Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens. Her new memoir, This Body I Wore, is published by FSG. 


Melisse Gelula (moderator) is an award-winning journalist and co-founder of the media company Well+Good. With a career that spans digital, magazines, and book publishing (Random House), she's written for dozens of lifestyle outlets and been quoted in the New York Times, Fast Company, and more. Melisse has degrees in literature and studied psychoanalysis for 6 years. She's currently writing a mental-health memoir and begins an MFA at Sarah Lawrence College this fall.

Sun. 19 June, 1.30pm

Tusten Theater

210 Bridge St, 

Narrowsburg

Reserve a Seat

"Petry is the writer we have been waiting for" -Tayari Jones

Deep Water Literary Fest 2022

Ann Petry was ahead of her time. The first Black woman writer to have a book that sold over a million copies (The Street), she deserves to be far better known today than she is.  In honor of a great writer, Deep Water Festival is proud to present a world premiere of Olaf and His Girlfriend, based on one of Petry's celebrated short stories. Please note that this is a ticketed event.


The Fête Arts is a production company based in Barryville, NY founded in 2020 by Broadway performers Colin Cunliffe and Ron Todorowski. The company aims to provide opportunities for artists in the Broadway community and beyond to perform original creations in various venues across the country. The Fête has produced 5 shows in Sullivan County including, An Evening of Contemporary Dance Theater at the Tusten Theater, An Eclectic Evening of Dance at Forestburgh Playhouse, Ghosts of the Arlington Hotel, an immersive haunted experience at the DVAA, Super Sol Sundaze with DJ Koko at the Cochecton Pumphouse and Coming Out From The Dark, showcasing artists from Broadway to Ballet & Opera" also at the DVAA.

Saturday, June 18, 7pm

Please note this is the festival's only ticketed event, and is $20.  

Book Now

NEW! JOYCE CAROL OATES IN CONVERSATION

Krause Recital Hall, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, 37 Main St., Narrowsburg

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times best seller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. For Deep Water Literary Fest she reads from her work, and discussed the art of horror with A.M.Homes, the author of the novels, This Book Will Save Your Life, which won the 2013 Orange/Women’s Prize for Fiction, Music For Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collections, Things You Should Know, The Safety of Objects, and Days of Awe. 

Free

Reserve a Seat

Courtney Maum, author of the memoir, The Year of the Horses (“Wry and tender,” Publisher's Weekly), a chronicle of healing, joins us for a conversation with Halimah Marcus, Executive Director of Electric Literature, a nonprofit digital publisher, and the editor of Horse Girls (Harper Perennial, 2021), an anthology that reclaims and recasts the horse girl stereotype. Moderated by Melisse Geula.  


Krause Recital Hall, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, 37 Main St., Narrowsburg, Sat 18 June, 2pm


 

Free

This event is free and open to the public, but we ask that you to reserve a place using the link below to reserve a space.

reserve a seat

WILLIAM WEGMAN

Conversation and signing

William Wegman may be best known for his Weimaraners—which have flexed their manicured paws from art galleries to the set of Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street–but dogs are only part of the artist’s oeuvre. In Writing by Artist, his latest book–and accompanying show–we get a glimpse into his playful and often impish texts, including imagined restaurant reviews, musings on ancient footwear, reworked greeting cards, and fictional advertisements for real life products, among other things. For this appearance at Deep Water Literary Fest, Wegman talks about his life and work with Andrew Lambert, editor of Writing by Artist.


Krause Hall, DVAA, 37 Main St, Narrowsburg, NY 

Saturday, June 18, 11am

This event is free and open to the public, but we ask that you to reserve a place using the link below.

Reserve a Seat

Joyce Maynard has written ten novels, including To Die For and Labor Day (both turned into acclaimed movies) and, most recently, Count the Ways, an epic portrait of an American family over four decades as it navigates a devastating accident against the backdrop of historical events and shifting  social attitudes. Maynard’s 2017 memoir, The Best of Us, tells the agonizing story of her second husband’s battle with pancreatic cancer, but she is best known for her 1998 memoir, At Home in the World, in which she wrote about her teenage relationship with J.D. Salinger.

Sunday 19 June, 2.30pm

This event is free and open to the public, but we ask that you to reserve a place using the link below.

Reserve a Seat

Staged readings of Mary Shelley's novel

"If I cannot inspire love, I will inspire fear."

Director Conor Kelly O'Brien has adapted Mary Shelly's novel to stage a reckoning between Dr. Frankenstein and his creature. Don't miss this absorbing theatrical event featuring five acclaimed actors and the a specially-created soundscape by Manon Manavit.

Saturday, June 18, 12.30pm

The Narrowsburg Union, 7 Erie Avenue,  N'Burg

Reserve a seat

THE BELLS OF MONT BLANC

Inspired by Frankenstein's Creature

Kristin Worrall's work, which combines live cooking demonstrations with theatre, has been described as "irreverent, relevant, and very, very funny." Now you can experience her singular work for yourself, with this dynamic and highly original take on Frankenstein. This event is free, and will follow the staged readings of Frankenstein at Narrowsburg Union.

Free, Sat 18 June, 1.30pm

Reserve a seat

Stories from wartime

World Premiere

In March and April 2022, the Ukrainian writer  Ostap Slyvynksy began to document the stories of refugees he was assisting as they arrived in Lviv railway station from points east, north and south of Ukraine.  Like Milan Kundera-meets-Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the stories have a quality of fable in which heartbreaking experiences are interspersed with moments of humor. Translated from the Ukrainian into English by Taras Malkovych, these stories will be presented by  actors,  residents of Narrowsburg, and some  (pre-recorded) guest readers including Tilda Swinton and Alan Cumming. Please join us in the beautiful setting of St. Paul's Lutheran Church for this beautiful presentation, directed by Gregory Triggs.

Sunday, June 19, 4pm

This event is free and open to the public, but we encourage you to make a donation, all of which will go to aiding Ukrainian refugees.

Reserve a seat

art at the deep water literary fest 2022

and do you dream?

Two films about Mary Shelley made during the global pandemic of 2020 that resonate with each other a

Elise Rasmussen  

“The Year Without a Summer" (pictured, above)

(16mm film transferred to 4K Video, 4 Channels of Sound, 20:05 mins , 2020)

Elise Rasmussen’s video is one part of a larger multimedia installation which took the Canadian artist to several continents investigating the circumstances both environmental and personal behind the creation of Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein. In 1815 Mount Tambora in Indonesia  erupted, wreaking a global climate disaster. The relentless rain of the summer of 1816 sequestered the young Mary Shelley and her companions on holiday at Lake Geneva and set her to pen the now infamous tale.  “The Year Without a Summer re-examines the effects of this environmental anomaly, finding parallels with our current climate crises, while intertwining diaristic accounts of Mary Shelley and her circle, Sumbawan folklore, and my own reflections traveling to the same volcano and lake during the hottest summer on record,” writes Elise Rasmussen.  "The Year Without a Summer." was originally mounted at Latitude 53, Edmonton, AB and was created with support from Canada Council for the Arts and La Becque Résidence d’Artistes. 


Sibyl Kempson / 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co. 

The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.  (58.21 mins, 2020)

Originally conceived as a live performance set to premiere in New York in 2021, the pandemic saw the company ingeniously pivot to transform the work into digital form. Maery S is part animation featuring intricate hand cut collages, part radio play, and song cycle stitched together from performances created entirely in isolation.  “MAERY S….visually places us in the layered universe of our reinvented Frankenstein author…, suggesting as many versions of…Mary Shelley as there are definitions of the word “Gothic…A string of misfortunes – financial, maternal, and familial – causes Maery S. to spawn a monstrous creative expression, which takes on its own life and violent history. Maery can’t help falling in love with her Monster, only to see it “collected” and imprisoned by charitable funding at a mandatory artists’ residency.”  Created by and starring Dee Dorcas Beasnael, Chris Giarmo, Brian Mendes, Sibyl Kempson, Crystal Wei, Oceana James, Victor Morales Amanda Villalobos, Dan Hurlin, Eva von Schweinitz, Madeline Best, Jay Silver, Alex Albanese/Fun City Films, Erica-Lynn Huberty, Leonie Bell, Rebecca Frank, Stephanie Anuwe, and Stephanie Morales.  The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. was originally screened at The Chocolate Factory in collaboration with Abrons Arts Center and NYU Skirball. 


The Union Digital Gallery

Both these movies will be played in rotation at the Union Digital Gallery, 7 Erie Avenue, Narrowsburg. Festival goers are invited to visit any time over the weekend

click here full festival program

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