Running throughout the festival weekend, The Lived Book, part of Bibliophantics, takes over Mildred’s Complex(ity) as a living, shifting encounter with books, reading, and literary possession. Drawing on Mildred’s Lane’s several libraries, the project invites visitors into a space where books are not simply shelved, but rearranged and reimagined.
As part of Deep Water Literary Festival, the weekend will include gatherings for readers and writers, alongside an appearance by Asti Hustvedt on the eve of the festival, Thursday June 18 at 6pm. In Hustvedt’s contribution, prompted in part by the death of her brother-in-law Paul Auster, she explores what it means to “get lost” in a book, describing reading as a form of mediumship: a strange collaboration between reader and writer, the living and the dead.
Bringing together two distinct contemporary voices, the exhibition pairs Dan Ladd’s (b. 1948, Northampton, MA) sculptural works made from gourds, roots, seeds, and other organic materials with Joseph Noderer’s (b. 1978, Pittsburgh, PA) expressive portraits and landscapes rich in color, humor, and atmosphere.
Presented in conjunction with Narrowsburg’s Deep Water Literary Festival, the exhibition explores forms of growth that resist a straight line. Ladd’s sculptures compress years of natural change into singular objects, while Noderer’s paintings blur the boundaries between memory, lived experience, and invention. Together, their works reflect the festival’s interest in the ways the past remains present and the future emerges from what has already taken root.
Drawing on the cycles of nature and the persistence of human character, Where Wild Things Grow offers a meditation on transformation, resilience, and the enduring poetry of the handmade. Opening Reception on June 20 from 5–8 PM.
Elizabeth Ennis presents a new moving-image work shaped by this year’s theme of time. In conversation with earlier films—including Everything, which traces a life from conception to death, and Bungalow, which draws on archival Catskills footage from the 1940s and ’50s—this new piece continues an ongoing exploration of time as memory, duration, disappearance, and return. Running approximately 30 minutes and presented on a continuous loop, the project invites viewers to enter and re-enter its rhythms at will.
Memory Method is a black-and-white stop-motion animation playing on a continuous loop at the 108 throughout the festival. Designed to reward repeat viewing, it’s full of visual details that emerge slowly over time. The film’s world expands further into the room via a collection of related artworks.
The 108 will be less a screening room than a place to drift in and out of between events—a visual hangout furnished with art furniture from the artist’s recent MASS MoCA show. Doors open all day, someone is always there, and there are plenty of reasons to come back.
Select writers will present their true tales based on the theme “Killing Time.” Dedicated to the art and craft of story, Yarnslingers was founded in 2012 by writer/musician Ramona Jan. She believes that, “Everyone has a story…or two,” and encourages people from all walks of life to spin their spellbinding tales.
From the haunted East Village of the AIDS crisis to the unruly freedoms and uneasy visibility of the queer nineties, Natalie Adler and Hugh Ryan trace how one era bleeds into the next. Adler’s debut novel, Waiting on a Friend, reimagines downtown New York at a moment of grief, defiance, and erasure, while Ryan’s My Bad maps the aftershocks of that loss through the clubs, chat rooms, activism, and self-inventions of the decade that followed. Together, their books ask how queer communities remember, rebuild, and carry the dead forward, and how the past continues to shape the freedoms and fractures of the present. This panel will be moderated by Brian Montopoli.
Writing inhabits multiple times at once, drawing from memory and possibility. The Outrage: A Queer Writers’ Residency embraces the nonlinear nature of both artistic practice and queer life. Queer lives have never moved in a straight line. We inherit fractured histories and imagine alternative futures. It’s the only way to make meaning across multiple temporalities at once. In the spirit of Deep Water’s Time Shift theme, the residency creates space for stories that move between archive and invention, allowing writers to encounter the past and future as active collaborators in the work of the present.
This year’s Outrage artists will read from work developed during their residency at North American Cultural Laboratory (NACL) over the week preceding the festival.
The 3rd Annual Book Fair brings together independent presses who play a pivotal role in shaping the current literary landscape. Come browse this year’s selections of recent releases. The exhibiting publishers’ rich catalogs include genre-defying works, celebrated authors, as well as underrepresented writers.
Curated by The Hound Books in Roscoe, and presented in association with The Shops in Narrowsburg.
Part of Ratty Books Children’s Programming
Bring the whole family for a self-guided meander through The Tusten Heritage Community Garden and follow a book through the way! A way to pause and connect reading to nature. Our walk features the beautiful book In the Garden by Emma Giuliani and follows a garden throughout the four seasons. Stop and consider questions for kids and growns alike such as ‘what do we see in nature that shows us Summer is coming?’ Come, slow down, and enjoy a book in nature at your own pace.
Illustration from In the Garden by Emma Giuliani