Black Utopias: Nell Irvin Painter and Aaron Robertson with Janus Adams
Emmy award winning local author Janus Adams sits in conversation at the 2024 Deep Water Literary Fest with leading American historian Nell Irvin Painter and PEN nominated author Aaron Robertson, to reflect on the experimental spaces and imaginative ways Black Americans have dreamed of better worlds. Robertson’s non-fiction debut The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America, was published in October 2024, whilst Nell Irvin Painter’s latest publication I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays was released earlier that year. Both made The New York Times 100 Most Notable Books of 2024.
Lenapehoking: Returning to Our Homeland; Honoring our Heritage with Curtis Zunigha
Weaving story-telling and song, Curtis Zunigha opened the 2024 Deep Water Literary Fest, and welcomed attendees to Lenapehoking. His story includes the forced removals of his Lenape ancestors from their indigenous homelands located between what’s now New York City and Philadelphia. Then the Lenape were called Delaware by the colonizers and pushed onto reservations in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario Canada.Curtis’s return to the Lenape homeland represents an act of reclamation…of culture, identity, and heritage.
Cynthia Carr and Matt Wolf on Biography and the Archive
What breadcrumbs does a biographer choose to collect on the many intersecting and sometimes contradictory paths of their subject’s story? Award winning film-maker Matt Wolf joined Cynthia Carr, author of the acclaimed Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar, as well as Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, to examine the role of world-building in the creation of biography. Wolf, the director of multiple documentaries including Wild Combination about the musician Arthur Russell, and Teenage about the birth of youth culture, is currently completing a multi part documentary on Paul Reubens and his alter ego Pee-wee Herman.
Dream Streets and Brief Encounters: Vivian Gornick, Ada Calhoun, and Tricia Romano
A conversation recorded at Deep Water Literary Fest 2024 in Narrowsburg, NY, with acclaimed writers Vivian Gornick, Ada Calhoun, and Tricia Romano who delve into the rich tapestry of New York City’s streets and neighborhoods as the locus for brief encounters and quixotic discoveries, as well as the
role of New York as a creative wellspring for writers, artists, and thinkers, as exemplified in Tricia Romano’s new book, The Freaks Came Out To Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture, in Calhoun’s book, St. Marks is Dead, a history of St. Mark’s Place in the East Village, Manhattan, and Gornick’s influential memoir, Fierce Attachments.
Untamed Mastery: The Garden and the World of Jamaica Kincaid
“When I’m writing, I think about the garden, and when I’m in the garden I think about writing. I do a lot of writing by putting something in the ground.” Antiguan-American essayist and novelist Jamaica Kincaid has redefined the genre of garden writing with My Garden (Book), Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalayas, and now in collaboration with artist Kara Walker An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children. Here, Jamaica is joined by New York Review of Books Editor in Chief, Emily Greenhouse, for a very special conversation about the garden as a site of creativity, personal discovery, and engagement with (and not refuge from), the larger socio-political issues of our time.
Imagining Eden: Lydia Millet and Hafizah Augustus Geter
Can storytellers inspire meaningful change? That question is at the center of We Loved It All, a profoundly evocative ode to life in all its imperiled forms, and the first non-fiction book by the prolific novelist Lydia Millet. The author of A Children’s Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award, and Dinosaurs, Millet now compels us to confront the tangible consequences of our careless stewardship of the planet, drawing insights from her work as a staff member at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson. Lydia is joined by award-winning author Hafizah Augustus Geter for a conversation on the role of storytellers in creating new and galvanizing narratives to help us recover our place in the natural world.
Understanding Orwell: D.J. Taylor on the Biographer's Art
In a special conversation for the 2023 Deep Water Literary Fest, award-winning biographer of Orwell, D.J. Taylor, talks with the critic Liesl Schillinger about his exploration of the life of this literary colossus, using all the tools of the biographer’s art, including newly-discovered source material, and conversations with the last few contemporaries of Orwell who are still alive.
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
Commissioned for Deep Water Literary Fest 2023, and based on George Orwell’s 1946 essay of the same name, Some Thoughts on the Common Toad, is a collaged found-footage manifesto against political cynicism and environmental alienation; a fierce defense of finding delight and beauty in nature in times of crisis – a nature free from romanticization and full of political radicalism.
Director: G. Anthony Svatek
Narrator: Tilda Swinton
Producers: Lucy Taylor, Aaron Hicklin
Sound Design: Kaija Siirala
Select Film Festival Screenings: Big Sky Documentary Film Festival, DOXA, Archivio Aperto, Mimesis Documentary Film Festival, Jihlava International Film Festival
Why They Write: Three Masters of Non-Fiction on Poverty, Propaganda, and Lies
Featuring Barbara Demick, Azmat Khan, and Peter Pomerantsev. Moderated by Ilya Marritz. Recorded at Deep Water Literary Festival, Tusten Theatre Narrowsburg, July 17 2023
A Nice Cup of Tea
Commissioned for the 2023 Deep Water Literary Festival, A Nice Cup of Tea takes a bold, modern spin on George Orwell’s iconic essay. Directed by Sahm McGlynn and starring the actor, designer, and master tea blender, Waris Ahuwalia, this captivating reimagining offers a fresh perspective on the art of tea-making.
Featuring: Waris Ahluwalia
Direction: Sahm Mcglynn
Cinematography: Trevor Tweeten
Editing: Cassie Wentlandt
Re-Recording Mix: Eric Friend
Margin Call: Lucy Sante, Jeremiah Moss, and Sukhdev Sandhu
In George Orwell’s classic account of poverty, Down and Out in Paris and London, the novelist and essayist shunned the expensive boulevards of the City of Lights in favor of the slums, those on the margins, often living hand to mouth. His behind-the-scenes account of working as a dishwasher at a smart hotel restaurant and living rough in England echoes down the ages in work by urban chroniclers like Lucy Sante, Jeremiah Moss, and Sukhdev Sandhu. Best known for Low Life, her study of New York’s turn-of-the-century demi-monde, Sante’s is the author most recently of I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition, as well as 19 Reservoirs, in which she uses New York’s water supply as a lens through which to examine the divisions between urban and rural, rich and poor. And in Jeremiah Moss’s Feral City, the author offers an expansive exploration of New York during lockdown, when the streets were reclaimed by those who stayed behind. Sante and Moss are joined by Sukhdev Sandhu, the author of the visceral urban odysseys Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night, and London Calling: How Black Asian Writers Imagined A City.