Festival by the Lake: 2024

We are always glad when Mother Nature cooperates (mostly:) and we are all able to enjoy a beautiful day by Lake Q for the annual Festival by the Lake, which took place on Saturday, June 8th this year! 

With five local authors, three typewriters and two guest poets under our tent, there was something for everybody.


Our guest authors were Susan Sabbatelli, Regina Mouradian, Sally Chetwynd, Karin Gertsch, and Christine Ricci-McNamee. Three children's authors and three adult authors (only possible with five authors because the talented Karin Gertsch writes for kids and adults! 


A new feature at our tent this year was the very popular and really fun poetry on demand fundraiser where passersby were able to talk briefly with our Poet for Hire. 

Colleen Getty kicked it off at the beginning of the day, but the real stars waxing poetic for most of the day were Paul Angelosanto and Kerri Bonner Leonard pictured below.

Our poets raised just over $100 for TRtW's programming!

Special thanks to Paul and Kerri, as well as all those who came out to hire our poets on demand:)

All three were first-time poets on demand and each had an absolute blast creating original poems on request typed out using one of our manual typewriters on-hand in exchange for a donation to The Room to Write to keep our programming free to participants.

 























Popular posts from this blog

Local Author Fair

Image
On Saturday, November 18th from 1-4pm the Wakefield Public Library hosted the 2nd annual Local Author Fair in collaboration with The Room to Write and Whitelam Bookstore .  A huge shout out to Karen Stern, librarian extraordinaire, for making this event happen. 15 authors from Wakefield and surrounding towns came together to make their books available to the public.  This was a great opportunity for readers to find a locally written book and meet the writer behind the book cover. Another aspect of this fair that gets less attention is the fact that the authors get to meet each other. Part of our mission at The Room to Write is connecting writers, authors and creative minds with each other. Community is such an important part of creativity.  The Wakefield Library's Local Author Fair is a uniquely important event in that it allows both independently published and traditionally published authors to be able to gather together and make their books available to the public at o...
Read more

Art in April "Tell Me a Story"

Image
Wow--April sure did keep us busy in all the best ways! We were invited to collaborate with the Arts Collaborative of Wakefield for their April Art Exhibit and Sale at the Albion Cultural Exchange and we committed fully to the collaboration! The theme of the exhibit and sale was "Tell Me a Story" and so we participated in three ways with an added bonus Writers and Illustrators Meet & Greet to boot!  1. An exhibit pairing 13 written pieces with 13 pieces of art. 2. Local Author Table featuring authors living all around us. 3. 3 Family Friendly Storytime Art Hours featuring 6 local authors. Writers who participated in the Artist/Writer collaborative exhibit were: Marilyn Lamkin, Cate Daniels, Susan Jepson, Sally Chetwynd, Eddie Brophy, Jennifer Revill, Kerri Leonard, Linda Malcolm, Sara Desmond, Eileen Worthley, PJ Carmichael, Janie Smith, & Alice Getty. You can see an example of their work on our North of Boston Writers Network blog with more to follow:  Shoes by Alice...
Read more

Festival by the Lake in Wakefield

Image
Despite the unpredictable weather, we had an amazing time at Wakefield's Festival by the Lake on Saturday, June 10, 2023.  The Festival by the Lake is always a great opportunity to connect with our supporters, educate visitors about our organization and make connections in the community. This year we were fortunate to have four local authors as guests in our tent available to talk to, purchase books from and to have books signed. Local author essayist and TRtW's Coordinator for Senior & Veterans Programming Linda Malcom joined us to start the day at 10am with her collection of essays, Cornfields to Codfish . To learn more about Linda and her book click here or watch her interview as part of our Journey of a Story series here. Local writer Lisa Varchol Perron stopped by next at 11am with her nonfiction picture book, Patterns Everywhere , and her very sweet board book about unconditional and enduring nature of a mother's love, My Love for You . To learn more about L...
Read more