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Bangor Metro >  January-February 2007 >  Laughter and Literature

Photo of spectators at the first annual Maine Literary Festival by Peg Shanahan

Mark Twain was reported to have said that analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. It can be done, but the frog tends to die in the process. Nonetheless, novelist Richard Russo kept his audience laughing during his keynote address on “Humor in Writing,” at the first annual Maine Literary Festival. The event was held in Camden, the author’s adopted hometown, over the first weekend in November.

“Humor allows me to go places I otherwise would not be able to go,” Russo said, citing Twain’s Huckleberry Finn as perhaps the ultimate model. Russo, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for his Maine-based novel Empire Falls, was one of 20 authors featured at the festival, an outgrowth of the Maine Authors Series, sponsored for the past 30 years by the Midcoast Maine Branch of the American Association of University Women. Festival chair Maryanne Shanahan estimated the event was attended by approximately 300 literature lovers, and raised nearly $5,000 for the AAUW’s scholarship fund, which assists college-bound girls and women in Waldo, Knox, and Lincoln Counties.

Martha White, granddaughter of E.B. White, read from a selection of the writer’s letters that she has gathered into a new anthology, published by HarperCollins.

Other authors participating in presentations and panel discussions included Cathie Pelletier, James Nelson, Max Alexander, Monica Wood, Bill Roorbach, screenwriter-director Robert Benton, and poets Wesley McNair and Betsy Sholl.