The Gloucester Writers Center is a place for working writers in a working town
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Linda McCarriston and Robert Booth
March 20, 2019 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
Like Vincent Ferrini, poet Linda McCarriston is a native of Lynn. She has two sons and four granddaughters. It took her much longer to settle in Gloucester than it did Vincent (she treasures a copy of No Smoke that he gave her in 2002). Educated in Lynn’s Catholic schools, she won some high-school writing prizes. On the day she was to receive a Boston Globe journalism award, she was unable to get the afternoon off from her job and couldn’t attend the ceremony. She did get to the University of Alaska, where she taught poetry for 21 years; and she did get to the National Book Awards in 1992, for her second book of poems, Eva-Mary, which had won the Terrence Des Pres Prize. Her first and third books of poems, Talking Soft Dutch, and Little River, are likewise still in print. She has published poems widely, in The Atlantic, Poetry, and many other journals, and has received fellowships from the N.E.A, Vermont Council on the Arts, and the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College. She has also published prose, especially on issues related to “the working class,” and is proud to say that her work, both teaching and writing, has often gotten her into trouble.
Robert Booth is a writer and the manager of a national mental healthcare nonprofit. He has written a few books of nonfiction, including a feminist history, The Women of Marblehead (2016); Mad For Glory (2015), about nation-building and imperialism in 1813; and Death Of An Empire (2011), about Salem’s demise as a world trading center (Boston Globe bestseller etc.). Booth is finishing one more book of history (Untamed Spirits, about Marblehead and Gloucester in the 1600s) but has been overcome by post-factualism and has turned to writing poems, fiction, scripts for documentary films, screenplays (Confession, based on his Salem book), and plays (The Long Trick, mainly about Gloucester). His hobbies are oil painting, baking, and candlepin bowling. He lives with his daughter and their cats and lizards in his native Marblehead, and is trying to open a bowling alley in Salem.