A new collaborative project at Northeast Harbor Library brings six Maine writers and artists together for an evening of words, images, conversation—and a little creative alchemy.
2 minutes ago
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Window Panes Home and Garden.
NORTHEAST HARBOR—What happens when one artist gives another artist something to respond to?
That’s a question at the heart of reWorks: A Collaborative Literary Art Project, a new project from the Northeast Harbor Library and Maine Lit Fest.
On Wednesday, October 7 at 5:30 p.m., the library will host an evening of readings, artwork, and conversation celebrating the project—and inviting the community to witness what can happen when creative work is allowed to travel from one person to another.
The idea is deceptively simple. The library commissioned three writers to create short pieces inspired by this year’s Maine Lit Fest theme, “responding to the moment.”
Those pieces were then given to three visual artists, who were asked to respond to the writing in their own medium. The resulting six works have been gathered into a limited-run reWorks zine, with free copies available at the event.
But the process itself may be as interesting as the finished work.
For photographer Katherine Emery, participating meant entering into a collaboration with a writer that she did not previously know and paying sustained attention to their words. She received Josie Sibara’s piece, “Responding to the Moment,” in June and had until the end of August to create her response.
Emery didn’t rush the process. She read Sibara’s words aloud, printed them, hung them above her desk, and pasted a copy into her journal. She let the language sit with her.
Then, one night during a full moon in July, she knew what she wanted to do.
Her response would involve film and multiple exposures—different moments allowed to overlap and spill into one another.
The idea felt particularly appropriate to a project about responding to the moment. As Emery puts it, the moment itself becomes a collaborator: light changes, the earth turns, a sound can send us in another direction. A photograph can capture something that will never look quite the same way again.
She carried a Pentax K100 that had belonged to her mother-in-law, Marion Kane, a reporter for The Bar Harbor Times in the 1970s, and spent a month looking, waiting, and responding. The resulting images became her visual conversation with Sibara’s writing.
This has helped Emery with her own art.
“I’ve struggled to create this year,” Emery says. “Everything everywhere feels heavy.”
But a line from poet Gwendolyn Brooks that Emery came across in a book—“Conduct your blooming in the noise and whip of the whirlwind”—reminded her that beauty doesn’t have to wait for better circumstances.
“This line reminded me that beauty does and must exist alongside the bleak. This project gave me permission to harness the love and energy I carry—to make and send a signal outwards,” she explains. “As a photographer, making images is how I communicate; I often don’t have words for what I see. Receiving the words from someone else inspired me to look up, and outward.”
Sometimes, it has to exist alongside the difficult things.
That spirit seems to run through the entire project.
Northeast Harbor Library Programs Coordinator and Circulation Librarian Zachary Taibi says commissioning creative work is relatively new for the library. He hopes reWorks will be the beginning of many more collaborations.
“For most participants, the live reading will be the first time they meet their paired author/artist face to face,” Taibi says. “There’s something exciting about that culmination.”
There is something exciting about it for the audience, too. Rather than simply looking at finished paintings or photographs or listening to a reading, attendees will have the opportunity to see the connections between the two and to hear the creators talk about how one person’s work changed the way another person saw.
“Commissioning creative work is relatively new for the Northeast Harbor Library, and I’m so grateful to our writers and artists for their enthusiasm and willingness to be the first cohort of what I hope to be many,” Taibi says.
The project also feels particularly suited to a library.
Libraries are places where different voices have always met: across generations, disciplines, experiences, and centuries.
Emery thinks about libraries as some of the few remaining places where people still “collide” organically with one another.
Her own memories of island libraries make that idea especially tangible. When her family moved back to Mount Desert Island, her husband took their daughter to the Somesville Library, where they discovered his childhood notes in the back of old Hardy Boys books. During COVID, Emery remembers requesting a book from the Northeast Harbor Library and finding it waiting outside, wrapped in brown paper with her name written in cursive. It was a small, thoughtful, and incredibly personal gesture at a bleak time.
“Libraries offer books in the form of voices over centuries–different and differing voices that remind us that we are part of something much greater than ourselves, and that we belong. Libraries are sacred spaces and deserve our care in return,” she explains.
Maybe that is also what reWorks is doing, too. It’s reminding each of us that we are here, that we belong, that we’re part of something bigger, that we are all a part of a litany of art and stories that help to create who we are as a community and as a society.
The project asks six individual creators to pay attention to one another. A writer makes something. An artist receives it. The artist looks, listens, interprets, and answers. The original work changes, not because it was incomplete, but because creative work can become something new when another person encounters it.
Art is communication and conversation. Writing is, too.
On October 7, that conversation moves into the library.
The evening will feature readings from writers Samaa Abdurraqib, Gary Rainford, and Josie Sibara, artwork by Emery, Jennifer Judd-McGee, and Kaitlyn Miller, and a conversation among the contributors about the work they made and the process that brought them together.
Free copies of the limited-run reWorks zine will be available at the beginning of the event.
And while the project began with a prompt about responding to the moment, it may ultimately offer a more lasting invitation: slow down, pay attention, and see what happens when you genuinely respond to what someone else has made.
In a time when attention is increasingly scattered, that feels like a pretty good reason to spend an evening in a library.
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