Writers of every age and ability who live in Watertown are invited to appear again at the second annual Watertown Arts Market August 13, 2022, (rain date August 14, 2022), in the open air (with tents) at Arsenal Park from 12-5 pm.
- Sign up to join our tent of spoken-word performances all afternoon.
- In our first year in 2021, “The Watertown Lit Squad,” a band of writers, poets, and performers of prose, spoken word, stand-up comedy, children’s books and rap filled the mike. We also produced a sterling record of our work, which is now available as a sampler on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/Watertown-Squad-Poets-Writers-Sampler/dp/B09FC6FGNP;
- Our ages ranged from first- time authors of 9 to celebrated published and award-winning poets of seven decades!
We had courageous and gifted voices, all from Watertown residents, born and bred or “immigrant”, from first-time readers to academic professors. We read poems and prose about our fathers, our first-born, Latino men on roof tops, starting grad school as a minority outsider assigned a utility closet, or rapping rage at censorship and silence. We celebrated a bare bear in a first book of homonyms written by one child and illustrated by her 10-year-old cousin.
Watertown has had an arsenal of poets and literary types for many years. Lydia Maria Francis wrote antislavery and pro-AmerIndian books in the first half of the 19th century. Celia Thaxter (whose house can still be seen on Main Street) was a respected poet in the second half of that century. The Armenian community had the late Diana Der Hovanessian.
Today we have Kathleen Spivack, a longtime resident who is a highly respected poet and who hung out with (and recently wrote about) a group of poets that included Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell, among others. DeWitt Henry co-founded the well-known literary magazine Ploughshares, which had its office on Waverley Avenue for many years, and Lawrence Kessenich is a former Houghton-Mifflin editor and prize-winning author of two full-length poetry collections, two chapbooks, a novel and produced plays.
We invite any Watertown Resident to join the Twenty-first Century wave of the Written and Spoken Arts, and become part of the Literary Community in Watertown, by
- Contacting Marjorie Greenberg, Coordinator of speakers, by July 31, to schedule the open mike, make contacts and find kindred spirits! makgreenberg39@gmail.com
- Sign up at the WAM website with your email and contact information, and be sure to indicate your zip code is 02472, as participation is open only to residents of Watertown. https://www.watertownartsmarket.com/participate
- Signing up to sit at our Sales table to sell your work or that of other Watertown writers throughout the day, by contacting Liz Rodgers, earodgers@gmail.com
- Submitting an electronic file of up to two pages, font size 12, by July 31, to DeWitt Henry. dewittphenry@gmail.com for publication in our 2022 Sampler.
- Download the Watertown Poets and Writers’ Sampler, from 2021. https://www.amazon.com/Watertown-Squad-Poets-Writers-Sampler/dp/B09FC6FGNP