At the Build-Fix-Grow Festival, Hanford Mills

I'll be reading/signing/yacking at the Build-Fix-Grow Festival at Hanford Mills this Saturday... It's good that regional museums have begun to take an interest in their area writers. Before Christmas, there was a fun event at the Fenimore Museum--now that's convenient to me!--and I recently talked to and lunched with the staff of the Fenimore Museum and Farmers Museum bookstores.

excerpt from The Watershed Post:

This Saturday, the Hanford Mills Museum in East Meredith is launching a new festival, the Build-Fix-Grow Festival, to celebrate “the ingenuity and creativity of the past and the present."

There's a robust literary component to this festival, in keeping with its omnivorous "rural genius" sensibility. ("Rural Genius" is the title of an exhibition at the Hanford Mills Museum that explores the lives and inventions of three Catskills autodidact inventors.) 

Seven local Catskills authors will be present to read from their work and to take questions from noon to 3 p.m.:

• Mermer Blakeslee (When You Live by a River, In Dark Water, A Conversation with Fear)
• Chuck D’Imperio (A Taste of Upstate New York, Unknown Museums of Upstate New York, Monumental New York)
• Cynthia G. Falk (Barns of New York: Rural Architecture of the Empire State)
• April L. Ford (The Poor Children)
• Ginnah Howard (Night Navigation, Doing Time Outside, and Rope and Bone)
• Marty Podskoch (Fire Towers of the Catskills: Their History and Lore, Adirondack Stories)
• Marly Youmans (Glimmerglass, Thaliad, A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage)

Thanks to director Liz Callahan and publicist Peg Odell and the staff at Hanford Mills. Click on the article to see what else is happening!