Northshore magazine showcases the best that the North Shore of Boston, MA has to offer.
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/99979
ne Authors Fully Stacked Notable titles by North Shore authors. Write Stuff Kevin Carey Literary Society The North Shore is home to a prolific community of authors whose ties���to the area and to one another���run deep. By Julie Batten K evin carey is a writer��� not a very famous one (yet), but like so many writers, a man who ���writes because I can���t imagine not writing.��� As an English professor at Salem State University and the author of a new volume of poetry that just came out last spring, The One Fifteen to Penn Station, he���ll be the first to tell you that 112 nshoremag.com January/February 2013 NSJanFeb13_Authors.indd 112 ���poetry starts in the gut, not in the head.��� Carey writes about growing up in Revere, playing basketball with a high school team that slayed giants, fatherhood, and ���places I���ve been, people I���ve known.��� As a longtime member of the Salem Writers Group, which meets twice monthly at the Athenaeum in Salem, Carey has been writing everything from plays to poetry to essays to documentary films since the ���90s. ���The writing community on the North Shore is a lot larger than people realize��� and a lot busier,��� he says. ���The kind of commitment to the arts that you expect of a literary haven like Cambridge has migrated, says Askold Melnyczuk, founder of Boston���s internationally renowned literary journal, AGNI magazine, and author of numerous awardwinning books, including House of Widows and Ambassador of the Dead (as well as the forthcoming Smedley���s Secret Guide to World Literature). ���No longer is the cultural calendar under central control of a handful of gatekeepers.��� Melnyczuk is an English professor at UMass Boston and Bennington Writing seminars and originally founded AGNI with the intention of creating a platform for promising young writers to debut their work alongside seasoned professionals. Therefore, he knows how to grow writers and the communities they inhabit. Melnyczuk sees the wealth of writing organizations springing up and literary events taking place in the area outside of the city as inevitable, with technology making it ���difficult to think about geographic place of birth because [the process of creating] seems to be universal.��� Quite simply, good writing begets good writing, and it���s here on the North Shore by the droves. On a recent Saturday night at Jabberwocky Bookshop in Newburyport, the folks who run the Tannery Reading Series there invited renowned writer Andre Author photos courtesy of Kevin Carey (top); Askold Melnyczuk (bottom) Page Turner Askold Melnyczuk photograph by glenn scott 11/19/12 11:06 AM