Writer, photographer spend 'a year in motherland'

Susan Conley, writer and
Winky Lewis, photographer
speaking at Bailey library

WINTHROP — The Bailey Public Library in downtown Winthrop will host writer Susan Conley and photographer Winky Lewis for a slideshow presentation and reading from their new book “Stop Here, This Is the Place” at 6:30 p.m Tuesday, Aug. 22.

The event is part of the ongoing Winthrop Lakes Region Forum, which is put on by the Bailey Library and sponsored by the Winthrop Public Library Foundation. The program is free and open to the public.

The book, published by Down East, celebrates “a year in motherland” with photos of children at play that capture moments of exploration, growth and friendship. Conley and Lewis began the project in the spring of 2013, when the youngest of the children was 9. The book includes 52 photos and stories, one for each week. Lewis and Conley have lived on the same street in Portland for 11 years.

Conley is the author of “Paris Was the Place,” an Amazon Fall Big Books Pick for fiction, an Indie Next Pick, and an Elle Magazine Readers Prize Pick. A novelist, nonfiction writer, poet and creative writing professor, Conley’s memoir, “The Foremost Good Fortune,” was excerpted in the New York Times Magazine and the Daily Beast. It was an Oprah Magazine Top Ten Pick of the Month, a Slate Magazine Book of the Week, and a finalist for the Goodreads Choice Award. It won the Maine Literary Award for Memoir. Conley has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Breadloaf Writers Conference and the Massachusetts Arts Council.

A former faculty member at Emerson College, she has also taught at Colby College and Simmons College. She currently teaches at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Program, and is the Jack Kerouac Visiting Writer at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. She’s also the cofounder of The Telling Room, a nonprofit creative writing lab in Portland, where she leads a variety of workshops.

Lewis studied photography at Princeton University with Emmet Gowin. She worked in New York City as a wedding and events photographer until moving to Maine in 2002. Since then she has been working as a commercial and fine art photographer and raising her three children. In 2015 she was chosen as PDN Photo Annual Winner. The German publishing house, Galerie Vevais, has just published a book of her photographs, edited by Jock Sturges.

The event will take place in the lower level King Event Room of the library at 39 Bowdoin St. FMI: 207-377-8673.

Susan Conley