2022

June 17, 2022: A Cambridge Kid in the '30s and '40s: Scenes from the Life and Work of Jonathan Bayliss
Houghton Library, Harvard Yard

We are pleased to announce an exciting special program at Harvard's Houghton Library on Friday, June 17, 2022. Bayliss's semi-autobiographical fiction contains vivid passages describing Cambridge during the Great Depression as seen through the eyes of a boy. He and his little sister and brother attended Cambridge elementary schools and lived in various apartments in Cambridge from 1933 to 1939 with their mother, Lois Henderson Bayliss. A few years later, during World War II,  Bayliss was a freshman at Harvard's Lowell House for two terms, before he joined the Navy toward the end of the war.  Bayliss's papers are in the collection of Houghton Library, and a few will be on display for this event.

For more information and to register for the June 17 program, click here. 

Fourth Annual Conference, September 10-11, 2022: Celebrating Dogtown Common: A Special Place

Dogtown Common will be the theme of the JBS 2022 conference, to be held in what Bayliss calls "Cape Gloucester" on the weekend of Saturday-Sunday, September 11-12. The conference is open to all.

Dogtown Common ("Purdeyville" and "Tir-na-Dog" in the novels) is a wild area in the middle of Cape Ann, which is, as Bayliss says in Gloucesterbook, "next to the harbor itself our most precious public possession." 

Bayliss's novel Gloucestertide captures - in densely packed prose! - what an early spring Dogtown walk is like: "Even the dry cedars and junipers did not yet trust the warming tilt of earth, though the leaves of deciduous bushes were already half unfolded, sparsely scattered around 'Purdeyville Square', where three roads used to meet at the groin of a hamlet. Here the wooded fringes of the disincarnate community were out of sight behind ridges of thin rockbottomed earth that had once supported forests among erratic boulders previously strewn like megalithic dung by the last scouring glacier but now keeping company with the low boscage of abandoned agriculture. The thin boreal grass seemed cropped forever by vanished sheep and cattle."

Dogtown's history, ecology, legends, and influence on writers and painters will be the subject of conference walks, talks, readings, and more.

Confirmed to date are speakers on various aspects of this special place: Mark Carlotto, John Day, Cindy Dunn, Chris Leahy, and Mary Ellen Lepionka. Saturday's talks, lunch, and dinner will be held in the beautiful Dogtown-like landscape of the Windhover Center for the Performing Arts, founded by Bayliss's friend Ina Hahn. Attendees will be offered a visit to Sandy Bay Historical Society, which has a very large collection of Dogtown-related objects.  

Saturday evening will feature an exciting new Windhover production based on Percy MacKaye's poem Dogtown Common. 

Sunday will include a talk on Dogtown-inspired art at the Cape Ann Museum.

In conjunction with "Celebrating Dogtown Common," the Sawyer Free Library will offer a bibliography and set up a display about Dogtown, and the Gloucester Writers Center will offer a Friday evening reading and social event to kick off the weekend.   

On both days, weather permitting, conference attendees will be offered guided walks in Dogtown itself.

Be sure to join our email list for registration information as it becomes available. 

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Gloucester Cultural Council, a local agency which is supported by the Mass Cultural Council, a state agency.