Email updates
If you would like to be kept up-to-date about JBS activities, send your contact information in an email to info@jonathanbayliss.org and we will add you to the JBS email list. Not all events are listed here.
2022
Fourth Annual Conference, September 10-11, 2022
The theme of the JBS 2022 conference will be Dogtown Common, a wild area in the middle of Cape Ann. Its history, ecology, and influence on writers and painters will be the subject of walks, talks, readings, and more. Be sure to join our email list for information as it becomes available.
2023: Gloucester 400
Gloucester's 400th anniversary will be celebrated in 2023, and many organizations are coming together to commemorate the 1623 landing of the Dorchester Company expedition on what is now Half Moon Beach in Stage Fort Park. Throughout the year, events will highlight Gloucester’s rich history, culture, and heritage which will showcase its diverse community, extraordinary contributions to art and culture, remarkable industrial achievements, and wealth of natural resources. The Jonathan Bayliss Society is one of the many partners of Gloucester400. Please visit www.gloucesterma400.org for more information.
Past Events
Third Annual Conference, September 11-12, 2021 One of the 2021 conference themes was Rocky Neck, the peninsula-island attached to East Gloucester via a causeway. Bayliss lived on Rocky Neck for more than twenty years and did much of his novel-writing there. Conference events are listed here. Recordings:
A PDF booklet (download here) includes speakers' notes: George Sibley (Rocky Neck Memories), Sally Bradshaw and Suzy O'Hara Kadiff (Art Colony), Viking Gustafson (Gloucester Marine Railways), Susan Baker and Paula Parsons (The Rudder), Bishop Terry Brown (Father F. Hastings Smyth and the Society of the Catholic Commonwealth), and John Day (introduction to Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay). It also includes the map of Bayliss's "Mother's Neck" that appeared in the conference program. |
Second Annual Conference, September 11-12, 2020 (Zoom)
The September 2020 Zoom readings entitled "From Cats to Seagulls: A Bayliss Bestiary" and "Gloucester Quintet: Five Writers, Five Friends" are on YouTube.
First Annual Conference, September 7-8, 2019
David Rich and Ken Riaf read passages from the novels Gloucestermas and Gloucesterbook relating to downtown "Dogtown" at the first annual conference in September 2019 - the videotapes are available here.
Other Recordings
A video of a September 2015 reading on labor-related themes in the novel Prologos is on YouTube, courtesy of the Gloucester Writers Center. Readers were David Adams, Peter Anastas, Thorpe Feidt, Henry Ferrini, Doug Guidry, Victoria Bayliss Mattingly, Martin Ray, Ken Riaf, and David Rich. On Bayliss's birthday, September 7, 2013, the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library sponsored "Dogtown's Acropolis," a reading with commentary by Peter Anastas and David Rich. See the video recording. A 1990 student production of Bayliss's stage play The Tower of Gilgamesh is available on the JBS YouTube channel.