2022

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

Dogtown Common was the theme of the JBS fourth annual conference, held in what Jonathan Bayliss's fiction calls "Cape Gloucester" on the weekend of Saturday-Sunday, September 10-11, 2022. 

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." Check out a trail map. 

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

Saturday's talks, lunch, and dinner were held in the beautiful Dogtown-like landscape of the Windhover Center for the Performing Arts, founded by Bayliss's friend Ina Hahn and now run by her daughter, Lisa Hahn. Speakers included Mark Carlotto ("Place and Times: A Spatial History of Dogtown"), John Day ("Dogtown and the Fiction of Jonathan Bayliss"), Cindy Dunn ("Dogtown Preservation"), Chris Leahy ("The Nature of Dogtown"), and Mary Ellen Lepionka ("The Archaeology and Indigenous History of Dogtown"). The Saturday program included options for a guided walk in Dogtown to Whale's Jaw and/or a visit to Sandy Bay Historical Society's "Dogtown Artifacts" with Leslie D. Bartlett.

Saturday evening, after the conference dinner, Windhover Center for the Performing Arts presented an exciting new production based on Percy MacKaye's poem Dogtown Common,  adapted and directed by Peter Littlefield - with readings by Peter Berkrot, Judy Brain, Duncan Hollomon, Cass Tunick, Brian Weed, and Deirdre Weed, and music by Kathleen Adams. Grace Schrafft gave an introductory talk about the history of witches in Gloucester.

On Sunday morning, attendees had the option to join one of several Dogtown walks led by experts in various aspects of Dogtown.

Sunday afternoon included a program on Dogtown-inspired art and literature at the Cape Ann Museum. In conjunction with the conference, the Sawyer Free Library produced a bibliography about Dogtown, and the Gloucester Writers Center offered a Friday evening reading and social event to kick off the weekend. 

More information about the conference is included in the program PDF. Videos of the conference talks are available on the JBS YouTube channel.

This program was 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.