The BTS Center
97 India Street • Portland, ME 04101
July 7, 2021
Dear Friends,
Tomorrow evening — Thursday, July 8, beginning at 7 pm (Eastern) — we will kick off the 2021 Summer Arts Series. I hope you are planning to join us for this online event!
Session 1 brings together friends and conversation partners Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief — two fascinating, accomplished, and engaging artists — for what I know will be a lively, inspiring, and at times challenging discussion that you won't want to miss.
The three sessions of this series are designed as modern salon-style* gatherings (*see the note about this phrase below) where brilliant people gather for meaningful and artful conversation.
More than an online program, we hope this will feel like an event. In that spirit, if you like, we invite you to dress up in your most artistic or elegant garb and come with a favorite mocktail or cocktail in hand. You will think, laugh, feel, and come away enriched and more engaged in the world.
Our host for the evening, the one and only Peterson Toscano — himself an accomplished scholar, performer, and self-described "quirky queer Quaker" — offers these invitational questions:
- How are you feeling about the future of America?
- What are you thinking when you see democracy challenged and when past injustices are dismissed?
- How can we better comprehend what is happening in the USA and respond in a meaningful way?
These, Peterson says, are exactly the kind of questions Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief take on in their journalism, novels, and memoirs. Having grown up outside of the USA, our two guests bring unique perspectives that will help us reflect on our own challenging realities.
"It can be heavy stuff," Peterson writes, "yet when they address these issues, they also help me see possibilities, paths forward, and reminders of past breakthroughs out of desperate conflicts. They bring with them warmth and mirth; they model resiliency. I invite you to join us this Thursday for a very special evening with writers Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief, the first in our Summer Arts Series."
And I invite you to do the same. I hope to see you in the Zoom room tomorrow evening!
And be sure to mark your calendars for the two additional events in this series:
Learn more and register at the links below.
With joy and anticipation,
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Rev. Allen Ewing-Merrill
Executive Director • The BTS Center
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Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief:
Two friends on moving to America and writing during a time of climate change
Thursday, July 8, 2021
7:00-8:30 pm (Eastern)
Join us for our modern online salon* with Aminatta Forna and Glen Retief. Born on the African continent, Aminatta and Glen were both eyewitnesses to violent struggles over power and freedom in their countries. As writers who have lived in the USA, they provide keen insights into what it is like to be a foreigner in America.
We will end the gathering with your questions and you will have the option to connect with a small group to share your own thoughts and insights. This will be a salon for the 21st Century where brilliant people gather for meaningful and artful conversation. If you like, you can dress up in your most artistic or elegant garb and come with a mocktail or cocktail. You will think, laugh, feel, and come away enriched and more engaged in the world.
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$12 registration fee or $25 for all three events in the series. In the hopes of making these programs accessible to all, unlimited scholarships are available, please contact aram@thebtscenter.org.
The first 50 people who register for this online event (or the whole series) will receive a free copy of Aminatta Forna’s new book of essays, The Window Seat: Notes from a Life in Motion! (Limited to registrants with a mailing address in USA & Canada.)
*About salon-style gatherings: In the early 1900’s the world was changing quickly—politically, socially, and artistically. Starting in 1903, an American couple, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, organized literary and artistic salons in their Paris apartment. Little known creatives on the cusp of major breakthroughs filled the intimate space. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse turned up along with up-and-coming writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Sherwood Anderson. They shared some of their work and then engaged in late night lively discussions about art, politics, love, and the rumblings of massive global shifts already beginning to happen.
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View this video to learn more about the event: |
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Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna, OBE (born 1964) is a Scottish and Sierra Leonean writer. She is the author of a memoir, The Devil That Danced on the Water, and four novels: Ancestor Stones (2006), The Memory of Love (2010), The Hired Man (2013) and Happiness (2018). Her novel The Memory of Love was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for "Best Book" in 2011, and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. Forna is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University and was, until recently, Sterling Brown Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is currently Lannan Visiting Chair of Poetics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.
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Glen Retief
Glen Retief grew up in South Africa during the apartheid era, where he was involved in national as well as LGBT liberation movements. His book The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood (St. Martin’s Press, April 2011) won a Lambda Literary Award and was selected as an Africa Book Club Book of 2011. He has published short stories and memoirs in journals including Virginia Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, and Hotel Amerika. He writes an occasional column of personal essays for the South African newspaper, The Daily Maverick; teaches Creative Nonfiction at Susquehanna University; and is currently a 2021-22 Fulbright US Scholar in Mamelodi, South Africa.
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Learn more about all the events in our
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Allen Ewing-Merrill
Executive Director
Kay Ahmed
Operations Manager
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Nicole Diroff
Program Director
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Aram Mitchell
Director of Partnerships & Formation
Ben Yosua-Davis
Director of Applied Research
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Our mission is to catalyze spiritual imagination with enduring wisdom for transformative faith leadership.
We equip and support faith leaders for theologically grounded and effective 21st-century ministries.
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