The Blue Hill Public Library and Blue Hill Books are cosponsoring an author talk with Maine author Michael Burke for his new essay collection The Art of the Myth on Thursday, September 11 at 7PM in the library's Howard Room. 

These twenty-five essays capture one man’s unique experience of Maine. Michael Burke provides the reader the vicarious pleasure of absorbing a season of county fairs, being a graduation speaker for a tiny high school, sampling the highs and lows of country auctions, sea kayaking along the Maine Island Trail, stacking firewood, and fiddleheading with a man named Blood. Attentive and insightful, The Art of the Myth is an introduction to that Other Maine, the one a reader rarely encounters.

Michael D. Burke is the author of a nonfiction collection, The Art of the Myth, and of a memoir/adventure, The Same River Twice (University of Arizona Press). His feature nonfiction and essays have appeared in Down East, Yankee, Islands, Outside, Boston Globe, The New York Times, Décor Maine, AMC Outdoors, The Sunday Times (South Africa), and other national publications. He is also a playwright, having won the 2018 Maine Literary Arts Award for “The Town Meets.”  For more than 30 years he was a whitewater and wilderness river guide in Idaho, Alaska, Oregon, California, Arizona, and Mexico. He is Professor Emeritus of Creative Writing and English at Colby College in Maine, where he served as the Director of Creative Writing.

Copies of the book will be available for purchase from Blue Hill Books. For more information, please call the library at 374-5515 or email Assistant Director Kayleigh Thomas at kayleigh.thomas@bhpl.net.