Longfellow Books

Celebrated Portland playwright Carolyn Gage will be joined by local actors to read scenes from her latest collection Nine Short Plays.

Gage is an award-winning, feminist playwright, who is the author of six books and more than fifty-five plays. Her work is widely produced and she tours nationally and ... (more)internationally, offering performances and lectures on lesbian culture and history.

Several of the works included in Nine Short Plays have been produced in Maine. Entr’acte, a play about a traumatic event in the life of actress Eva Le Gallienne, was presented at the Space Gallery in Portland, as was Bite My Thumb, a swashbuckling gender-bender about two rival Shakespeare theatre companies. Battered on Broadway, a fantasy about aging female characters from well-known musicals, toured to Auburn for the Maine Association of Community Theatres, and Gage’s anti-war piece, Rules of the Playground was mounted in Rockland and Portland last year.

Gage moved to Maine during the ice storm ten years ago, teaching as a guest lecturer at Bates College for a year. She has also taught at USM and produced women’s theatre in Portland with her company Cauldron & Labrys. “Maine has been a wonderful place to live and write,” says Gage, “because of the tremendous appreciation for the arts that is here, as well as the tradition of respecting free-thinkers.”

So join us on Thursday, April 24th at 7 pm. Wine and cookies will be served. For more information, call 772-4045.

Marijuana as medicine has been a politically charged topic in this country for more than three decades. Despite overwhelming public support and growing scientific evidence of its therapeutic effects (relief of the nausea caused by chemotherapy for cancer and AIDS, control over seizures or spasticity ... (more)caused by epilepsy or MS, and relief from chronic and acute pain, to name a few), the drug remains illegal under federal law.

In Dying to Get High, noted sociologist Wendy Chapkis and Richard J. Webb investigate one community of seriously-ill patients fighting the federal government for the right to use physician-recommended marijuana. Based in Santa Cruz, California, the Wo/Men’s Alliance for Medical Marijuana (WAMM) is a unique patient-caregiver cooperative providing marijuana free of charge to mostly terminally ill members. For a brief period in 2004, it even operated the only legal non-governmental medical marijuana garden in the country, protected by the federal courts against the DEA.

Using as their stage this fascinating profile of one remarkable organization, Chapkis and Webb tackle the broader, complex history of medical marijuana in America. Through compelling interviews with patients, public officials, law enforcement officers and physicians, Chapkis and Webb ask what distinguishes a legitimate patient from an illegitimate pothead, "good" drugs from "bad", medicinal effects from just getting high. Dying to Get High combines abstract argument and the messier terrain of how people actually live, suffer and die, and offers a moving account of what is at stake in ongoing debates over the legalization of medical marijuana.

Wendy Chapkis is Professor of Sociology and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, ME. She is the author of the award-winning book Live Sex Acts: Women Performing Erotic Labor and Beauty Secrets: Women and the Politics of Appearance.

Richard J. Webb is a lecturer in Communication Studies at San Jose State University.

Join us for a special Father's Day poetry reading, featuring some spectacular local poets: Nancy Henry, Michael Macklin, Betsy Sholl, Martin Steingesser and Judy Tierney.

Nicole Chaison will be here to celebrate the release of her new book, The Passion of the Hausfrau.

James Hayman will be here to celebrate the release of his new book, The Cutting.