Upcoming Events

Please join Maine Master Naturalists, Samaa Abdurraqib and Shana Stewart Deeds for a slideshow of the signs of spring! Some of these include: frog and bird calls, spring ephemerals and trees. All abilities welcome, no experience necessary! We recognize that not everyone is able to attend long hikes and want to bring some signs of spring to you at the Topsham Public Library.

The Camden Festival of Poetry brings distinguished voices in poetry to Camden for an annual Festival, celebrates Maine poets and singer-songwriters, and encourages young voices in poetry throughout the year. Listening to and talking about poetry, we find connections discovering the “inseparability of our own lives and the lives of others.” {quote from Jane Hirshfield}

Bird as subject; bird as metaphor; bird as inspirational curiosity; birds as lore. In this workshop, we will be welcoming all ways of engaging with birds through poetry. We will read work by poets who honor these feathered beings in a variety of ways. Work by poets like Cyrus Cassells, Don Domanski, June Jordan, Ross Gay, John Lindgren, and Myronn Hardy will serve as a backdrop for our own writing as we explore the many ways that birds motivate us towards creativity. This will be a generative workshop. We will focus our time on prompt-based writing, with opportunities for sharing, if you are so inclined.

The Plunkett Maine Poetry Festival, held in April each year, was established in 2002 to honor the memory and accomplishments of Terry Plunkett, an English professor at the University of Maine at Augusta for nearly thirty years. In connection with the festival, we will have three workshops from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on April 25, 2026.

In her NYT-bestselling book of essays and award-winning poems, Aimee Nezhukumatathil often explores the natural world, including whale sharks, fireflies, eels, dragonfruit, catalpas, monsoons, humans, and so much more. Using a variety of prompts and centering activities, including read-aloud selections from Nezhukumatathil's work, participants will explore their own astonishments and curiosities related to the world around us and how we move through it. Writers of any and all backgrounds and levels of experience are welcome!