Virtual Speaker Series: “Wit & Wisdom" with Jo Radner

Whatever did New Englanders do on long winter evenings before cable, satellite, and the internet? In the decades before and after the Civil War, our rural ancestors used to create neighborhood events to improve their minds. Community members male and female would gather for formal debates and would compose and read aloud homegrown, handwritten literary "newspapers" full of keen verbal wit. Sometimes serious, sometimes sentimental but mostly very funny, these "newspapers" were common in villages across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont and revealed the hopes, fears, humor, and surprisingly daring behavior of our forebears.

Jo Radner, author of Wit and Wisdom: The Forgotten Literary Life of New England Villages, will talk about this 19th-century village tradition of creating and performing handwritten literary newspapers.

Before returning to her family home in western Maine as a freelance storyteller and oral historian, Radner spent 31 years as a professor at American University in Washington, DC, where she taught literature, folklore, women's studies, American studies, Celtic studies, and storytelling. She has published books and articles in all those fields. Radner received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and is a past president of the American Folklore Society and the National Storytelling Network.

Register to attend here.