Harrison Bird Browne in Fact and Fiction: A Historical Talk with Earle Shettleworth and Jefferson Navicky In-Person

Join us for a lively conversation that interweaves history and fiction.
Sponsored by Mount Desert Island Historical Society, Great Harbor Maritime Museum, and Northeast Harbor Library, in partnership with Maine Humanities Council and Maine Speaks. This event will be in person.

Harrison Bird Brown of Portland was one of 19th-century Maine's most successful marine and landscape painters. Maine State Historian Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr. will discuss Brown's career as it intersected with Mount Desert Island. His illustrated remarks will be based on his article about the artist in the 2023 issue of Chebacco, the annual journal of the Mount Desert Historical Society.

Brown served as inspiration for poet and archivist Jefferson Navicky’s most recent book, Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands. The story is a novel in prose poems about three generations of landscape painters, starting with a fictionalized Harrison Bird Brown. Navicky will read selections from the book and will speak about how the artist and landscape painting inspired his latest book.

Biographies

A native of Portland, Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr. attended Deering High School, Colby College, and Boston University and was the recipient of honorary degrees from Bowdoin College and the Maine College of Art. He became an architectural historian for the Maine Historic Preservation Commission in 1973 and director in 1976. He retired from that position in 2015. Mr. Shettleworth has lectured and written extensively on Maine history and architecture and has served as State Historian since 2004. Shettleworth is the Maine Historical Society’s 2023 Maine History Maker Honoree.

Jefferson Navicky was born in Chicago and grew up in Southeastern Ohio. He earned his undergraduate degree in English from Denison University, and his M.F.A. from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. He is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023). Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021) won the 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry. Jefferson’s work has received several acknowledgments and awards, including an American Rescue Plan/Maine Project Grant, a Maine Arts Commission grant, and three Maine Literary Awards. His plays have been produced throughout New England. Jefferson is proud to be a member of Maine’s literary arts community and is active on several volunteer boards, committees, and community projects. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.