Press Release for December 8 Writers Forum
This Thursday’s Writers Forum will feature prose authors Sharon Bray and Julia Bower and poet David Davis.
Sharon Bray’s writing career has ranged from to Harvard Medical School to local newspapers and literary journals. She established The Enterprise in Bucksport in 1992 which she published and edited for 9 years before she sold it in 2001. She supports herself with freelance writing, mostly for Penobscot Bay Press. She publishes the Naramissic Notebook and is active in the Bucksport Bay Healthy Communities Coalition and the Orland Fire Department. She fits her own writing around newspaper freelance reporting, farm chores, community commitments, and responding as best she can whenever anyone asks for help or needs a jar of homemade soup.
David L Davis’ work has been published in the Bucksport Enterprise, Narramissic Notebook, Echoes Magazine and in anthologies Sense of Place, H.O.M.E. Words, and the bicentennial history Best Remembered: Orland, Maine 1800-2000. He recently published a book of poetry, Ready To Be Surprised. Dave did not begin writing poetry until after the tragedy at Columbine High School. He was so moved by this event that words just came tumbling out as fast as he could write. Since that time he continues to write every day. He writes about life as has found it living beside the Narramissic River. Dave has lived alongside the Narramissic River in Orland, Maine since his marriage in 1949 to Ginny Soper Davis, a descendent of the first settlers of Orland. When Dave visited relatives in Orland after WW11 he knew this was the place he wanted to be. He worked in the Bucksport paper mill until opportunity came his way to work for the University of Maine Cooperative Extension in community development. Upon retirement from there he started and ran a successful greenhouse business. He has always been active in town affairs and community organizations. A Quaker, Dave was instrumental in starting a Friends meeting in Orland. Ginny and Dave have two children and six grandchildren.
Julia Bowers lives and writes in Brunswick. She wrote and illustrated a children’s picture book at the age of eight that was nearly published by MacMillan, and wrote a play for an honors degree at Mt. Holyoke College. Since then she taught at a private boarding school in Switzerland, was a Foreign Service Officer with the State department, an interior decorator in Manhattan, a freelance illustrator in Connecticut and has continued to write in Massachusetts and Maine. She writes personal essays and observations, often with a satiric slant and is also writing a series of stories about a rather tiresome child named Margaret.