By Lindsey Pizzica Rotolo
Norfolk ArtsWave! will bring a host of talent from near and far to partake in the three-day arts festival during August 13-15. Aside from a host of music and art events, the weekend will also bring a number of literary indulgences to town.
Norfolk’s own Anne Garrels and Vint Lawrence will kick off the weekend with a Friday afternoon reading in the library of “Love Letters,” a Pulitzer Prize nominated play by A.R. Gurney.
While the two need little introduction to this readership, Garrels is a senior foreign correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR), where she has worked since 1988. Prior to her career at NPR, Garrels was the NBC News Correspondent at the State Department. One of 16 journalists who stayed in Iraq during the American bombing in 2003, Garrels issued gripping daily reports of her experiences there and published a book about that time, “Naked in Baghdad,” with the help of her husband, Vint Lawrence.
Lawrence, a local artist, served as a paramilitary officer in the Special Activities Division of the CIA for eight years in the 1960s. He went on to become a widely published political cartoonist with his work often appearing in The New Republic and The Washington Post. The couple met at a dinner party in Washington, D.C. in 1982. As Garrels describes it, “I was being set up with a lawyer, who was age appropriate, but saw Vint from across the room. It was love at first sight.”
Simon Winchester delivers the next literary event of the weekend at Infinity Hall on Saturday afternoon. Winchester, a best-selling British author with a home in the Berkshires, will host the Brendan Gill Memorial Lecture.
Winchester began his writing career as a journalist in the late 1960s, serving as a correspondent to Northern Ireland. He was named Britain’s Journalist of the Year in 1971 for his reporting on that country’s turmoil and wrote his first book, “Holy Terror” about his experiences there.
He spent most of the 1970s as a correspondent to Washington, D.C., where he covered the Nixon administration, Watergate and the Carter years. After his stint in Washington, Winchester was stationed in India and then spent 12 years covering southern China before moving to New York City in 1997.

Simon Winchester, one of many literary greats to take part in Norfolk ArtsWave! weekend.

Winchester has written 21 books on topics such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the volcano island of Krakatoa, William Smith, the war in the Balkans, British outposts around the world and Korea, among many others. He is married to former NPR producer Setsuko Sato.
Edmund Morris follows Winchester at Infinity Hall late Saturday afternoon with the Battell Memorial Lecture on ____________.
Morris has a home in Kent, Conn. and has written biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” the first in a three-volume biography of the 26th president, won the Pulitzer in 1980 and the National Book Award. Morris spent 14 years as Reagan’s official biographer and finally published “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan” in 1999.
He also wrote a book on Beethoven and writes on travel and various arts topics for The New Yorker, The New York Times and Harper’s Magazine. Morris is married to fellow biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris.
On Sunday, Emilie Piper, an historian of colonial western Mass., and David Levinson, a cultural anthropologist, will give a talk at the Historical Society on their recent book, “Elizabeth Freeman: One Minute a Free Woman.”
Freeman, Colonel John Ashley’s slave, lived in Sheffield, Mass. in the late 1700s and successfully sued her boss for her freedom in 1781, helping make slavery illegal in Massachusetts.
In addition to Freeman’s life, the book also explores the lives of many other black families in Sheffield, Stockbridge, Lenox and Norfolk. Levinson has been the editor of many anthropological reference books and co-founded the Berkshire Publishing Group in Great Barrington, where he has served as president and editor-in-chief.
Ian MacNiven, authorized biographer of James Laughlin, will deliver the last literary event of the weekend. His talk, “New Directions: James Laughlin, Norfolk and the Shaping of Modern Literature” will take place Sunday afternoon at the library and will feature rare, first editions of several New Directions books.
MacNiven wrote, “Lawrence Durrell: A Biography” and edited “Letters 1935-1980,” a collection of correspondence between Durrell and Henry Miller.
For more information on Norfolk ArtsWave! events, see the insert in this issue or go to www.norfolkartswave.org.

Photo By Setsuko Winchester