Nancy Hesser
Power-packed and pared down, flash fiction and its kin – pocket, postcard, and palm-sized stories – can provide a refreshing option for today’s readers. This three-session course offers an international sampling of vivid “short shorts,” each under three pages, whose authors have swapped length for strength to build suspense, paint memorable portraits, and evoke powerful emotions. Discussion topics will include “Flash Back: How We Came Up Short,” and “Flash Freeze.” Readings will be provided via email.
Nancy Hesser, Ph.D., has taught literature in the US, DR Congo, and Mali. When she is not hanging out with her husband and canine companions in Dorchester County’s salt marshes, she may be found teaching short story courses for various lifelong learning programs, focusing on such themes as American regionalism, the Roaring 20’s, Caribbean voices, bar room stories, and flash fiction. Choose between Live ZOOM Class Sessions or Recorded, Thursdays, February 11, 18, 25 from 1:30-2:30 pm $30. To register for the course go to our website at https://chesapeakeforum.org/ or visit us on Facebook.
Kate Livie is a professional Chesapeake educator, writer and historian. An Eastern Shore native, Kate is passionate about the Chesapeake Bay’s culture and landscape. She has written extensively about regional travel, history, environment and foodways for publications from Wooden Boat to Baltimore Magazine to Edible Delmarva. Her 2015 book, Chesapeake Oysters: The Bay’s Foundation and Future, won the Maryland Historical Society’s Marion Brewington Prize for Maritime History. Formerly the director of education and associate curator at the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, she is currently a part of the humanities faculty at the Center for Environment and Society at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where she teaches courses about the Bay’s environment, arts, economy, traditions and culture. Kate lives with her husband in her hometown of Chestertown, Maryland, on Morgan Creek.
This presentation will use a sonar-mapped oyster reef from the dock of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Cambridge, MD to illustrate, geologically, what the Bay looked like in this vicinity of the Choptank River from 20,000 years ago (when the sea level was 300 feet lower) until now. You will see the Choptank as an energetic, flowing, meandering river; the subsequent incursion of saltwater into the Chesapeake Bay; and sea level reaching its present level from 6,000 years ago. The presentation will show the burying of that reef by sediments washing off the fields of the Wilhelmina Colony up by the Dover Bridge in the late 1800’s. Finally, the program will also suggest that there was more going on to cause the demise of oysters than over exploitation.
Our Distinguished Visiting Professor for 2021 is David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition at Yale University. Dr. Blight’s lecture, “Frederick Douglass in His Times and In Ours,” is dedicated to the memory of John F. Ford, Chesapeake Forum’s Founding President. It will be presented via Zoom on Thursday, January 21st at 4 pm. and will also be available as a video recording to watch at your convenience.