Join writers Jonathan Lethem and Laura Miller for a conversation on writing, and writing about writing, at the Bay School's Emlen Hall at 7 pm on Friday, October 20 to kick off the 2017 Word Festival.

Jonathan Lethem, novelist, essayist and short story writer, is a summer resident of Blue Hill and is best known for his 1999 novel Motherless Brooklyn. In 2005, he received a MacArthur Fellowship. His most recent book, More Alive and Less Lonely, is a collection of essays that celebrates a life spent in books, featuring new and previously unpublished material, including: impassioned appreciations of forgotten writers and overlooked books, razor-sharp critical essays, and personal accounts of his most extraordinary literary encounters and discoveries.

Laura Miller, a journalist and critic living in New York, is Books and Culture Columnist for Slate Magazine. She is a co-founder of Salon.com, where she worked for 20 years. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Guardian and The New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the “Last Word” column. She is the author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (Little, Brown, 2008) and editor of The Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors (Penguin, 2000).

This event is free and open to the public.