made it happen it is truly a community event made possible through the hard work of our library staff community and many many community organizations it's clear looking around the room and hearing the buzz before we started  we're grateful to the gallery and to the thirty three artists who submitted work in all different media including art that was specifically created for this exhibit the exhibit runs through mother's day so there's still time to take  the next week on april twelfth we hosted barbara berenson author of boston the civil war of the second revolution who is now working on a book about women's suffrage i was fortunate to be in attendance that evening to learn about the pivotal role that the women of massachusetts played in the fight for women trying the moment historical society and the belmont league of women voters co sponsored the following weekend on saturday morning friends and family and patrons traveled then to boston and traveled back in time literally by to explore the north and from the women's heritage trail group spoke about the real people in places that were featured in the boston girl last thursday on the twenty first we hosted a wonderful concert by the close woods that blinded the closer music of eastern europe with jazz numbers that addy and her sister might have listened to and probably danced to way back in the twenty's we've had here tonight if you could please rise to be recognized  and turning to the next part of our program tonight have the privilege of welcoming arthur stephen mccauley who will be introducing our keynote speaker stephen is the author of eight novels including two published under a pseudonym his work has been translated into more than a dozen love child of morton and woody allen i'm just going to leave it at that right he's currently the associate director of creative writing at brandeis university but the real reason we asked him to speak  thank thank you very much for inviting me to be participate in this really wonderful event tonight i feel very privileged to be here and very privileged to introduce a needed diamond my friend  for many years now in fact a need and i used to work together in the late mornings at her house in different rooms and i would go to her house in the in the late mornings and would you know she'd work in her study and work in the kitchen or something like that  so anyway i want all of you to know that i think considering you know one of my very best friends because one of my goals in writing these introductory comments was to make my dear friend in need a diamond from which a writer can be considered he may be considered as a storyteller as a teacher and as an enchanter a major writer combines these three story teller teacher and chanter but it is the in chanter and him that predominates and makes him a major writer i think it's appropriate to say that there are many ways in which a needed diamond is a major writer and for the sake of brevity i will limit my comments to her fiction alone leaving aside her extensive work as a journalist her seven books on contemporary jewish practice and or many personal essays and columns on everything from parenting to sarah   the red tent was published almost twenty years ago it has been for two decades ammash massive international bestseller but more than merely merely selling many millions of copies worldwide the novel like marilyn monroe has become iconic as the los angeles times said it reached women who felt left out of biblical history which i interpret as meaning that anita improved on the bible in some way which is a huge undertaking credulous it hasn't speier reading groups women's discussion group spirituality retreats tours and vacations a lifetime miniseries and a lot of really interesting art work so you should google it there's been a lot of cadmium red and vermilion paint has been spilled in tribute to this novel like catch twenty t title itself has entered the language of something i discovered when i was coming out of a bakery incenses going to heard a woman turn to a friend and say what you need is a little more rigid ten time and i mean really called a need and said oh  i've heard that one in time but the red tent of course was only in the middle of anita's career as a writer and the beginning of her career as a novelist she's published four other novels each stunningly different from its predecessors but connected by the theme of the ways in which women's friendships and communities have sustained lives in the face of personal and political adversity sometimes on a biblical scale and even change the course of history as an example of novel all of belmont and a good portion of the rest of the country is reading and talking about and has been since it was published in december of two thousand and fourteen in this novel anita is clearly at the height of her powers in all three categories referred to by mr the bulk of as a teacher bringing to life the difficulties and accomplishments of women largely from immigrant backgrounds in early twentieth century boston as a storyteller unforgettably recounting addy biomes harsh family life the bloody suicide of her sister the evolving friendships with a girl she meets at rockport lodge and the heartbreaking deathbed betrayal by her mother g the lots of books instruct and they all tell a story but the trend of popularity of the boston girl is due i believe her need is ability to enchant and charm readers from the opening pages mesmerizing voice direct self effacing uncompromising funny she weaves a spell with this voice and holds readers to the page from beginning to end whether describing violence and discomfort triumph and love it's a kind of artistic sorcery that comes from meticulous research empathy and i can tell you as a member of a news running group years of hard work and difficult revision and if there's one quality we is that i admire as much as her in talent it's her extraordinary professionalism but before i sit down i thought i'd be letting down emily reardon who invited me here tonight if i didn't divulge a few facts about anita she loves she really loves the ice you know always being encouraged to go to shows them so i appreciate that in the upcoming presidential election she is not supporting donald trump i know you're surprised to hear that but she's kind she's generous she's loved by a whole lot of people including thank you very much and good night i feel like rebuttal is that is it is what i should do next but i'm not supposed to do that i don't think in the course of the evening i will tell you a little bit about sticks participation  platform for reaching out for knitting the place together across all kinds of movies and platforms and interest groups and i don't think i've ever seen or heard of anybody else doing it quite like this and i understand why you do it every other entirely sure what that means i think it suggests that my fiction is longer on dialogue and plot or physics and given the title and the cover image and the first person narrator of the boston girl i think it would be fair to lavin who is the reader is truly extraordinary so i'm not going to use that as her but this is addie invoking the book eva sweet heart if you ask me to tell you how i got to be the woman i am today what do you think i'm good i'm flattered you chose to interview me and when did i ever say no to my favorite grandchild i know i say that to all my grandchildren and i mean it every single time that sounds ridiculous like i'm losing my marbles but it's true when you're a grandmother you know and and why not look at the five of you dr social worker two teachers and now you of course they're going to accept you into that program don't be silly my father is probably rolling over in his grave but i think it's wonderful don't tell the rest of it you really are my favorite and not only because you're the youngest did you know you were named after me good story everyone else is named in memory of someone who died like your sister jessica who was named for my nephew jake but i was very sick when you were born and when they found i wasn't going to make it they went ahead and just hoped the angel of death wouldn't make a mistake and take you even instead of your parents weren't that superstitious but they had to tell everyone you were named after your father's cousin arlene so people wouldn't give them a hard time it's a lot of names to remember i know grandpa and i named your aunt sylvia for your grandfather's mother who died in the flu epidemic and your mother is claire after my sister what do you mean you didn't know i had a sister that's impossible but he was the oldest then celia and then me maybe you forgot nobody told you well maybe it's not such a surprise people don't talk so much about sad memories and it was a long time ago but you should know this so go ahead turn on the tape recorder my father came to boston from what must be russia now and he took my sister's body and celia with him it was eight hundred ninety six or maybe eight hundred ninety seven i'm not sure my mother came three or four years later and i was born in boston  have lived here my whole life which anyone can tell the minute i opened my  mouth so that's addie and and he did turn out to be a strong character but that's not how it works for me i don't start necessarily with characters my historical novels and four of the five novels i've written are historical  have been inspired by a found story a story that begins with a question in the red tent the question was about dina jacob and lee i have a daughter named dina who steps into the spotlight for a brief violent moment and then she vanish and that left me wondering what really happened to her in that city with that man and what happened afterward there was a silence there in the last days of dog town a massachusetts town becomes a ghost town the settlement becomes a ghost town and all that's left today are sell or hold and legends and some names of people but i wondered why did the time town die out and who were the last people to leave who was the last man who was the last woman day after night set in one thousand nine hundred five palestine and a daring rescue is carried out freeing all of the jewish prisoners in a british internment camp i visited there and i saw photographs of the women in those barracks and i wondered what happened to them during the war how about a building which is a rockport lodge and the lodge looked like i'd pass it probably i don't know one hundred times without even seeing it it looked like a dozen other bed and breakfasts in rockport two stories white clabbered black shutters sign out in front that said the rockport lodge but i finally stopped to look at it when a friend of mine walked out the front door and i said what are you doing here and she told me she was the cook that summer she was working there and she's the one who told me that only female guests were alive that that was a policy that had started in the beginning back in one thousand nine hundred six when it opened to give inexpensive and chaperone qualities to city girls of modest means to provide a taste of recreation and leisure to a class of girls who would never have been able to afford it sort of the fresh air fund for unmarried young ladies of the time and it was paid for by wealthy women with progressive era beliefs in suffrage going to learn about an education reform child welfare and the  americanization so i wondered what it would be like what it was like in rockport large for the girls who went there in those early days who were they what happened there as i started to investigate the history of rockport lodge i learned that it had reinvented itself many times over these over its ninety years in operation some of the girls returned year after year so the clientele aged and eventually married women were allowed to stay in one nine hundred seventy five brochure describe rockport lodge guests as a quote working women retired women and temporarily unemployed women parenthesis others are not exclude by the late one nine hundred eighty s women's ninety's in two thousand and one the lights went out for good and it was closed and that was the summer i walked up on the porch and looked through the windows the grimy windows with the but inside it was like history had been frozen in the dining room there were these big round of tables with the chairs around them in a full set of blue willow china up on the walls in on shelves and the parlor had a piano which was loaded with song books and there were games and magazines all over very overcrowded overstaying room as though the girls were going to come back at any moment the whole building felt like an old steamer trunk with a century's worth so i decided that i would write a novel that would cover entire span of rockport lodge history something like same time next year many of you may remember the play in a movie about this adulterous couple who met year after year for their annual tryst i decided i would invent a whole group of women diverse women which is my m o and that group of friends would meet at the lodge and form strong bonds and return year after year and share the stories of their lives and that would reflect the history of the women's of women through the twentieth century and i would call that book rockport lodge and indeed that was the name of the that was on my contract i was going to write a book called rockport lot so i started my research with the rockport lodge papers which were at this lesson your library on the history of american women  a collection of forty seven boxes of paper a lot of it was fundraising letters which were fascinating brochures housekeeping minutiae really laundry lists and shopping list the ground and they went hiking in those and within a few years really within less than ten years women were wearing bathing suits that would look perfectly contemporary today and showed everything so there was this enormous gone to the lodge as a girl and had also been a member of something called the saturday evening girls club in boston's north her grandmother had also worked at the paul revere pottery studio at the bennett street sept where immigrant  futile craftsman style designs on pottery which are now very valuable and on display at the museum of fine arts among other so that led me to edith brown an illustrator and painter who supervised the pottery studio and to her lifelong companion edith carrier included running ben in st creating a federal food facts bureau during world war one and then working as a senior administrator in the boston public library i have to say most of the characters in issues that so reflected my own experience in the sixty's and seventy's when i was growing up by the tent by the teens and twenty's that tens and twenties more girls were attending college than ever before and women's magazines fretted about how these educated new female sales force you couldn't have the male floorwalker selling or even gloves for that matter they needed a female sales force offices require typists and telephone operators and the people who ran those places quickly realised that women could be paid less for the work that started out being done by men librarianship and social work became women's work and then soon professionalized and accredited so all of this was happening in boston and i began to walk  actually along with harvard harvard dropped out and simmons carried the ball i have maybe you can tell never been so smitten by my research which meant that after a year of reading and poking around in archives i had barely gotten to the mid  twenty i had also assembled a fictional group of girlfriends as i meant to who came from diverse backgrounds which was unusual for the time jewish italian and irish girls talking together working together but as unusual as it was that was the way it was that saturday evening girls club and at rockport there really was a mixing of ethnicity so i had done all this research but i had too much history to tell i had too many ethnic family strands to break too many back stories tricks i could have written a three hundred page book about a single week at rockport lodge i realize i think maybe i did write right then i went through more drafts than i can remember names changed story lines were added and characters were dropped and it was a mess but addie was there from the beginning and he was the youngest in her group and abby's family story was always central ultimately rockport lodge the saga of the century became the boston girl the coming of age story of one at a bound to leave most of my research in room floor that perfectly normal that always happens but i was afraid that the arc of addie's story into a happy marriage might be too small that her life might be too monday and to keep a reader turning it was not perhaps historical enough but once i made arity eddie the narrator i realized or maybe i remembered that we don't experience history in the abstract or from on high we live inside it and add the experience is the momentous defense of the early twentieth century at eye level a girl bobs her hair a veteran of the great war collapses on a crowded beach a friend dies because she ignores warnings about the flu epidemic and goes dancing in addie's life the geo political the immigrant success saga is haunted by loss and despair war and disease are tests of resilience even for those on the sidelines those who survive so maybe it was not so monday after a b it was not so small to tell the stor of arc a bookend to my first novel the red tent also begins with a prologue but with the differences between these two prologues are more striking than the similarities the first person narrator in the red the keeping of men who had no way of that is why i became with dina is addressing women unknown women women that she hopes is listening or listening in a distant future women who were should know this as he says turn on a tape recorder and he is a pistol this is the ark of the moral universe bending toward just we have a long way to go before all women's stories and women's lives are given the respect they are d telling the story somebody who was collecting oral histories a stranger that she was going to have an appointment with somebody who didn't know her was curious about her life which is a nice thing and then i don't remember where the idea came to turn it completely actually actually having given the book to addie as a conversation with her granddaughter i revised the book the last time and it was a warmer book it was a funnier book it was more honest it was conversational  the question is how do i how do i get access to the papers in rockport logic i started poking around libraries up on k pan so i looked in the sandy bay historical society which had not a whole lot i went to the library in gloucester  and then i'm trying to remember who told me that the papers had been sent to the sless i'm sure it's a great story they were they were the people who were emptying the house out the workman came across all these papers and one of them said you know maybe we shouldn't throw this away so somebody called this lesson here and they ran up there with a van and rescued all of these boxes and when i found out they were there i called the librarian said can i look at them and they said well we haven't processed the mia you know and there  lots of boxes of things to process and i said when might you be doing that because i like working on a novel so they pushed it to the top of the list god bless them and gave me access to them and i had never done that kind of research where you actually put on white gloves and you have the boxes come in so th historian at the museum of fine arts so it was and and somebody who's the crittendon house for unmarried women which was a horror for a long time is now an empowerment organise for women i talk to them and i looked at some of their records so it was really happy to talk about what it is they care about when you  when i when i would have written about if i had written a five hundred page book i don't write five hundred pages there was a whole section where i added i was going to become a librarian and i'm a big library fan as most writers are all right as i think and and i learned that in east boston there was and i'm going to forget her name there was an it remarkable librarian jewish woman who very young she's twenty two and was given the run of this library and she became sort of a character in addie's mentor and she started something remarkable she started a monthly she featured writers of different traditions so she had an italian american month and she would put  out not just books written by italians but also objects from their homes and villages objects and platters of food and she did that for the irish and she did it for african americans for negroes at the time and she did it for jews and she long that was a that was a holes you remember that  actually this is a question about why the molasses flow doesn't show up but there also there's also no mention of the police strike which dennis lehane wrote a lot about so these were the i couldn't put it all in and it wasn't this is a question about the west and library experience there were reading groups in the west and library there are some photographs in the boston public library archives you're nodding maybe you've seen them so reading reading clubs and after school reading groups were very yeah there were all tenements the north end was the worst tenement the country for a while it was worse than the lower east side it was the most diseased it was the most densely populated it was terrible truly terrible i mean we would go to there for peace it's quaint but it was not and for what was going to happen to them and who was going to take care of mom and pop if she if she left the house so there were there were lots of reasons for that but no it was it was just a heartbreak it was a heartbreak in her deadline it's it's a lot less romantic if you're writing for a newspaper magazine and you don't turn it on time you never get another assignment and you know paid so i got beaten into me for twenty years so i would for the most part made my deadlines and that also gave me a kind of discipline that i knew that by x amount by by the end of july i wanted to be this far and if i was close that was ok and it gave me kind of goal after goal after goal having having colleagues having ok the question is what am i working on now and what am i reading i this last semester i audited to play writing class which was enormous amount of fun and so i been reading a lot of what happened to that is like make a i've got a lot of people want to know why stop there and what about the rest of her life what about the women's movement what about world war two in the holocaust and you know it's like the question she was asked is what made you the one you are today so it's a coming of age it really is a coming of  i think actually the rest of her life is sketched in in the last few chapters that maybe not satisfying but you know that it was a great marriage of satisfying marriage and and that her friendship with anna for example continue there and and the great the great joy and triumph of her life is that she can have a relationship like the grandchild she can be funny and honest and say that's probably as much as you want to know about your grandmother's love life and and that there's a kind of honesty and humor and shared respect to me that's the great triumph and that's what i was talking about with that book and think that she knows that she can teach her her story is safe and her granddaughter whether or not the details carry on that her when that hat when they switch happened from why it happened i was just too much i mean i decided i couldn't tell this gigantic i don't i didn't want to spend ten years writing this book and that's what it would have taken i it's not what i do it's not i don't mistake thank you and i'm happy to talk to you afterwards thank you so much