Why I Self-Published Decline of Fishes

There has always been a certain stigma attached to self-publication. When a writer decides to bring out his own book, the unstated but ever present question is: “Why couldn’t you find a publisher?” By a publisher, the asker of such a question usually means a conventional trade publisher. A subsequent, if hidden, assumption is, “If you couldn’t find a publisher—or an agent to represent the book—it can’t be a very good one.” This is the nub of the problem for writers who do not have an agent or who have not published with a major trade publisher.

After I completed a first draft of my novel, Decline of Fishes, I thought about querying agents. I also thought about the current state of the literary market and whether my book would fit into any of the categories—or niches— for commercially marketable books. Each week I read the major book review publications, I visit bookstores, and I scan the “new books” shelves in public libraries, so I have a pretty good idea of what’s being published and who’s publishing it.

Consequently, I asked myself if my novel conformed to any of those categories or if my personal and literary profile matches that of any of the writers currently being published. Aside from the masters like Philip Roth and Thomas Pyncheon, who have their own loyal readerships, or the dwindling number of mid-list writers who remain in print, my work seems to have little in common with that of younger urban-based writers who are publishing today. Surely it has none of the exoticism of post-colonial writing or the linguistic experimentation of recent European immigrants. I don’t write about ethnic subcultures, or about the challenges of contemporary marriage and child rearing. Neither do I write about divorce and the single parent life or the demands on young professionals of corporate culture, so why would an agent be interested in representing me?

Even if I were to find an agent, how long would it take to place my book? And once placed, would it be subject to the kinds of violations a number of writer friends have recently had their fiction and non-fiction subjected to in the editorial process? In other words, would the wait—a long and probably fruitless one—be worth the effort, especially at my age and considering that the subject of my novel—the pressure on traditional cities and towns like Gloucester, Massachusetts to sell out to developers, thereby undermining their indigenous character and culture—is of moment.

On its face, my novel about a group of local activists who oppose the construction of an upscale shopping mall on the city’s working waterfront, just as the fishing industry faces its greatest crisis, sounds like a story that might attract interest. It’s relevant—how many American communities are fighting to preserve the traditional culture and economies of downtowns forced to compete with Wal-Mart or Big Box shopping malls? It’s accessibly written in direct and realistic prose. It has what I have been told are believable characters, who struggle with personal conflicts and a threatened way of life as they fight the mall’s developers. The plot is suspenseful—what kinds of power and money lie behind the attempt to develop the mall? And there is a dramatic payoff. Will the developers get their way? Will the main characters resolve their conflicts; and who will benefit or lose from the final outcome?

I shared my concerns about finding an agent or an appropriate publisher with several writer friends, each of whom had experienced some form of the interventions I have described in the agenting or publication process. One friend had 150 pages cut from her original manuscript and was required to rewrite the book from a more marketable perspective, thereby violating her original intent. Given these concerns and our shared sense of the exigency of my subject, my friends urged me to bring the book out myself.

Five writer friends—one a former senior editor at a prestigious Boston publishing house, another the editor of a national magazine, all of whom have published fiction and non-fiction in major venues—have read and commented upon my book through several revisions. Their comments, criticism and suggestions have helped to shape, sharpen and improve the novel. Considering their experience, I feel that Decline of Fishes has received as much if not more editorial scrutiny than it would have received from a trade publisher. And the book has not been compromised to fit a commercial interest or market.

Fortunately, a local alternative to mainstream publishing already existed. Believing that writers themselves should have ultimate control over the content, editing, design, promotion and distribution of their books, poet and playwright Schuyler Hoffman and I founded the Back Shore Writers Collaborative in 2005. To date we have published two books under the imprint of Back Shore Press, Peter’s Tuttle’s road poem, Looking for a Sign in the West, and my novel, No Fortunes, both of which have been well received and reviewed. We have worked with local artists and designers and regional printing facilities to produce our books and we distribute and sell them through independent booksellers and the Internet.

Along with the incredible support of Janice Severance, owner of the Book Store of Gloucester, two thoughtful and positive reviews (see below) and several local news articles and interviews have helped to launch Decline of Fishes. In the coming months I hope to be doing more public readings. But what has encouraged me the most are the personal communications from friends and readers, who have taken the time to write or email me their responses to my novel. Their helpful and insightful comments have made the years I spent researching and writing this book, often with scant hope of publication, seem worthwhile. I extend to them my deepest gratitude.

Decline of Fishes: Review by Alex Miller

Peter Anastas, a member of the generation of Gloucester writers influenced by Charles Olson, is by now a familiar figure for attentive readers on the North Shore. Having adopted Olson’s pattern as a writer-plus-activist, Anastas has made a career out of hearty involvement with his own place. His emphatic view is that, for an author of his disposition, citizenship and art must grow through and out of one another-hence his dual role in Gloucester as a writer and, at various stages, a social worker, a protester, a teacher at community colleges, and a sitter on numerous committees. Now in the mature flowering of his career, and more hounded than ever by questions of responsibility toward his endangered home landscape, he has released what he refers to as “the most personal book I have written.” Decline of Fishes, whose Greek-American-writer character Jason Makrides bares a massive resemblance to Anastas, is an arresting work of storytelling, which functions as a crash course in local politics and economics while managing to be neither preachy nor fact-clogged.

Set in 1993, Decline of Fishes narrates the struggle of several Gloucester residents to resist the building of a mall on the city’s waterfront; a project which, according to local regulations, is prohibited due to the fact that it depletes the docking and loading space available to working fishermen. Additionally, the mall is seen by many Gloucesterites, including Jason Makrides, a social worker and former novelist, Allison, the intelligent wife of a local pro-mall development committee member, who is having an affair with Makrides, Nina Calogero, a tenacious fisherman’s wife, and Frank Acciaio, an aged and wise sculptor and connoisseur of local flavor, as nothing less than a stain on the city’s “soul”: an exploitative and trivializing project that will poison Gloucester’s home-grown industry while inviting more rich out-of-towners to come in, build condos and luxury boutiques, and speed up a destructive process of gentrification. Though much of the novel’s action takes place in committee rooms, restaurants, and around kitchen tables, where those resistant to the mall discuss its implications for the city and strategize about how to defeat the development committee’s request for special permission to build on property reserved for the fishing industry, the lives and struggles of the characters remains its focus, and as a result, it flows smoothly and remains, perhaps surprisingly, a page-turner.

“Gloucester, like many communities, is really struggling to define itself-and hang onto itself,” says Anastas. “I am an activist; I have lived through this struggle, and I wanted to participate in any conversation that would help people understand how real this place is.” In Decline of Fishes, he has certainly done this. By the time we are ushered into the meeting where the mall will at last be voted up or down, the tension is wound harrowingly high. But the tension of Allison and Makrides’ Romeo-and-Juliet affair, which breaches warring clans, and of the Gloucester Daily Times reporter Lori Lambert’s internal struggle to reconcile painful memories of an abusive fisherman-father with increasing sympathies for the fishing families who would suffer an economic body-blow from the mall’s presence, is just as involving. Decline of Fishes proves to be as much about the inner lives of its major characters as it is about the eco-cultural life of a city. In fact, the implication is that these two aspects are, ultimately, synonymous.

--Alex Miller

Decline of Fishes
By Peter Anastas,
Back Shore Press, 382 pp., $18.95

(This review appeared in the November 29, 2010 online edition of North Shore Art Throb)

Decline of Fishes: Reviewed by Rae Francoeur

“Decline of Fishes” By Peter Anastas. Back Shore Press, Gloucester, 2010. 382 pages. $18.95.

The view from your window matters.

Jason Makrides, the protagonist in Peter Anastas’s beautiful and thought-provoking new novel, “Decline of Fishes,” gazes upon Gloucester, Mass., the venerable but troubled fishing town he loves. Gloucester appears to him like a painting of Venice by Canaletto, rising in radiant sunlight.

In a moment of solemn reverie he takes in the city’s special, endangered beauty — as lovely as it is sad. “I saw fishing vessels making into port, trailed by gulls. I saw the shining Birdseye tower and seawalls along the Boulevard holding everything in against the power of the ocean. Gloucester, I thought, Glowing City….” Readers must complete this passage on their own to understand the significance of this concluding meditation.

In “Decline of Fishes,” the last empty waterfront parcel becomes the focus of a heated citywide debate between developers and the imperiled fishing enterprise. The parcel pits those who see a proposed new mall as a way to bolster the flagging tax base against those who want to hold on to Gloucester’s unique culture. It examines the difficulties of choosing between promising profitability and preservation of existing businesses subsisting on meager profits.

Simply put, the book tracks the divided community’s preparations for the City Council debate up to and including their final vote on the mall’s future. Or is it Gloucester’s very identity as a fishing community they are deciding here? The focus is less on the immediate drama — neighbor vs. neighbor — and more on the far-reaching consequences having to do with community, values and economy. A man does wield a rifle, the automatic response, in some cases, to oppressive conflict. In this book, though, discussion prevails over violence.

The parcel, remarkably, is smack in the middle of the fishermen’s working waterfront. Is this symbol or just good storytelling? Neither. In real life, such a parcel exists. If you take that empty lot away from Gloucester’s fishermen, what will follow but condos and yachts and the demise of a sacred, centuries-old way of life?

Among the key players in this story are the mall developer Win Guest, originally from Gloucester, and project’s lead attorney Jock O’Hanley. They want to build a mall with 25 stores, two restaurants and a 200-car underground garage. Their backing, though impossible to pin down, includes leaders in Boston politics, the Catholic Church and other outside special interest groups.

Lori Lambert follows the story for the local paper. The daughter of an abusive fisherman, she counters any possible sentimentality readers may conjure about the fishermen and their plight. Her life is a struggle still. Her marriage is on the rocks but she managed to get an education and a job at the newspaper. Still, the publisher is pro-development and the tendency is to quash findings that endanger the mall’s chances.

Among Lori’s mentors is Jimmy, the paper’s editor. Brilliant and community oriented, his days are numbered because the local paper is about to sell to outsiders. Lori’s other mentors include Jason and his friend and a fellow intellect named Frank. Nina Calogero, the president of Save Our Fishermen and a lively, articulate, committed wife of an Italian fisherman, is a natural-born organizer who makes delicious espresso and biscotti. When the battle begins to coalesce, she’s right there to help rally and organize. Allison is an attractive mother and teacher currently taking time off to raise her children. Her husband Dennis, a successful local builder in a position of power, has grown away from Allison. Allison and Jason conduct a passionate sexual liaison resulting in affection, self-examination and change.

This carefully constructed, layered book, so tightly focused in on Gloucester, is nonetheless a book of universal importance, especially in our country at this moment in time. Though a study on the deliberation of economic investment, growth and a community’s decision-making, “Decline of Fishes” is at its core a book about passions — intellectual and physical and entrepreneurial — and our attendant responsibilities. How do we function and choose, given these powerful, complex, at times warring drives?

Anastas, author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, is also a respected expert on the works and life of the poet Charles Olson. In “Decline of Fishes” he explores, with care and precision, a number of timely themes.

First, of course, is the future of this city that’s still, by most comparisons, as unique an “island” culture as any in existence. And there is, indeed, a last undeveloped parcel that was the source of contention in the 1980s. Now its disposition is a bit more resolved, with half the property reserved for maritime use. At the current time, this vacant parcel, called I-4, C-2, is under “idea development.”

Another resonant issue is the empowerment and importance of women. Allison, Lori and her less fortunate sister, as well as the fishermen’s wives take on vibrant heartening roles via Anastas’s pen.

My own favorite theme is the deeply explored meditation on reading, writing and study. In Gloucester’s world of fishermen and poets — and unique and fully realized characters — books are as significant as the fishery. In this city there are bookshelves crammed with books. Books, though possibly as imperiled as fishes, are here key to man’s most passionate of all endeavors — the search for self and meaning.

Writing, too, emerges as a significant theme. Jason is the writer who suffers tremendous unhappiness when he tried to merge his writing life with his family life. Unable to resolve the conflicts, he puts his writing aside.

For now, there’s enough of Gloucester’s unique personality to celebrate and debate. Yet those who read the development attorney’s dire warning at the end of the book will know what he’s saying. The “Decline of Fishes” takes place in the past — when the fishery was larger and more viable.

The view today, though stunning and reminiscent, is not quite the same.

This review appeared in the Cape Ann Beacon, on November 17, 2010. Rae Francoeur can be reached at rae.francoeur@verizon.net. Read her blog atfreefallrae.blogspot.com or her book, “Free Fall: A Late-in-Life Love Affair,” available online or in bookstores.

Peter Anastas reads from Decline of Fishes, November 4, 2010

Why I Wrote Decline of Fishes

Set in the historic fishing port of Gloucester, Massachusetts during the summer of 1993, Decline of Fishes depicts the battle, led by an intrepid group of local citizens, to prevent the construction of a shopping mall on the last remaining parcel of the city’s harborfront. The mall’s promoters—city councilor Joyce Benson; the out-of-town developer Win Guest; and Jock O’Hanley, his well-connected attorney—claim that with Gloucester’s fishing industry threatening collapse, the harbor should be redeveloped as a tourist attraction and commercial center to raise tax revenue and create jobs. But the development’s opponents, led by native son Jason Makrides, artisan Frank Acciaio, and Nina Calogero, president of Save Our Fishermen, wage a pitched battle to convince their community that, instead of providing jobs and taxes for the city, the shopping mall will pave the way—literally—for this proud, gritty fishing port’s extinction.

Decline of Fishes is a multi-layered novel about the recklessness of growth at any cost, the survival of an endangered industry, and the value of hard-won principles. The novel tells the story of a choice faced by cities and towns across America: whether to stay true to their historical selves or sell out to the highest bidder.

I had long wanted to write a novel about my hometown that encompassed the struggles of the often beleaguered fishing industry of America’s oldest seaport and my own conflicts about having come home to live and work. But it wasn’t until I returned in 1962 that another dimension of the struggle surfaced. Urban renewal was eating away at the infrastructure of Gloucester’s working waterfront, as well as the fabric of the city, followed by the stirrings of what would shortly surface as a building boom—subdivisions, condos, industrial parks—that threatened to transform both the nature and character of this historic fishing community. Not only was the city under economic pressure because of fluctuations in the fishing stocks, we also faced the social and environmental consequences of overdevelopment. Everything we loved about our human-scale city was under siege.

Instead of setting to work on my novel, I was forced into activism by the urgency of what was happening to the place in which I had chosen to spend the rest of my life. A series of skirmishes against luxury condominiums and upscale subdivisions soon turned into a struggle over the soul of the city itself. Would Gloucester remain the gritty working-class community we’d grown up in and loved, or would we give in to those development pressures that would transform the city into a bedroom for Boston while making housing unaffordable to natives? This was not an idle question as we watched towns like Newburyport, Portland, Maine and Newport, Rhode Island fall captive to the allure of tourist dollars and condominium lifestyles, which ended up forcing fishermen off the their waterfronts and natives into low-paying service jobs.

For three decades I worked with citizen-based groups opposing what many of us felt was inappropriate development and advocating for long-term comprehensive planning that would provide for orderly growth while preserving the vital character of the city. During this time I published At the Cut, a memoir about my childhood in Gloucester, and Broken Trip, a novel-in-stories based on my experiences as a social worker at Action, Inc., the city’s antipoverty agency. I also contributed over 600 weekly columns about local affairs to the Gloucester Daily Times. While carrying on these activities, I continued to be haunted by the novel I had hoped to write about the tensions I was experiencing in my daily life in a city rocked to its foundations by the battles between those who pressed to transform our community and those who fought to maintain its traditional character and folkways.

As I searched for a dramatic focus for my novel, an event or issue around which I could construct a narrative, a Boston developer announced his proposal to build a shopping mall on the last open parcel of the city’s industrial waterfront. The battle that ensued over that mall practically tore the city to pieces. I had become so intimately involved in the struggle, along with dozens of individuals and local groups, that it didn’t occur to me until much later that I had finally been given the subject and basis for my story, what Henry James called a donne`. I would write about the fight to stop the mall, which, in reality, proved to be the key struggle to preserve the soul of Gloucester.

During the battle over the mall, in the mid-to-late-80s, the fishing industry fell deeper into crisis with the virtual collapse of the North Atlantic stocks, actuating the most stringent government restrictions on fishing the industry had known. After days at sea were cut, along with the institution of catch limits, many fishing families lost both their boats and a large portion of their livelihood. Gloucester suffered from the effects of these onerous regulations along with the entire seacoast of New England. I observed the impact of the government regulations as I watched my friends in the fishing community fight to maintain their way of life. As a social worker, I experienced first hand the economic and emotional fallout from the crisis in the lives of the families I attempted to help stay afloat. Feeling the need to incorporate this crisis into my narrative, I decided to set my story about the mall in1993, eight years after its actual occurrence. This was the precise time when government regulations were beginning to have their most dramatic impact on the city and when, capitalizing on the crisis, out-of-town developers began to exert increasing pressures on city officials to grant permits to build what many citizens looked upon as unsuitable development projects in terms of size, placement and potential impact on the local character and environment. Combining the crisis in fishing and the city’s economy with the seductive demands of developers would, I hoped, increase the novel’s dramatic potential.

The narrative extends over the course of a single summer, in 1993. The novel opens with a demonstration at the federal National Marine Services office building during which fishermen, organized by Nina Calogero, president of Save Our Fishermen, try to prevent government workers from going to work, just as they believe restrictive federal regulations keep them from fishing daily; and it reaches a climax with the final vote of the City Council for or against the mall. The action of the story, its plot, unfolds in a series of contrapuntal chapters narrated from the point of view of four of the principal characters (Jason Makrides, Allison Banks, Nina Calogero, and Lori Lambert), beginning and ending with Jason. This enables the story to be told and the action and meaning of events to be perceived through diverse points of view, hopefully lending greater dimension to the novel. Narration is in the third-person, selective-omniscient, except for the chapters devoted to Jason, who speaks in the first person to create a subjectivity that I hoped would enhance the tension among voices while maintaining his role as the novel’s protagonist.

The dramatic payoff comes after the build up of suspense leading to the City Council’s vote that will determine the fate of the mall for its adherents and opponents. In the course of achieving this resolution in the narrative, each of the principal characters surmounts a personal conflict or challenge that results in growth or change, even if those changes are often painfully won.

Finally, this novel is about the process of its own composition. Jason has long wanted to write a novel about the struggle of his hometown to maintain its identity in a changing world and his own conflicts as he came of age as a writer. Decline of Fishes enacts that struggle. It is the novel that Jason has dreamed of writing and ultimately writes.

Though the actual battle against the mall took place twenty-five years ago, the story I’ve fictionalized has not lost its relevance. As federal restrictions continue to plague the fishing industry, which is still fighting for its life even as stocks recoup, and Gloucester, like the rest of the nation, suffers from the collapse of the global economy, new proposals continue to challenge our community, as we attempt to balance necessary growth against the equally vital imperative to retain our fundamental character, which brings people from all over the world to our city. But the will to persevere among fishermen and their families has not wavered, nor has the love of place of the majority of the city’s residents. It is these verities I hoped to celebrate in Decline of Fishes.

In conclusion, let me offer a word about the way this book has been published. Believing that writers themselves should have ultimate control over the content, editing, design, marketing and distribution of their books, Schuyler Hoffman and I founded the Back Shore Writers Collaborative in 2005. To date we have published two books under the imprint of Back Shore Press, Peter’s Tuttle’s road poem, Looking for a Sign in the West, and my novel, No Fortunes, both of which have been well received and reviewed. We have worked with local artists and designers and regional printing facilities to produce our books, and we distribute and sell them through local distributors, independent booksellers and the Internet.

(Decline of Fishes is a available from area book stores and from our distributor Len Bolonsky, Good Harbor Books, 978-283-4769 or 978-283-9294. Also available from Amazon.com

Paul Sawyer Honored at Charles Olson Centennial

The final weekend of the Charles Olson Centennial, October 8-10, began with a celebration of the life of a man who was a poet and writer himself and the friend of some of the country’s leading poets and writers, including Gloucester’s recently appointed Honorary Poets Laureate, Charles Olson and Vincent Ferrini.

On Friday, October 8 at 3 p.m. the life of Rev. Paul Sawyer was commemorated in words and music at the Universalist Unitarian Church of Gloucester, a church he often attended and sometimes preached at. Family members, friends, former colleagues and poets and writers, who had traveled to Gloucester for the Charles Olson Centennial, joined together to pay tribute to the life of this remarkable man at the church where Vincent Ferrini often read and Olson wrote about in his Gloucester epic, “The Maximus Poems.”

Rev. Sawyer, who died in Pasadena on June 23 of pancreatic cancer, was the animating force behind the newly founded Gloucester Writers Center, formerly the home of Vincent Ferrini, where Ferrini and Sawyer spent countless hours talking during Sawyer’s many visits home to Gloucester. Even as he struggled with cancer, Sawyer campaigned for the project, helped to raise funds for the purchase of Ferrini’s house, and visited Gloucester to garner final support for his dream’s realization, writing to board members:

“The Ferrini Olson Poetry Center will provide a setting for writing and scholarship in the spirit of these two outstanding Gloucester writers. It will carry forward their commitment within the Cape Ann community as well as the wider world, reaching out to schools and writers engaging in the ‘unfinished business’ in front of us.”

A native of Saugus, Sawyer grew up on Cape Ann during the summers, where his parents, a brother, sister, nieces, nephews and cousins lived. His schooling was completed nearby at Phillips Andover Academy and Harvard University, and Sawyer returned frequently to Gloucester to visit family and friends, always marveling at the natural beauty of the city and its ability to attract and nurture artists and writers.

As much as Sawyer was animated by poetry, which he shared often with his congregations as a Unitarian Universalist minister and graduate of the Star King School of Ministry in Berkeley, California, he was also a strong advocate for peace and social justice. According to his obituary in the Pasadena Weekly, he had been incarcerated “some sixty times during protests against the death penalty, nuclear power and the war in Vietnam.” His jail companions included singer Jackson Brown and “Pentagon Papers” author Daniel Ellsberg.

But “he had so many spheres—jazz, politics, history,” Susan, his wife of 25 years, said, describing his fifty years of ministry in Seattle, Oregon, Berkley, Pittsburg, New Jersey and Pasadena. His sister Charlotte, wife of retired Gloucester pediatrician, Dr. Hamer Lacey, told a story about how Sawyer, though gravely ill, attended a reunion at Andover with old classmates, many of whom occupied positions of power in the world.

“He didn’t want to talk about old times,” she said. “He didn’t want to discuss his illness. What he wanted to talk about was the war in Afghanistan and how to end it.” His wife added that Sawyer reminded his former classmates, “Your values aren’t worth anything unless you are ready to go to jail for them.”

Shortly before his death, Sawyer completed a memoir, “Untold Story: A Short Narrative History of Our Time,” in which he told his own story in the context of the turbulent years during which he preached, wrote, taught and made of himself an example of the “examined life,” so important to Emerson, Thoreau and the New England Transcendentalists he spent a lifetime studying and emulating.

Charles Olson Centennial Opens with Five Nights of Readings

(Charles Olson and Diane di Prima on Dogtown Common, in Gloucester, MA, during the 1960s. Di Prima will headline the Charles Olson Centennial in Gloucester, October 3-10, with Michael Rumaker and Ed Sanders)

Gloucester’s Charles Olson Centennial Week, October 3-10, will open with five evenings of readings at three separate locations. Each reading begins at 7 p.m. They are free and open to the public. The schedule is as follows:

On Sunday, October 3, poet, novelist and CUNY Graduate Center professor Ammiel Alcalay will read from and sign copies of his recently published novel “Islanders,” at the Bookstore of Gloucester, 61 Main Street. Alcalay grew up as a summer resident of Rocky Neck in the 1950s and early 60s, with Charles Olson as a close friend of his parents, painter Albert Alcalay and his wife Vera. He has written extensively about Olson and his childhood memories of Gloucester.

Of his novel “Islanders,” published by City Lights Books, the LA Times wrote: “Atlantic islands, Northeastern U.S. fishing towns, the last years of the Vietnam War: Ammiel Alcalay flies over this time and these places. .. Memories emerge, and from the memories, stories. The placement of details on the pages is stunningly simple.”

On Monday October 4, a group of local poets calling themselves "The Usual Suspects,” will read from their own work at the Gloucester Writers Center, 126 East Main Street. Readers will include James and Amanda Cook, Kent Bowker, Schuyler Hoffman and other local talents. These writers have been inspired by the work of Charles Olson and the school of writing which formed in the 1960s called “The New American Writing,” of which Olson was a major influence. They will read from their work and discuss it with participants. Parking for the Gloucester Writers Center is across the street in the East Gloucester Marina.

On Tuesday, October 5, Gloucester natives Peter Anastas and David Rich will read fiction and non-fiction inspired by Charles Olson at the Gloucester Lyceum and Sawyer Free Library. Anastas will read from a recently completed memoir, “From Gloucester Out,” and his forthcoming novel, “Decline of Fishes,” also set in Gloucester. Rich will read from the fiction of the late Gloucester playwright and novelist Jonathan Bayliss, including excerpts from Bayliss’ posthumous novel “Gloucestermas,” due for publication this fall.

On Wednesday October 6, the Gloucester Writers Center, located at the former home of poet Vincent Ferrini, will host a second evening of readings featuring works by Olson's friends and fellow poets, Vincent Ferrini and Linda Crane. A highlight of the evening will be the presentation of unpublished work by Crane. Readers will include Sarah Stotzer, Joanna Bowker, Jo-Ann Castano, Carol Weston, Peter Anastas, Dorothy Nelson, Elizabeth McKim, and Fred Dewey.

On Thursday, October 7, poets Gerrit Lansing and Charles “Chuck” Stein will read from their work at the Bookstore of Gloucester, 61 Main Street. Both poets were close personal friends of Olson’s and each has paid tribute to Olson in poetry and prose. Lansing’s most recent book is “Heavenly Tree, Northern Earth,” published by North Atlantic Books. Stein is the author of a major critical study of Olson, “The Secret of the Black Chrysanthemum: The Poetic Cosmology of Charles Olson.”

For further information about these readings and about the Charles Olson Centennial celebration, please visit http://www.Olson100.blogspot.com.