A quiet fell over the captivated crowd in the Hamilton Smith lecture hall as Lewis Robinson read from his new novel, The Islanders. Robinson, a fiction writer and author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories, Water Dogs, and The Islanders, is also an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maine at Farmington.
The event on Nov. 7, 2024, marked the third event of the University of New Hampshire English Department’s Writers Series for the semester.
The department had previously hosted two other authors this semester: Donald Revell and Nina MacLaughlin, and plans to hold three more Writers Series events in Spring 2025. The series aims to highlight writers in many different genres, such as poetry, nonfiction, and fiction, for both students and the public.
Thomas Payne, an associate professor in the English Department who teaches writing at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, kicked off the event. Payne introduced Robinson’s former student at the University of Maine, now a graduate student in the Writing MFA program at UNH. She gave a brief introduction before Robinson began his reading.
Robinson read a few excerpts from his new novel, The Islanders, which was published at the beginning of last month. This book is a coming-of-age story that follows high school hockey player Walt as he joins a leadership program for misfit teenagers on an island off the coast of Maine. The narrative alternates between Walt’s life before the island, when he went to school in New Hampshire, and his new, unfamiliar life on the island, away from his family.
Following his reading, Robinson fielded a Q&A session. The audience, which included about 30 people, was a mix of graduate students, undergraduates, and others. Several questions focused on his writing process, how to handle rejection in the publishing industry, and how much of his writing is inspired by past memories before it is transformed into something new within his fiction.
“I would really enjoy attending one of these events even if I wasn’t an MFA student here,” one graduate writing student said afterward. Several other UNH Writing MFA students who attended agreed with her. Although they wished to remain anonymous, they agreed that these events are helpful to hear about published writers’ experiences with their processes both in writing and in publishing.
This Writers Series event on Nov. 7 was the last of this semester. The next Writers Series event will be held on Feb. 6, 2025, featuring poets Sarah Stickney and Heather Treseler.
