Summary: Producer/Hosts: Ron Beard Theme music for Talk of the Towns Theme is a medley from Coronach, on a Balnain House Highland Music recording. Talk of the Towns: Local Community concerns and opportunities This month: Interview with Roxana Robinson author of Leaving, published by W.W. Norton and Company, 2024 – What is the context and overall plot for Leaving? – Leaving, like your other novels, explores bonds that hold within families, and the forces that test those bonds…. What is your curiosity about families that keeps you returning to them in your writing? – The main characters Sarah and Warren are late middle age, each with claims made on them by life, family, jobs… as they reconnect after more than 30 years, they each contend with these claims, providing the major tension in the story – Sarah and Warren also have strong connections to place… Sarah to her home outside of New York City, Warren to his summer home on Mount Desert Island… what is the nature of the claims that these places have on Sarah and Warren – You are known both as a writer of fiction, and as the biographer of Georgia O’Keefe. That book was recently republished with a new foreward … what led you to research and write O’Keefe’s story? Guest/s: Roxana Robinson www.roxanarobinson.com About the hosts: Ron Beard is producer and host of Talk of the Towns, which first aired on WERU in 1993 as part of his community building work as an Extension professor with University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Sea Grant. He took all the journalism courses he could fit in while an undergraduate student in wildlife management and served as an intern with Maine Public Television nightly newscast in the early 1970s. Ron is an adjunct faculty member at College of the Atlantic, teaching courses on community development. Ron served on the Bar Harbor Town Council for six years and is currently board chair for the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor, where he has lived since 1975. Look for him on the Allagash River in June, and whenever he can get away, in the highlands of Scotland where he was fortunate to spend two sabbaticals. Liz Graves joined Talk of the Towns as co-producer and co-host in July 2022, having long admired public affairs programming on WERU and dreamed of getting involved in community radio. She works as the Town Clerk for the Town of Bar Harbor, and is a former editor of the Mount Desert Islander weekly newspaper. Liz grew up in California and came to Maine as a schooner sailor.
