Join us for an Author Talk with Cheryl Blaydon and Laurel Dodge where they will discuss their work and writing process, as well as share passages from their latest novels. Both authors will have books on hand for purchase and signing.

About the Authors

After twenty-plus years as a painter, Cheryl Blaydon’s portfolio has grown to include six novels, the latest published in August of 2024. Hailing from upstate New York, she has worked in big business, sailed the Caribbean, traveled through Europe, and studied art in Florida. She now divides her time between writing and painting from an airy studio with a north-facing window in East Boothbay, Maine.

When Laurel Dodge isn’t striding through swamps or meandering through mountains, she is at her desk writing novels. Her work as a naturalist for nature centers, land trusts, and a zoo has informed her writing, in which nature always takes a central role. The Buoyant Letters of Mimsy Bell, a 2024 IPPY bronze medal winner for literary fiction, is her first novel. She lives in Midcoast Maine with her family, where she watches moths at night and tries to wrest vegetables from her old farm’s tired soil.

About the Books

Reunion with Rembrandt by Cheryl Blaydon

It’s been twenty-eight years since a major art heist rocked Boston. March 18 is significant not only to Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but it is the date that represents the legal date of Kate Flannagans divorce.

Once inside the venerable walls ancient history and iconic works of art, Kate must navigate through the maze of feelings that also involve a grandmother whose life had been transformed because of art in the 1930s.

But nothing is more difficult for Kate on that day than walking the galleries where every breath she takes, every corner she turns, and every remnant of her perfume lingers because of a man called Angus.

The Buoyant Letters of Mimsy Bell by Laurel Dodge

Menotomy, a small, unassuming town in the western mountains of Maine, has nothing much to distinguish it except the great, wild, murderous river that flows through it, and the fact that it was the birthplace of rock ’n’ roll star, Mimsy Bell. These two – river and rock star – have a history: the river took the life of Mimsy’s first love. Now, at the age of eighty, after a life of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, Mimsy has returned to Menotomy to find herself a suitable gravesite and to have it out at last with the river that has haunted her all her life. Armed with a collection of small antique bottles and a sharp pen, Mimsy records her daily life in letters to her dead lover, bottles them and tosses them into the river, an eccentricity that soon attracts a number of new admirers, and initiates a series of life-changing adventures.