Flat Bay Collective
We work in paint, paper, wood, and words. We are a cluster of artists living---happily removed from the national cultural marketplace---in rural, coastal Washington County, Maine. Accustomed to working in isolation, we have become known to one another gradually through a kinship in labor and vision, until somehow Flatbay Collective came together. Visitors to our website can view it as a kind of music, the notes of which have their source in the woods, the barrens, the sea, the ledges of our rugged and generous landscape.
Collective Membership
Robert Froese
fiction writer.
Robert Froese lives on Flat Bay in the solar-powered home he and his wife, Leonore Hildebrandt, built themselves. He teaches creative writing and film at the University of Maine at Machias and spends some of his spare time tending apple trees. Robert has written three novels---The Hour of Blue (1990), The Forgotten Condition of Things (2001), and A Dark Music (2006), ---and is currently working on his fourth. He has also written several screenplays, including adaptations of some of his novels.
Susan Hammond
book and visual artist
Susan Hammond lives on the coast in Harrington, Maine. In her work she tries to show the bond between the inner life of nature and her own inner life.
Born and raised in Germany,
Leonore Hildebrandt has lived “off the grid” in Harrington,
Maine, for over twenty years. At home in two languages, she teaches writing
at the University of Maine. Since 2007, she is serving as an editor for
the Beloit
Poetry Journal. Also a singer/songwriter, Leonore has been performing
with Brian Stewart for many years.
Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several magazines, including
the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Denver Quarterly,
the Puckerbrush
Review, the Café Review, the Northwoods
Journal, and in the almanac-style book A
Seaside Companion published
by Tilbury House.
Donna Kausen
bowl maker
Donna Kausen has made her home in Washington County Maine since 1976. She took up wood turning in 1999. Making bowls, both carving and turning, satisfies the human urge to create something functional and beautiful. Most of her wood is found locally and finished with nut oil.
Richard Miles
poet
Richard Miles' poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar and American Poetry Review. He works as a stonemason and lives with his family in Harrington, Maine. His collection Boat of Two Shores is available in paperback from the University of Maine Machias Press.
Brian Dyer Stewart
songwriter
Brian Stewart lives with his family in Harrington, Maine. He has been
writing and performing songs about love, family life, politics and peace
for more than 30 years. He has four cds, including one of original piano
music.
Tony Brinkley
poet
Tony Brinkley lives in Bangor and teaches poetry at the University of Maine at Orono. He is also the Faculty Associate at the University's Franco-American Centre. A sequence of his poems, Stalin's Eyes, was published by Puckerbrush Press and a second sequence, Gomorrah, will be published by Flat Bay Press in the near future. In collaboration with Elena Glazov and Raina Kostova, he is translating the Zhivago Poems by Boris Pasternak and the Voronezh Notebooks by Osip Mandelshtam. His poetry and translations have appeared in Another Chicago Magazine, The New Review of Literature, Shofar, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Puckerbrush Review. In collaboration with Keith Hanley, he is the co-editor of Romantic Revisions, a collection of essays on the poetics of English Romanticism from Cambridge University Press.
Bernie Vinzani
Book Artist
Bernie Vinzani is the Director of The Book Arts Studio and Associate Professor of
Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Maine at Machias.
He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in such venues as
The VI International Print Biennial, Cracow Poland, ARC Gallery, Chicago,
Das Papier, Duren, Germany, Paperworks Caracas, Venezuela,
and the Maine Invitational, Portland, Maine.
As a professional papermaker, he has made paper for and collaborated
with such artists as William Wegman, Red Grooms, Claire Van Vliet,
Robert Natkin, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ansel Adams.
Vinzani's work and has been featured in such publications as Hand Papermaking Journal,
The Book of Fine Pape, American Craft Magazine, and Art New England.
He has taught workshops at the Penland School of Crafts, North Carolina,
Haystack School, Maine, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Colorado,
The Southwest Craft Center, Texas, and the International Paper Conference, Boston.
Flat Bay Press
Flat Bay Press is the publishing arm of the collective. We are currently working on a manuscript by Maine Poet Tony Brinkley: a cycle of poems entitled Gomorrah.
Please do not send unsolicited manuscripts. The Press has all the material it can handle at the present time. Any future interest in poetry or prose will be advertised here.