Author Event: Brenda Gilchrist

Blue Hill, Maine - Deer Isle author Brenda Gilchrist will read from her new memoir, Walzing with Bracey: The Long Reach Home at the Blue Hill Public Library on Thursday September 27th at 7:00 PM. The book tells the story of how Gilchrist’s charming little corgie dog helps her “take on” her ancestral summer house in Deer Isle that she inherited, and “face up to the ghosts of her overachieving and rather intimidating forbears.”
In the book she tells of steamship Atlantic crossings, sailing on Penobscot Bay, hobnobbing with New York’s cultural elite as Praeger’s senior art books editor and finding her adventurous furry companion. She also touches on the history of her family (her great-grandfather, Charles Loring Brace, was a noted social reformer and a friend of Charles Darwin), the house (which was designed by Alexander Wadsworth Longfellow, the poet’s nephew) and the assortment of interesting and noted folks who visited (John Steinbeck camped in the driveway on the first leg of the cross-country trip chronicled in Travels with Charley).

Brenda Gilchrist spent her childhood in London and settled in New York City as a young adult, visiting a number of exciting places abroad such as Paris, Karachi and Kashmir to visit with her mother and diplomat father. Brenda Gilchrist's career was in the New York art and publishing worlds.  She was senior editor in charge of the Art Books Division at Praeger Publishers and general editor of the Smithsonian Illustrated Library of Antiques series. Since moving to Maine, she has written, illustrated and designed books published by Braceypoint Press. Now in her 80s, she has retired to her Deer Isle cottage that has now been winterized.

Books will be available for sale and signing.  For more information, call the Library at 374-5515.