Year-round residents from Provincetown, Truro, Wellfleet, Eastham, Orleans, Brewster, Harwich, and Chatham are eligible to apply for the Truro Center for the Arts annual “60+” program of free workshops for seniors. The courses are “Pastels,” with Rob DuToit, Mondays and Wednesdays, from 10 a.m. to noon, October 19th through November 4th; “Poetry,” with Kate Wallace Rogers, Mondays and Thursdays, from 10 a.m. to noon, November 2nd through November 19th; and “Printmaking,” with Vicky Tomayko, Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 10a.m. to noon, October 20th through November 5th.The classes will be held virtually this year, via Zoom. Applications are available on thecastlehill.org website. Space is limited: participants are chosen by lottery and will be notified of admission on October 14th.
Truro Center for the Arts
Scarf It Down
Dahlia Popovits is teaching a scarf weaving class at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill at 10 Meeting house Road. Join her Monday, September 21st, and Tuesday, September 22nd, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The course costs $150, plus $50 for materials. Register at castlehill.org.
Scarf It Down
Dahlia Popovits is teaching a scarf weaving class at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill at 10 Meeting house Road. Join her Monday, September 21st, and Tuesday, September 22nd, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. The course costs $150, plus $50 for materials. Register at castlehill.org.
Create Sketchbooks With Mark Adams and Nick Flynn
Artist and cartographer Mark Adams, a regular contributor to the Independent, and poet Nick Flynn, his frequent partner in creative endeavors,have reunited for a non-campus course, “The Sketchbook Journal: Writing and Drawing in the Field,” at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill at 10 Meetinghouse Road in Truro. The course will take place in four sessions, from Monday, September 14th, through Thursday, September 17th, from 9 a.m. to noon. The class, limited during the pandemic to seven students, will meet on Zoom first, then outdoors, “foraging for words and images.” The cost is $455. Sign up at castlehill.org.
Isn’t It Mitch?
There will be an opening reception for painter Mitchell Johnson at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, 10 Meetinghouse Road, on Thursday, September 10th, 4 to 6p.m. The show is on view through September 18th. Johnson’s upcoming course at Castle Hill is sold out.
our picks for the week of July 30 through August 5
Indie’s Choice
Outer Cape Calendar
An Artist’s Lot

The Arts Foundation of Cape Cod is hosting an online silent auction starting on Thursday, July 23, at noon through Sunday, Aug. 9, at 9:30 p.m., featuring art by Traci Harmon-Hay, Sarah Lutz, Pete Hocking, and others. There will also be a live auction, streaming from the Chatham Bars Inn on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 6 p.m., with works by Donald Beal, Cynthia Packard, and more. Visit artsfoundation.org to register and bid.
Into the Woods
The Mass Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary is offering a few socially distanced activities. Among them is a kayak trip through Nauset Marsh in Eastham on Friday, July 31, at 8:30 a.m., tickets $70-$85 (call 508-349-2615 to register); and a full moon hike on Monday, Aug. 3, at 7:30 p.m., tickets $14, children free (register at massaudubon.org).
Advice Versa
The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown is hosting a virtual one-hour poetry workshop led by Nick Flynn that is designed to inspire unexpected and surprising new poems on Thursday, July 30, at 6 p.m. Registration is $10 at fawc.org.
Ukulele Lady
The Eastham Public Library is holding a virtual ukulele workshop with Julie Stepanek on Saturday, Aug. 1, at 1 p.m. Ages six and up are welcome. There is also a live-streaming animal show via Zoom on Tuesday, Aug. 4, at 5 p.m. Go to easthamlibrary.org to register; both events are free.
Feed Your Ears
The Wellfleet Pearl restaurant continues with live music daily (except Monday) from 3 to 5 p.m., no cover. Featured this week: Catie Flynn Band (Thursday, July 30), Boston Naturals (Friday, July 31), Pitchfork (Saturday, Aug. 1), Bruce Maclean (Sunday, Aug. 2), Brandon Manter (Tuesday, Aug. 4), and Jordan Renzi (Wednesday, Aug. 5).
World Tour
Great Music on Sundays @5 presents “Marimba and Piano Global Rhythms” on Sunday, Aug. 2 at 5 p.m. This free live-streaming concert, with Brian Calhoon on marimba, John Thomas on piano, and Chanthoeun Varon Collins on cello, includes music from Argentina, Bulgaria, Italy, Romania, and the U.S. For details, go to ptownmusic.com.
For a Song
Steeple Street Music Academy in Mashpee is running a songwriting competition called Mash-ville. The entry deadline is Saturday, Aug. 1, and you must be at least 13 to enter. The fees: $25 for your first song, $10 for each additional song. The grand prize: two round-trip tickets to Nashville, Tenn. Winners will participate in a songwriting showcase on Aug. 15. Visit steeplestreetmusic.com for details.
Drag Picnic
Marti Gould Cummings in “Picnic in the Park” is coming to Pilgrim House’s outdoor stage from Tuesday, Aug. 4 to Saturday, Aug. 8. Tickets are $35 at pilgrimhouse.com.
Bracelets for BFFs
The Truro Public Library is hosting a virtual friendship bracelet-making class with Sophia and Maggie Prickitt on Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 10:30 a.m. via Zoom. Call 508-487-1125 or email [email protected] to receive the link. Materials will be provided through curbside pickup.
Backyard Boogie
Wellfleet Preservation Hall is presenting a backyard concert series. First up is Zoë Lewis on Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 7 p.m. (rain date Aug. 6). Tickets are $15 for adults, $7.50 for children 13 and under. Groups are limited to six people; bring a blanket or lawn chair. Reserve in advance at wellfleetpreservationhall.org.
Puppet Party
The Provincetown, Truro, and Wellfleet libraries are holding a virtual puppet show, “A Celebration of Imagination,” performed by Caravan Puppets, on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 10:30 a.m. For a Zoom link, email [email protected] with the names and ages of your viewing party.
Painting With Pete
One highlight of the online and on-campus classes offered at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill is “Making Pictures,” with Pete Hocking, which will be held live, from 9 a.m. to noon on Monday, Aug. 3, through Thursday, Aug. 6. The four sessions cost $455. Register at castlehill.org.
Young at Art
The Provincetown Art Association and Museum is offering several live outdoor classes for kids. Hannah Capra teaches “Little Artists Outdoors” on Tuesdays at 10 a.m. for children 4 to 7, and “Young Artists Outdoors” on Thursdays at 10 a.m. for children 8 to 10; both are $40 per session. Grace Emmet teaches “Plein Air Painting” on Fridays at 8:30 a.m. for children 10 to 15, $50 per session. Go to paam.org to register.

Hold the Mayo
The Wellfleet Recreation Dept. is hosting “Virtual Music at Mayo,” an online concert series. The Grab Brothers Band performs on Friday, July 31, at 6:30 p.m., and the Rip It Ups get in the groove on Thursday, Aug. 6, at 6:30 p.m. Visit the Wellfleet Rec’s Facebook page for details.
VIRTUAL ARTS
Charting Courses on the Outer Cape
Brush up your skills during a time of crisis
It wouldn’t be summer on the Outer Cape without courses. And, fortunately, though indoor courses in art and writing are not in the offing at this stage of the coronavirus crisis, there is no dearth of virtual or outdoor options.

Kiah Coble, curator of adult education at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, says that PAAM’s adult courses this summer are about half-and-half online and outdoors. “I am impressed by how quickly teaching artists rose to the occasion,” Coble says. “I was expecting cancellations, but almost everybody wanted to figure out an alternative.”
Instructors of online Zoom classes have taken two approaches: some are opting for the usual six-hour blocks, while others are choosing shorter sessions and allowing students to work independently. They can share the work they’ve accomplished for critique and hoped-for admiration by sending in photos or holding it up to the computer camera.
Though students in adult online classes are generally responsible for their own art materials, they’ll receive at-home silkscreen kits for Vicky Tomayko’s Introduction to Silkscreen Printing, running from July 27 to Aug. 7. Even so, materials aren’t usually a problem, says Coble: “The biggest barrier to participation is technology, such as access to the internet or a computer.”
Outdoor (or “plein air”) classes taught by John Clayton, Mary Giammarino, Pete Hocking, Aaron Michael Thompson, and Kath Macaulay through August will take place at the beach, in PAAM’s lawn and sculpture garden, or around Provincetown. These are capped at five participants to allow for ample social distancing, so early booking is recommended, and participants must wear masks.

Outdoor art classes are allowed in phase two of Gov. Charlie Baker’s reopening, as well as indoor art classes for children, though Tessa Bry Taylor, PAAM’s curator of youth education, feels it’s still too risky and that state guidelines for arts instructors are not especially clear.
Instead, PAAM is offering its children’s Art Reach program virtually this summer, from July 8 through Aug. 12. “The program is focused on exploring different mediums,” Taylor says. “Each week they take on a new project.” Materials are provided for pickup or delivery, and children can also be creative with objects found around their kitchen or on the beach.
There are also plein air workshops in landscape and watercolor painting for middle school and high school students coming out soon, as well as outdoor “art adventures” for smaller children. “As a parent of two very small children,” Taylor says, “I am even more desperate for this kind of program.” She sees the value in “creative tactile play” and getting children familiar with social distancing in preparation for school.
While Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill only has online adult programming for the time being, plein air classes are planned for its Edgewood Farm campus during August, Executive Artistic Director Cherie Mittenthal says. Its diverse selection of Zoom classes is focused on materiality, in a time when we spend so many hours in the intangible internet domain.
Glenn Grishkoff, for instance, provides materials for his brush-making class (July 20 to 24), and Anna Poor provides blocks of soapstone for her stone-carving class (Aug. 3 to 7). Patricia Miranda is teaching a class on egg tempera on Aug. 17, a good way to use up your overstocked quarantine rations. Clay classes this summer are focused on demonstrations or hand-building, as not everyone has a wheel at home. For those not yet suffering from screen fatigue, there is also a website-building class for artists with Jesse Freidin from July 27 to 31.
Mittenthal says she was unsure of the appeal of online classes at first, since “we are so tactile as artists,” but she’s pleased that people are “taking risks.” The second round of the Yellow Chair Salon, a four-month online artist residency program with Michael David, will start in October. Fellows craft PowerPoint portfolios of their work to share with their peers as well as guest critics. Mittenthal says that Castle Hill’s fall residency program is still up in the air.
The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown is offering a large selection of online writing workshops through its 24 Pearl Street program. These include a workshop on poet Rainer Maria Rilke by Mark Wunderlich, starting June 22; a flash essay workshop with Jill Talbot, starting July 6; and a workshop on pleasure and pain in poetry with Traci Brimhall, starting Aug. 3, among many others.
Many classes involve online lectures and independent writing, but also have “live” Zoom elements such as student meet and greets and virtual readings. In addition to workshops, FAWC is running a series of virtual events with their fellows and faculty, such as a “quarantine dinner conversation” with Marie Howe on June 23.
Finally, the Provincetown Independent is offering a free five-week journalism workshop for high school and middle school students from July 1 to Aug. 5. Participants will create pieces for publication in this newspaper.
Prospective students should sign up early for online classes. It also must be noted that these courses (except for the journalism workshop) are not free: at PAAM, they range from $50 to $400, based on the number of sessions and whether it’s online or plein air; courses at Castle Hill start at $165; and courses at FAWC cost between $400 and $600.
BOOKS
Artistic Collaborations Illuminate Nick Flynn’s Stay
He probes his personal history in spare, elegant poetry and prose
The writer Nick Flynn, whose work has been published in the New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, and a dozen books, came of age as a poet in Provincetown.
He was born in 1960 in Scituate, raised by his mother — his father adrift — and in the mid-1980s, after his mother’s suicide, Flynn moved to Boston and then to Provincetown, where he was a Fine Arts Work Center fellow during the 1990s and FAWC’s writing coordinator. He lived mostly on his houseboat, a 42-foot Chris-Craft, moored seasonally in the harbor. Friends came and went, and ties to this town of artists and renegades continue to ground Flynn’s work.

Especially now, Flynn’s followers will find his recent book, Stay: threads, conversations, collaborations, to be a source of solace, illumination, and a recognizable sense of place.
It’s a braided sequence of artist collaborations and previously published work that provides space for Flynn to plumb his archives and come up with a range of symbolic, aesthetic objects, including family photographs and ephemera.
“Collaborative work with other artists is such an important part of my work process,” Flynn says from his home in Brooklyn. The book includes a late-in-life letter from his difficult, troubling father, Jonathan Flynn, encouraging his son to be a writer. In Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, about the time he was a case worker at Boston’s Pine Street Inn, a homeless shelter, Flynn recounts being at the desk when his father is admitted. Photographs of his mother, Jody Draper, as a young girl, are particularly affecting — she remains a ghostly presence in Flynn’s life and work.
The poet Phil Levine, with whom Flynn studied at New York University, is another significant influence. Levine once returned a poem to Flynn, saying, “You have more light inside you than this.” Levine’s observation leads Flynn to note, in Stay, “I knew I had light inside me, and that somehow I would have to find a way to let some of it into my poems.”
Locally known collaborators whose presence is felt in Stay include Mark Adams, Mischa Richter, Amy Arbus, Nicholas Kahn and Richard Selesnick, Jack Pierson, and M. P. Landis. Their inclusions form a tapestry of Flynn’s friendships — art offers an avenue to keep them close.
His work with Adams, a visual artist and cartographer with the Cape Cod National Seashore, began “when he appeared at one of my readings in the early 1990s,” Flynn says. “Mark is so open and curious. He knows so much.” Adams and Flynn recently did a workshop together at Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, going out onto the dunes, where Adams would paint on pages in Flynn’s books with his signature walnut ink brushstrokes. Stay includes a portrait of Flynn by Adams painted on Flynn’s rendition of the myth of Proteus, the old man of the sea, who loses his way and becomes stranded on an island. In Adams’s portrait, Flynn looks down, his left hand sheltering his eyes. The words “Proteus,” “sea,” “rock,” dislodge,” and “thorns pierce” emerge from the text, suggestively.

From Proteus, Stay segues to a fragment from The Reenactments, Flynn’s memoir of his role as executive producer of the film Being Flynn, an adaptation of Another Bullshit Night. In the excerpt, Flynn finds himself discussing with Julianne Moore, who plays his mother, the pills she took; he also fields questions from director Paul Weitz about the gun his mother used to kill herself. “I get to the edge of knowing, then teeter back and forth,” Flynn writes. “It is all we can do, all I’ve ever done — stand before what I know, and pulse into the unknown.”
Another long-standing connection is with photographer Mischa Richter. “Mischa’s always working on something having to do with Provincetown — I save a lot of my energy for our collaborations,” Flynn says. “We always keep in touch.” Richter’s film about Provincetown, I Am a Town, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art in February. At Richter’s request, Flynn wrote a poem for the film, which became the source of its title. Flynn also wrote a poem for Saudade, Richter’s 2010 book of photographs; here, too, the theme is Provincetown, set against a background of change and loss.

Richter’s photograph Ray accompanies Flynn’s eulogy of beloved outsider artist Ray Nolin, who struggled with mental illness, first published in Provincetown Arts 2016. “Provincetown, when I got here, was a town of eccentrics, of outcasts, of misfits,” Flynn writes. “I was living on a boat then, and for a while, Ray stashed paints and canvases on board. I never knew when I’d find him set up, in the midst of painting.” Flynn describes how Nolin hid and even burned his artwork: “Ray was always working for God, not for you, and that was part of both his beauty and his difficulty.” Now that he’s gone, Flynn writes, addressing those who hid Nolin’s artwork to keep it secure, “If we really understand what Ray was trying to do, all his life, we will burn it.”
Flynn took photographs while living in Boston and includes some self-portraits in Stay. His early collages were assembled from torn pieces of the photographs. Wandering in new cities, he began making collages of ephemeral scraps he glued to cardboard — gum wrappers, grocery lists, drawings. The goal was to map interior as well as exterior space: to find out “where or who or what I am,” he writes.

“My writing is also very collaged,” Flynn says. “The whole book is a collage.” When he puts works next to each other, “the space between them means as much as what’s on the page.” Stay was released in hardcover, calling attention to the white ink embossed on black. The back cover, Flynn says, reads “a light coming on in an empty room.” That line, from his poem “Sudden,” investigates a newspaper reporter’s use of the word “suddenly” to describe his mother’s suicide.
In an excerpt from The Ticking Is the Bomb, which Esquire magazine described as a “painfully beautiful memoir of torture,” Flynn describes a theatrical scene when his daughter, Maeve, was a year and a half old, and he and his wife, actor Lili Taylor, were spending the summer in upstate New York. Flynn observed a light going on and off in Maeve’s room. Maeve, standing in her crib, he writes, was aware “that she was the one controlling” the switch. “Her room, from a distance, pulsed like a huge firefly.”