Winslow Homer's Herring Net

Herring Hymns and Sardine Songs

Join us from 6:30 - 8 p.m. on Wednesday, August 4th to celebrate our most famous fish: the Herring. Herring Gut Learning Center will host an evening with poets Gary Lawless and Karin Spitfire to celebrate Herring, Sardines, and a way of life that developed along the coast of Maine due to these slippery silver swimmers.

From Gary Lawless's Blog:
We want to spend the summer celebrating the herring, yes the sardines, the little silver darlings, but we also want to celebrate the human cultures which grew up around the sardine fisheries. We want to spawn and promote a number of events around the state centering on the sardine, and the disappearance of the sardine related industry and culture, another kind of extinction.

For our part we plan to present film footage, artifacts, stories and pictures pertaining to Port Clyde Sardines. If you or someone you know has a Port Clyde fishery tale, please come share it that evening. Or send it in if you are shy. We'd like to make this a time to remember an important aspect of our life here in Herring Gut.

Gary Lawless is a Maine native, a poet, teacher, and co-owns Gulf of Maine Books, an independent bookstore in Brunswick, Maine.

Karin Spitfire was the 2007 Poet Laureate of Belfast, Maine and works as a freelance teacher of Women's Studies, a certified practitioner of Body-Mind-Centering and an assistant wilderness guide with Her Wild Song.

The event is free and open to the public.


To be added to our email list for future event listings.Click here.

To see the schedule for this summer's celebration of the scintillating sardine:Click Here