Lovell Speaker Series introduces Rebecca Buyers

LOVELL — The Charlotte Hobbs Library Speaker Series welcomes Rebecca Buyers on Thursday, March 21 at 7 p.m. Buyers is a photojournalist and author of “The Great Cranberry Island Portrait Project”, a work published in 2023 that combines Buyers’ photos and oral histories of Great Cranberry Islanders with the art of printmaker Janet Best Badger. Created when the duo were artists in residence at the Heiker-LaHotan Foundation, Buyers will read some of the “word portraits” she created after interviewing residents of Great Cranberry Island and will discuss the value of capturing living history in small communities, the joys of collaboration, and the distinction between reporting and oral history, the latter allowing subjects to tell their stories in their own words.

Buyers is also the author of “The Marvelous Macadamia Nut” (1981) and editor of “Angels of the Caribbean, A Chronicle of Resilience” (2016) by Glenroy Browne. Buyers’ career spans the fields of journalism and philanthropy, having worked as a newspaper reporter and photographer for The Bar Harbor Times, The Ellsworth American, and The Mount Desert Islander and as a grant maker at The Maine Community Foundation.

Since 2010, she has traveled and lived abroad, in the sunny Caribbean and under the gray skies of London. She returned to Maine in 2023 with her husband to renovate an historic farmhouse in Sweden where they plan to retire. Buyers is documenting the project on a blog, redhouserenovations.com

This talk is in-person and on Zoom. For details and the link to join virtually, go to www.hobbslibrary.org . For queries, contact the Charlotte Hobbs Memorial Library: 207-925-3177. The Charlotte Hobbs Library Speaker Series is supported in part by a generous contribution from Norway Savings Bank.