Abbot Public Library hosts a literary festival

MARBLEHEAD – The newly renovated Abbot Public Library hosted numerous authors on Friday who discussed their books and the process of writing one yourself. It was the first day of a literary festival taking place at the library through July 7 as part of the city’s Festival of Arts.

On Friday, Alexander Brash opened the day’s lectures with a discussion of his book “A Whaler at Twilight”, a non-fiction companion work to Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick”.

Brash said the book is based on his great-great-grandfather Robert Armstrong, a whaler who traveled the world in search of whales and absolution.

Brash recounted how he learned about Armstrong and described how, as a scholar at the Yale School of Forestry, he went to Provincetown, where he spotted a humpback whale off the coast.

“It was fascinating, both because of its colossal size and because it immediately aroused curiosity,” Brash read from his book.

After this experience, he told his parents the story of the whale sighting and his mother mentioned that there was a whaling tradition in her family.

Although Brash said he was fascinated by this, he let decades pass without asking further questions about his whaler lineage.

“I was busy, I was in graduate school … then I got a job, then I got married and then I had kids,” he said.

Brash said when he retired and had time to research his family history, he went back to his mother and asked her where he could find information about his great-great-grandfather.

His mother told him to take a trunk out of the back of her closet and look for a little black book and a map. When he found Armstrong’s 100-page autobiography, he read it and said it was a “really, really fascinating story.”

This autobiography later became a key part of A Whaler at Twilight, and the map led Brash around the world following Armstrong’s footsteps. Brash also found Armstrong’s diaries at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, which he used as a mouthpiece for his book.

The book describes Armstrong’s sailing voyages from New Bedford to the Galápagos Islands and New Zealand. A Whaler at Twilight also describes the history of whaling and includes Brash’s own commentary and retellings of his great-great-grandfather’s stories.

For more information about the talks and workshops at the Abbot Library Literary Festival, visit https://www.marbleheadfestival.org/literary-events.