We will hold our yearly Rassemblement in Orono, at the Franco American Centre from April 26 – 28, 2019. As in the past, we will open our gathering at 5pm at the Franco American Centre with a dinner (optional potluck — no worries if you can’t bring something). And, as before, we plan to have sessions all day Saturday and wrap up on Sunday.
We welcome presentations in French and in English. Depending upon who is joining us, we can arrange for some basic (google!) translation support if we have the text in advance.
Second, we invite those of you who are interested to present work based upon this year’s theme, The Ship of Culture. We would like to engage this idea specifically on Friday evening after dinner but imagine that it might thread through our entire weekend. We are looking for a few presentations for Friday evening that engage these ideas to begin our discussion.
Third, we’d like a couple presentations to wrap up on Sunday that would be in dialogue with Dean Louder’s oeuvre. Dean was a frequent attendee to our gatherings (he often wrote about them on his blog) and was well known for his work on Franco Americans. He uniquely conceptualized Franco Americans within a larger, continental context and placed Franco Americans within the historical and geographical context of French presence in North America. We think finishing our time together with this larger, more continental view might be an interesting way to end our weekend.
Finally, we are going to break up Saturday with a picnic lunch by the Stillwater River, and we are going to dedicate Saturday evening to a staged reading of Abby Paige’s new play. We invite you to bring instruments and music; we will have snacks for hanging out after Abby is done.
For those of you who are interested, on Friday April 26, 2019 before the Rassemblement, the Franco American Centre is organizing a panel of historians to present on Franco Americans in World War I. This panel is organized in coordination with the University’s Humanities Center. We specifically organized this panel on this day in case any of you wanted to come early to see these presentations and to allow the presenters to stay the weekend with us.
If you would like to present and/or intend on joining us for meals, please sign up so we can plan accordingly. We have drafted a tentative schedule that we will keep updated.
We will provide food for Saturday and Sunday morning, though we are asking that you cover the cost of your lodging if you can. We have organized a room block of singles and doubles at the University Inn in Orono of 15 rooms. The name of the room block is “Franco American Writers Gathering” and is for April 26 and 27, 2019. The rate is $107 (before taxes); you need to call them (800.321.4921) to get that rate. The hotel will hold the room block until April 12. If you need help with lodging, let us know, and we will do what we can.