Delmarva Review, a national literary journal with local roots, announced publication of its 16th edition presenting new poetry, short stories, and creative nonfiction from 72 authors in 23 states, the District of Columbia, and four foreign countries. The review publishes the most compelling new writing selected from thousands of submissions during the year.

“Through the author’s voice, we discover new truths about ourselves,” said Wilson Wyatt, executive editor, from St. Michaels. “Perhaps more than anything this describes our connections with literature and the reasons to pursue the best.”

Since its beginning in 2008, Delmarva Review has published new literary prose and poetry from 550 authors in 47 states, the District of Columbia, and 19 foreign countries. Almost half are from the Chesapeake and Delmarva region. Including 2023, ninety will have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Some have attained attention in “best of” anthologies or received public acclaim from other literary critics and editors.

This year’s cover photograph is called “Eye of the Beholder.” It is a fitting description for the Red-tailed hawk’s large “eye,” on the cover, that allows the raptor to focus on its prey with spatial clarity from great heights at high speed.

The review’s editors cull through thousands of submissions to find the best new writing for publication. They read every submission, without regard to an author’s home region or any other factor except the writing quality that makes one gem rise above the rest.

There is no single theme except for the “uncomfortable reality of change.” Topics naturally include dealing with grief, sickness, death, acceptance, love, human freedoms, aging, and life’s uncertainties. Storytelling is always about change.

Delmarva Review was created to offer authors a valued home to publish their best writing at a time when many commercial publications were reducing literary content or closing their doors.

Announcing the Talbot Arts High School Mentorship-Scholarship Winner:

The editors are pleased to include the 2023 winner of the Delmarva Review-Talbot County Youth Writing Scholarship award. In partnership with Talbot County Schools and supported by a grant from Talbot Arts, the review selected a personal essay by Mia Mazzeo, a junior at Easton High School, in Easton, Maryland.

The winning student collaborated with the managing editor, as a writing mentor, to prepare for publication in this issue, and she received a monetary award.

Announcing The Best of the Delmarva Review; Submissions are paused for 2024:

The review is pleased to announce “The Best of the Delmarva Review” anthology will be published in 2024. It will include the editors’ selections of the best poetry, short fiction, and nonfiction published in the review since its founding sixteen years ago.
The normal submissions period will be paused now through 2024 allowing editors to focus on selecting the best work of the 550 writers who have been published in the Delmarva Review since 2008.

Information about the anthology and future submissions will be made periodically on the website.

In addition to Wyatt, the journal’s editorial staff includes Bill Gourgey, managing editor, of Washington, DC, poetry editor Anne Colwell, of Milton, DE, poetry assistant editor Katherine Gekker, of Alexandria, VA, fiction senior editor Harold O. Wilson, of Chester, MD, fiction coeditors Lee Slater, of Norfolk, VA, and Judy Reveal, of Greenville, MD, nonfiction editor Ellen Brown, of Duluth, MN, Gerald F. Sweeney, book review editor, of Easton, MD, and student intern, Sawyer Gourgey, assistant website manager, from Washington, DC.

Biographical information on each member of the editorial staff is listed on the review’s website (see below). All are volunteers who are experienced in their fields.

As an independent, 501(c)(3) nonprofit literary publisher, the journal greatly appreciates the financial support it receives from individual tax-deductible contributions and a public grant from Talbot Arts, with revenues from the Maryland State Arts Council.
The Delmarva Review, Vol. 16, is available in paperback and electronic editions from most major online booksellers. The print edition is also available at regional specialty bookstores. For more information, see the website: DelmarvaReview.org

 

Let’s start with First Night December – Dec. 1 in Rock Hall with pianist and impresario Joe Holt’s concert presentation of “It’s Almost Christmas, Charlie Brown.” The show is a tribute in song to Charles Schulz’s holiday TV classics by the late jazz pianist and composer Vince Guaraldi, who pretty much defined the “Peanuts” animated soundtrack. Drummer Greg Burrows and bassist Tom Baldwin join Holt at Rock Hall’s “home of musical magic,” The Mainstay, 5753 N. Main St. Showtime begins at 8.

mainstayrockhall.org

Chestertown’s Garfield Center for the Arts gift wraps its production of the 2019 screenplay adaptation based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic novel “Little Women,” which begins and ends on Christmas Day, 15 years apart. The Off-Broadway debut of Kate Hamill’s revision brings still-relevant women’s issues to light while still focusing on the March family of a mother and her daughters growing into adulthood while their father is off to defend the Union during the Civil War. The play runs on weekends, Dec. 1-17.

garfieldcenter.org 

’Peake Players, the student theater company of Chesapeake College at Wye Mills, brings “The Snow Show” – a mash-up of 18th- and 19th-century Christmas tales – to the stage of Todd Performing Arts Center, Dec. 7-9. The plot, such as it is, finds a family stuck in a snowbank on the way to Grandpa’s place. Pushing a wheelbarrow uphill, Grandpa struggles to come to their rescue. But he can’t make it without the help of dancers moving to tunes inspired by characters from “The Little Match Girl,” “Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox,” and “The Beggar King” in this multicultural celebration.

chesapeake.edu/peake-players

Church Hill Theatre’s holiday season offering is a staged version of Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” based on the 1938 radio version directed by Orson Welles and starring Lionel Barrymore as Scrooge. (No, we’re not expecting either of those late-greats to appear as the Ghost of Christmas Past.) But you can catch this adaptation at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Dec. 15 and 16, or matinees at 2 on Dec. 16 and 17 at 103 Walnut St., Church Hill.

churchhilltheatre.org

Adkins Arboretum in Ridgely invites you to ride along with them to Kennett Square, Pa., to enjoy the ever-popular, always-spectacular “A Longwood Christmas” – as in Longwood Gardens. Upon arrival, take a walk and a look around the botanical wonders, indoors and out, before settling down – maybe you can find a cozy spot next to a firepit – to experience the wondrous show of a half-million lights entwined in a botanically inspired configuration to create a visual rivaling the best Fourth of July fireworks you’ve ever seen. (Sunset at this post-daylight-savings time of year is 4:35 or so.)

The bus trip departs Aurora Park Drive in Easton at 1 p.m., 20 minutes later at the U.S. 50/Route 404 park and ride, and 1:45 at the park and ride at Routes 301/291, Millington. The return trip begins at 8 p.m. and arrives at 10-ish at Queen Anne’s and Talbot stops. Members of Adkins get a $40 discount on advance reservations. (If you miss the bus trip, “A Longwood Christmas” runs through Jan. 7 with Christmas Day and a few more days off.) Meanwhile, coming up at Adkins: Although it will still be several days short of winter on Sunday, Dec. 10, you can get a taste and up-close view of the season with a guided walk through the arboretum’s Caroline County meadows, woodland, and wetlands led by Margan Glover revealing sounds and sights of thrumming woodpeckers, dry forest weeds abloom and unfrozen creeks trickling. 

adkinsarboretum.org

Temple B’nai Israel in Easton, more widely known regionally as the Salter Center for Jewish Life on the Eastern Shore, holds an ecumenical Community Menorah Lighting, 5-6:30 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10, led by Rabbi Peter Hyman. The first night of Hanukkah is observed at the temple on Dec. 8 with a candle lighting and a new-member Shabbat service with guest cantorial soloist Anita Stoll. Hanukkah observances will continue each evening through the eighth night, with a final candle lighting at 4:26.
bnaiisraeleaston.org

Easton Choral Arts Society didn’t steal my “Home for the Holidays” line for its annual Christmastime concerts at Christ Church. We both “borrowed” it from Perry Como’s holiday hit of the same name – “There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays” – released in 1954. So, I wouldn’t be surprised if that classic made it to the playlist for performances at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 7, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10. Artistic director Alexis Renee Ward promises a musical travelog, from Southern gospel and Midwestern regional folk to Northeastern folk rock and West Coast cinematic soundtracks. But the highlight may well be the world premiere of “Santa Lucia” composed by Ward, based on the Festival of Lights first observed on these shores by 17th-century settlers along the Delaware River. The ecumenical program of secular and sacred music includes works celebrating Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, as well as Christmas. The winter holidays, indeed.

eastonchoralarts.org 

Dorchester Center for the Arts hosts its annual “Merry Market” show and sale where you can peruse potential holiday gifts no one else will find on Amazon or at whatever mall that still exists. That’s what Shop Small Saturday, the day after Black Friday, is all about. Member artists display various finely crafted art, including pottery, jewelry, candles, and more, along with paintings, small sculptures, and other art constructs. Meet many of the artists at DCA’s Second Saturday reception on Dec. 9. But while you’re at it, don’t overlook the center’s current exhibit, the “Red Zone Project,” drawn from the Human Trafficking Awareness Art Project as part of the partnership of the Talbot-based For All Seasons crisis center with the Dorchester Detention Center. Not so merry, merry. But, as they say, there but for the grace of God (or whomever) go I. Both shows run through Dec. 23 at 321 High St., Cambridge.

dorchesterarts.org

***

It’s not exactly a holiday, but it’s well worth celebrating the career of Don Buxton, who is retiring from 30-plus years as executive director of Chesapeake Music. But his influence and leadership in music on the Shore stretches beyond his extraordinary accomplishments at CM. Besides establishing the top-notch Chesapeake Chamber Music Festival that ushers in the summertime with notes of inspiration and artistry, the springtime Chesapeake International Chamber Music Competition for Young Professionals showcases the talents and promise of the next generation of virtuoso geniuses. 

But beyond Chesapeake Music, Buxton was a central figure in establishing a professional symphony orchestra in Easton and the Delmarva Peninsula, serving as conductor in the inaugural seasons of the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra. In celebration of his career, CM presents its “Salute to Don Buxton” with a video presentation too short to cover all his merits, but also a performance by Chesapeake Music co-artistic directors – cellist Marcy Rosen and violinist Catherine Cho – as well as fellow chamber festival stalwarts pianist Diana Walsh and violist Todd Phillips. Expect only the best in honor of Don Buxton, 3 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 10, at the elegant Ebenezer Theatre. Chesapeake Music headquarters are next door in downtown Easton.

chesapeakemusic.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts writer and editor now living in Easton.

Remarkably, 50 years after the assassination, seven of the surviving doctors who attended President John K. Kennedy at Parkland Hospital in Dallas were interviewed for a documentary, “JFK: What the Doctors Saw,” now streaming a decade later on Parliament +. 

Several of those doctors – along with others who have since died – were among those I was scheduled to interview for the Baltimore Sun in 1976 when the House Select Committee on Assassinations was investigating the murders of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. (More later on what became – or didn’t – of my attempt to interview those who tried to save JFK’s life 60 years ago on Nov. 22.)

As directed by Barbara Shearer, “What the Doctors Saw” is just that. There is no sidetracking – nothing about Lee Harvey Oswald except his claim to be a “patsy” in denying that he was the assassin, whether alone or with help. We don’t even hear a word about what we’ve all known for six decades – that Jack Ruby murdered Oswald just two days after JFK was shot dead.

What we do hear over and over, almost ad nauseam is that each doctor observed what they consistently and unanimously maintain was a dime-sized entry wound at the president’s throat, subsequently obscured by a tracheotomy in a futile attempt to resuscitate him. The massive wound they observed on the right at the back of his skull was unquestionably, to all of them, an exit wound. Any such bullet entering and exiting in that manner would have to have come from the front or slightly to the right of the president from his back seat in the fatal limousine. It could not possibly have been shot from behind – a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository where Oswald was working on the day of the assassination. Other shots causing a shallow wound in the president’s back and another that seriously wounded then-Texas Governor John Connally in the front seat of the limousine did come from that direction.

Most disturbing in the documentary are recollections by Dr. Robert McClellan and others that a dark-suited man they took to be a Secret Service agent approached Dr. Malcolm Perry, the lead surgeon of the Parkland team, in Trauma Room 1 after he announced the president’s death and described an entry wound to the throat. “You must never call that an entrance wound again if you know what’s good for you,” McClellan quoted the presumed member of JFK’s security detail.

More suspicious, if not downright conspiratorial, was the apparently botched presidential autopsy, as recalled by Jim Jenkins, the one surviving member of the naval team conducting it. Under Texas law, an autopsy resulting from a deadly crime must be conducted in the county of jurisdiction. But the Parkland doctors and investigators of the assassination say that the Secret Service muscled the president’s body into a vehicle bound for Love Field and a flight to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The autopsy was performed at Bethesda Naval Hospital by two military physicians who were not pathologists and had virtually no experience performing autopsies.

While the documentary strongly suggests a government coverup that resulted in a rubber-stamp lone-assassin verdict by the Warren Commission on Sept. 24, 1964 – barely two months before the presidential election that resulted in President Lyndon Johnson’s first full term in office – there are arguably benign motives behind this rush to judgment. The Cuban Missile Crisis, resolved peacefully just more than a year before JFK’s assassination, involved a former member of the Marine Corps – Oswald – who defected to the Soviet Union and returned to the U.S. with no apparent action taken against him. Johnson is heard in a recorded conversation regarding the Warren report that it would help avert a third world war and save millions of lives. 

We’ll never know, of course. And most likely, after 60 years, we’ll never know the whole truth about the JFK assassination. 

But personally, I’m disappointed that the questions asked in this documentary were not asked before a half-century had passed. At least they were asked before all the Parkland doctors had passed on. The Sun was prepared to ask those questions of the same doctors – when, back in 1976, many of them were still working at Parkland. Based on my front-page story derived from House Select Assassinations Committee leaks and an interview with photographic expert witness Robert Grodin, Sun managing editor Paul Banker authorized my trip to Dallas with autopsy photographs turned over to the panel. My mission: Ask the doctors I had contacted – including one attending Connally – about what they saw when the president and the governor were brought to trauma rooms 1 and 2 on Nov. 22, 1963. 

Accompanied by an attorney who would notarize their comments about the photographs, I boarded a flight to Houston from Baltimore-Washington International with a subsequent connection to Dallas. The flight, however, was delayed more than three hours after a fuel truck struck a wing of our TWA jetliner. Engineers from McDonnell Douglas were consulted about safety concerns. We arrived in Houston too late for flight connections to Dallas and had little chance of getting there by car rental before the early Saturday tee times for four of the doctors I was to interview. 

In a 1975 TV interview with Geraldo Rivera, Grodin, and Dick Gregory introduced a home movie of the assassination, shot by Abraham Zapruder in shocking color. A year later, after being introduced by one of my sources, Grodin agreed to give me copies of JFK autopsy photos for the purpose of showing them to the Parkland doctors. In a minority report as part of the House probe, Grodin argued that the official autopsy photos were doctored to make the massive wound toward the back of Kennedy’s head – much of his brain was exposed with bits of it splattered on Jacqueline Kennedy’s pink suit – to resemble a nickel-sized entry wound. 

The photos that the doctors called fakes in the Paramount + documentary appear to my eyes to be the same images I had in my possession 48 years ago. But, unbeknownst to me, my most conspiratorially minded source had made his own way to Dallas. Freaked out and suspecting some sort of foul play at BWI, he called my boss in the middle of the night, advising him to call the FBI and speculating that the CIA had targeted me. Though I had arranged interviews with Parkland doctors the following weekend, I was taken off the story. And the photocopies were returned. With nothing to show the doctors but grainy black-and-white Xeroxes, the reporter sent in my stead to Dallas came up empty.

So, that’s my excuse for never getting to ask the doctors what they saw. But what about the rest of the news media? Why didn’t anyone else step forward to ask the doctors what they saw on Nov. 22, 1963? I procured the photographs surreptitiously. But they’ve long since been published. Maybe it’s the mishandling of JFK assassination investigations that launched our national doubts about the official line fueling our current conspiracy-theory gullibility.

I have a novel on weird theories about JFK and 9/11. Unpublished – like my best shot in 1976 for a Pulitzer in investigative reporting. It’s called “Camelot and the Second Coming.” Tell me if you know a likely agent.

Steve Parks is a retired reporter, editor, and critic now living in Easton.

From the perspective of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum, there was no one more perfect to be the featured artist for the public opening of its brand new visitors center next month than jazz musician Anthony Turk Cannon. While Cannon did have excellent credentials after two successful decades as both a composer and saxophonist, it was his family legacy of watermen and a lifelong relationship with the CBMM that made that decision so easy for the museum’s leadership.

The Cannon family story is a powerful one. After generations of watermen working out of St. Michaels, Anthony’s father had different aspirations for his five children than carrying on a family tradition. After a lifetime on the water, Turk, as Anthony’s father was known, pushed hard for his kids to break away and find more secure and safe careers than the backbreaking life on the water.

In Anthony’s case, baseball was his ticket off the Shore. With a full scholarship at Howard University and then a successful career in cyber security with government agencies in Washington, DC, Cannon did fulfill his father’s hopes, but even after most of his adult life in the capital city, it is St. Michaels that remains his real home.

And it was in St. Michaels that Anthony found his love of music. Sadly, though, that passion had to be put on hold during college and while establishing himself in the technology field. But 22 years ago, he found that passion again after visiting some of the District’s best jazz clubs and has blossomed ever since with sold-out concerts at venues like Jazz Alley and the Rams Head.

The Spy sat down with Anthony last week to hear about this remarkable journey, his relationship with CBMM, and what he has planned for December 2 when he once again comes home to St Michaels.

This video is approximately four minutes in length. CBMM is hosting a Grand Opening for its new Welcome Center on Dec. 2 from 10am-4pm. For more information please go here.

Although the standard classical music repertoire is vast, until recently much of the typical symphony orchestra playlist was dominated by greatest-hits masterworks by long-dead European composers with rock-star names – Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky. Although each of the three pieces performed by the Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra Friday night in Rehoboth Beach (reprised this weekend in Ocean City and at Chesapeake College) were also composed by long-dead European composers – one that even the principal players who performed her overture had never heard of – it may as well have been a world premiere to those in attendance in the acoustically bright Epworth United Methodist Church sanctuary.

Never mind that it was written in 1873, the Overture in D major, Op. 43 by pioneering Swedish composer Elfrida Andree was new even to many players on stage before they began rehearsing it. (Full disclosure: I never heard of her before either.) Andree was considered pioneering largely because she was female. Women composers and conductors, such as herself, were a minority rarely recognized or even given a chance to publish or perform their works. Her thrilling overture fell well within the late Romantic idiom of the time, but with beautiful deviations. Surprising and lovely solos pop up throughout the piece, largely by woodwinds and French horn, led in the 43-player MSO ensemble by first flutist Mindy Heinsohn, first oboist Dana Newcomb, first clarinetist Jay Niepotter and first bassoonist Kari Shea.

In part because the woodwind section was so instrumental to this performance, Heinsohn, a 2004 Easton High School alum and graduate of the Yale School of Music and Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, was chosen to make opening remarks about the program before introducing concertmaster Kim McCollum, followed by the entrance of music director Michael Repper. He wasted no time diving into this remarkable rediscovery, which, besides the woodwind solos, is marked also by soaring first-violin melodies.

And that was just the first 20 minutes of the concert. The Symphonic Variations by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a promisingly mature piece for a composer who died in 1912 at the age of 37, came next. Inspired by an African-American poem, “I Am Troubled in Mind,” the variations flow from one into another without pause along a theme established by brass instruments, principally tuba, trombones and French horns, led by Zach Bridges, Jeffrey Gaylord and Michael Hall, respectively. Without the usual pauses between variations, the piece flows like a cascading river that helped make Coleridge-Taylor a trans-Atlantic superstar at a time when his racial identity might not have been widely known. (No Facebook or Instagram.) Posthumously, much of his music was not recognized then in the music industry and is no longer published. As a result, much of his work is new again in our time.

After intermission, Mendelssohn’s historically significant Symphony No. 5, better known as the “Reformation Symphony,” turns the concert program back to traditional classical music sources though not exactly in the greatest-hits category. Not that it is deficient as a masterwork, but it is on a once-controversial theme. Religious uprisings, even of centuries past, linger in the minds of future generations. The Reformation, of course, refers to the Protestant revolt against Catholic hegemony, particularly in Europe.

The four-movement symphony proclaims which side Mendelssohn is on with a salute to Martin Luther, founder of the Protestant Reformation widely credited as author of the hymn translated from German into “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The opening Andante, appropriately solemn and contemplative, gives way to a joyful and exuberant second movement Allegro Vivace, as if celebrating the Reformation to come, though it had already advanced 300 years earlier with the “Augsburg Confession” enumerating Lutheranism articles of faith. The third-movement Andante offers a melodic respite from controversy that melds without pause into the full orchestra, fourth-movement statement of resolve and determination with a glory-be finish, which left some in the audience hesitant, at first, to offer a standing ovation. Was that three or four movements?

No matter, the “Reformation Symphony” was a fitting conclusion to a greatest-hits medley of gems many of us have never heard before. Hopefully, it’s part of an accumulating trend. The Metropolitan Opera has been trying to recruit new, younger audiences by staging works by living artists on contemporary themes. Credit Repper and the MSO for unearthing great music by composers whose work has been buried by centuries-old racial and gender biases. Bravo.

Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra

Opening concert, Nov. 3, Rehoboth Beach, followed by concerts 3 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 4, Ocean City Performing Arts Center, and Sunday, Nov. 5, Todd Performing Arts Center, Chesapeake College, Wye Mills. midatlanticsymphony.org

Except for the centerpiece tulips, colors are muted on Church Hill Theatre’s set for the laugh-out-loud profanity of French author Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage.”

The 2009 Tony winner for Best Play, translated into American vernacular by Christopher Hampton, reminds us that you’re on your own regardless of marital status.

A pair of 11-year-olds – Benjamin and Henry, who we never see in this four-hand, four-letter-word dramedy – got into an argument that ends in the latter child losing two incisors as the former clobbers him with a stick. The assailant’s parents are invited by the victims to “discuss the situation.” Veronica, Henry’s mom, makes clafouti (a dessert) for the occasion. Michael, her husband, offers coffee but serves espresso on request. Annette guardedly accepts, but her husband, Alan, an attorney, digs in – literally and figuratively. At the start, both parties are edgily polite. But you sense it can’t last.

Alan tests everyone’s patience by incessantly answering his cell phone to conduct business that takes precedence over the matter at hand. While the decorum dissipates gradually, it’s splattered for good when Annette vomits over and under the coffee table where Veronica’s out-of-print art books are stacked.

J.W. Ruth serves up a deliciously contemptible Alan. (Didn’t he hear the warning to silence all cell phones as we settled into comfy new seats at Church Hill?) Worse, he’s slickly devising a cover-up of a pharmaceutical company’s new drug that’s making people bump into the furniture – including Michael’s landline mom – also unseen. Ruth delivers the title line with Alan’s smug contempt of good manners.

Played with on-his-best-behavior artifice by Christopher Wallace, Michael is a hardware and home-goods wholesaler – think toilet fixtures – who’s a rock until he isn’t. Michael is in way over his head, intellectually and temperamentally, with his wife. She’s writing a book about Darfur during the African nation’s outbreak of genocidal atrocities. Christine Kinlock imbues Veronica with a rage that she struggles to contain to preserve her judgmentally arch notion of civility.

As Annette, whose career is in “wealth management” – her husband’s – Brianna Johnson fidgets nervously while seated on one of two sofas anchoring a spare living-room set designed by director Michael Whitehill before she loses all control – first by not holding it in and then by holding back not at all once rum replaces espresso as the beverage of choice.

Whitehill directs this well-cast civil-to-savage quartet as if they were changing-partners square dancers, switching sides with each virulent shift in allegiance. Think your spouse is on your side? Think again. Not even a child’s pet hamster is spared in this domestic jungle. 

‘God of Carnage’

Fridays-Sundays through Nov. 19, opening 8 p.m. Nov. 3, Sunday matinees at 2, Church Hill Theatre, 103 Walnut St., Church Hill. churchhilltheatre.org

Steve Parks is a retired New York arts critic now living in Easton.