If you want to appear, turn to another.
--FANNY HOWE

Join us on October 15^th, on what would have been Fanny Howe’s 86th birthday, for a warm, welcoming gathering in her honor. Emceed by John Mulrooney, the event will bring together a group of Howe’s Boston-area friends—including Jim Dunn, Keith Jones, Penny Janeway, Richard Kearney, Ruth Lepson, and Linda Norton--for a loving and lively conversation.

As in our previous Oral History Initiative events, this will be less a scholarly panel than a constellation of vibrant memories, as participants share their favorite stories about Fanny as a friend, poet, thinker, and singular presence, whose way of being in the world altered and enlarged the worlds of those around her. Our hope is to create a generous, loving, complex and richly-textured portrait of our late friend, the likes of which we shall not see again. Audience members will also be invited to contribute their own reminiscences of Howe, who graced the Boston-Cambridge community with her presence for the better part of 80 years.
 

The event will close with a video, "Fanny, as in..." created by Sue Schardt.

Please note: We regret that the Reception that we had planned for after the event will need to be canceled due to an unexpected staffing shortage. But, Grolier Bookshop has kindly agree to be on hand at the Carpenter Center to sell Fanny's This Poor Book and the new issue of spoKe magazine, a substantive tribute issue dedicated to Fanny Howe and Danielle Legros Georges. And, if you have time and energy, some of us are hoping to head over to Fanny's favorite restaurant (Nubar) afterwards to raise a toast in her honor.

IN-PERSON ATTENDANCE: Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts auditorium,
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, Mass. Free and open to the public. 

ONLINE ATTENDANCE: Live-streaming is available via the WPR YouTube Channel. 
  



ABOUT THE PANELISTS:
 

JOHN MULROONEY, a.k.a. our moderator, is the author of Spooky Action (Dos Madres Press) and If You See Something, Say Something (Anchorite Press) and co-producer of the award-winning documentary The Peacemaker. He performs music in Rusty Doves. His long friendship with Fanny began in a blizzard, during which they took refuge at the bar of the Commander Hotel. They bonded over poetry, movies, and their ambivalence about Boston. 

JIM DUNN is the author of such collections as Angry Bull’s Cadence (The Bodily Press, 2025) and This Silence is a Junkyard (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022).  He met Fanny at her memorable reading with John Wieners at Waterstone’s in 1998. They bonded over mutual acquaintances, poetry, laughter, Harry Crosby, and a love of the North Shore, becoming  lifelong tried and true friends.
 

PENNY JANEWAY has worked as an editor, teacher, and freelance writer for such publications as The New York Times. She first met Fanny in 1966 at a party for the Atlantic Monthly, where Penny’s husband Michael C. Janeway (later editor-in-chief of the Boston Globe) had recently been hired. 
 

KEITH JONES is the author of Echo’s Errand and the forthcoming Las Palmas, In A House No Longer There (Black Ocean). He met Fanny through Bill Corbett, and in the back booth at Grafton’s, where Bill once held court, they became comrades and co-conspirators. In a crucial time of parenting, teaching, and poeting, she was a kind and steadying friend, mentor, and interlocutor.

RICHARD KEARNEY holds the Charles Seelig Chair of Philosophy at Boston College and is the author of many books on philosophy and imagination. He has known Fanny since 2009, when they met here in Boston and co-founded with Sheila Gallagher the Guestbook Project in narrative hospitality. Close friends ever since, Fanny visited with Richard in his native Ireland almost every year until her passing.
 

RUTH LEPSON is the author of On the Way: New and Selected Poems (MadHat Press) and poet- in-residence emerita at the New England School of Music. She dreamed of renting a place with Fanny, and years later Fanny asked if she could move in to her place for a semester. You never know....
 

LINDA NORTON was an Acquisitions editor at the University of California Press, when she published Fanny Howe’s Selected Poems in 2000. In 2011, Fanny wrote an introduction to Linda’s first book, The Public Gardens: Poems and History, published by Bill Corbett’s Pressed Wafer. Fanny and Linda saw each other for the last time in Dublin, in April 2025, not long before Fanny died.
 

SUE SCHARDT, a filmmaker and dear friend of Fanny’s, writes: “Fanny and I have been collaborators and close companions over the last seven years, spending much of our time meandering byways far and near. I made “Fanny, as in...” for tonight’s event, which coincides with her 86th birthday.

Cover photograph by Christina Davis.