Author Lowry is featured Shaker Village speaker April 12

NEW GLOUCESTER — Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village will present a special discussion and audience Q&A with author Lois Lowry and Brother Arnold Hadd at 6 p.m. Monday, April 12, via Zoom.
The talk is fee and open to the public of all age groups. Registration is at at maineshakers.com. It will also be live-streamed on Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village’s Facebook page Optional donations are accepted.
The discussion will feature Lowry’s book “Like the Willow Tree,” historical fiction set at Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village.
In the book, when their parents fall victim to the influenza epidemic of 1918, 11-year-old Lydia Pierce and her older brother, Daniel, are taken by their uncle to live in the Shaker Community at Sabbathday Lake. Through Lydia’s diary entries readers come to experience Shaker life and to appreciate her grieving, acceptance, and eventual appreciation for the community that was to become her family.
Hadd will speak about children’s life at Shaker Village and how being raised by the Shakers was a common practice at the time. Lydia’s experience was based on both written and oral histories passed from one generation to the next. Brother Arnold will share many of those stories and also share the perspectives of the Shakers who raised children.
Lowery and Hadd will also discuss how Shaker Village functioned through the influenza epidemic a century agao, compared with the modern-day struggles of living through the COVID-19 pandemic.