MARBLEHEAD — The newly renovated Abbot Public Library hosted a plethora of authors who discussed their books and how to write one’s own on Friday, the first day of a literary festival that will be held at the library until July 7 as part of the town’s Festival of Arts.
On Friday, Alexander Brash kicked off the day’s talks with a discussion on his book “A Whaler at Twilight,” a nonfiction companion 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 told the story of how he learned about Armstrong, describing 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 mesmerizing both for its colossal size (and) for immediately imparting an impression of curiosity,” Brash read from his book.
After this experience, he retold the story of seeing the whale to his parents and his mother mentioned that their family has a history of whaling.
Although Brash said this intrigued him, he let decades go by without asking any follow-up questions about his lineage of whaling.
“I was busy, I was in grad school… then I got a job, then I got married, and then I had kids,” he said.
Brash said once he retired and had the time to sift through 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 pull out a trunk, which was in the back of her closet, and look through it for a little black book and a map. Once he found Armstrong’s 100-page autobiography, he read it and said it was a “really, really fascinating story.”
This autobiography would later become a major part of “A Whaler at Twilight,” and the map would lead Brash around the world to follow in Armstrong’s footprints. Brash also found Armstrong’s diaries at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford, which he used to give voice to his book.
The book details Armstrong’s sailing trips from New Bedford to the Galápagos Islands and New Zealand. “A Whaler at Twilight” also details the history of whaling and features Brash’s own commentary and retelling 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.
