Natascha Feenstra, a small business lawyer who has lived in town for 23 years, joined a writing workshop that focused on character and scene development as part of the town’s Watershed Literary Festival.
“I haven’t done creative writing since high school in the ’80s,” she laughed. “But the exercises really brought out some creative juices.”
Feenstra was just one of the many participants of the Third Watershed Literary Festival, an event that brings together authors and readers for a writing-steeped weekend of more than 20 workshops and panel discussions featuring 30 authors. The proceeds benefitted four local organizations.
Starting on Friday, Sept. 26 and running through the weekend, the festival included everything from talks about sports writing with Rye-based Ian Rapoport, the NFL Insider, to discussions of memoir with local author and Rye Record contributor Eileen O’Connor and novel writing with Lee Sandford Carey.
It all kicked off with a cocktail party on the lawn of Rye’s historic Meeting House. Guests mingled in the early autumn dusk over books, hors d’oeuvres, and conversation before gathering inside for Writes & Bites, the festival’s signature program, where 10 writers read personal essays on the theme of “Waterworks.”
Among the attendees were Cybil and Brian Powers, Rye residents and avid sailors, who praised their friend and festival founder Paula Fung. “We’ve always admired her work and how she gives to the community,” Cybil said.
White Plains resident Ivy Eisenberg, an information technology consultant/stand-up comic, shared her essay “iloveyousimonandmax, one word, all lowercase,” about the heartbreak of being a mid-career mom pushed out of a corporate job and having to surrender her password.
The cocktail party buzzed with local authors anticipating upcoming releases. Jocelyn Jane Cox, one of the night’s readers, was days away from the launch of her memoir “Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice.” She was joined by fellow Vine Leaves Press writers Daria Sommers, whose historical novel set in Bangkok during the Vietnam War is to be published in 2026, and Jessica Cadorine, whose book on Korean adoption is slated for 2027. All three had studied at Sarah Lawrence, and Cox and Cadorine also shared a bond through figure skating.
Before the readings began, Margot Clark-Junkins inaugurated the festival’s new Bookmark Award, honoring community advocacy for books and authors. The recipient was Chris Shoemaker, director of the Rye Free Reading Room since 2013. Author Annabel Monaghan called the festival “Comic Con for book nerds. You’d expect something like this in Miami, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, or Washington, D.C. It’s just bananas that we have this in our small town, in our 200-year-old building. It’s very special.”
For Monaghan, the real magic was connection. “The reason it really matters is that we’re bringing readers and writers together,” she said. “At its essence, a book is a collaboration between the writer and the reader.” With that, the crowd settled in for the evening’s 10 writers, whose essays flowed with floods and streams, shattered marriages and new love, sentimental passwords, and family goldfish flushed down toilets. Tears of loss mingled with laughter and fresh beginnings, setting the tone for the weekend.
On Saturday, former-lawyer-turned-historical-fiction writer Jacqueline Friedland described in the workshop “Time is a River: Merging Fact With Fiction” feeling like she was “playing dress up” in her career until maternity leave opened the door to writing. Later in “Below the Surface: The Art of Memoir,” authors Nicole Graev Lipson and Tom Junod reflected on truth, secrecy, and memoir as a deeply human search for understanding. Graev Lipson said she thought of memoir as not writing “what happened,” but rather thinking of: “What the hell happened?”
The afternoon continued with author David Browne, whose book “Talkin’ Greenwich Village” illustrated the craft of music writing. Novelist and longtime editor Betsy Lerner followed with “Writing Family in Novels,” emphasizing how every scrap of writing — from journals to emails — can become a springboard for creative work: “Nothing goes to waste.”
In “Water in Motion: Writing for Stage + Screen,” television writer and Rye resident Stu Zicherman, documentarian Libby Geist (also a Rye resident), and Rye High grad and playwright Kiera Moran discussed storytelling across mediums. They were followed by Rappaport, who spoke about the demands and dynamics of sports journalism in “Breaking the Surface.”
Sunday morning opened with a local authors’ book sale and children’s read-aloud. The program then shifted to journalism, as Rye Record Deputy Editor Andrea Atkins Hessekiel and RHS teacher and writer Roni Sarig discussed industry trends in a panel moderated by former Rye Record Editor Tom McDermott. Hessekiel spoke about the idealism that first drew her to journalism and reaffirmed the press’s vital role in “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” While acknowledging that the state of newspapers nationwide is “precarious,” she expressed gratitude for “The Rye Record” and concluded that “the state of journalism in Rye is sound.”
Also on Sunday, three debut novelists — Daisy Garrison, Heather Aimee O’Neill, and Avery Carpenter Forrey — shared perspectives on point of view, plotting, and process in “Dipping a Toe In: Debut Novels.” In “Changing Course: Processing Life Events Through Essay/Memoir,” authors O’Connor and Andie Raynor agreed that memoirs offer time for reflection and connection.
Moderator and writer Lee Woodruff, another Rye resident, encouraged would-be writers: “If you introspect and write it down, you are a writer.”
The weekend concluded with novelists Sandford and Karen Dukess in conversation with Monaghan.
As all of the event unfolded, Watershed founders Alison Relyea, Sían Roath, Clark-Junkins, Ann Magalhaes, and Fung kept everything running smoothly.
