The Working Waterfront Festival

Tom Juravich
At the Altar of the Bottom Line

Tom Juravich's At the Altar of the Bottom Line takes us behind the statistics of the economic collapse and into the work and lives of Americans who feel stressed, exploited, exhausted and abandoned. "From what I was seeing around me and hearing from my friends and neighbors I had a strong sense that the work in American was deteriorating very quickly," tells Juravich speaking about why he began the project. "And I knew I wasn't going to be able to understand it from looking at statistics or from searching the internet in my office at the university."

Over six years Juravich conducted 85 in-depth interviews in four different occupations in Massachusetts: operating room nurses, call center workers, workers in a machine shop and Guatemalan fish house workers. Juravich, also an accomplished musician, wrote a series of songs based on the interviews he did for the book. These songs are also used as the basis for a series of audio documentaries that feature the voices of many of the people he interviewed. This multi-media project is rounded out with striking photographs taken by Paul Shoul.

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Theresa Maggio
Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily

A mattanza, in Italian, is a slaughter—in the instance Theresa Maggio relates, a springtime slaughter of bluefin tuna, the fish highly prized by sports fishermen and gourmands. In these elegant pages, Maggio describes the hard lives of Sicilian fishermen who chase the bluefin, reenacting a hunt that extends far back into prehistory and whose rituals, including that ceremonial massacre, have gone essentially unchanged for thousands of years.

Theresa Maggio, a former science writer at the Los Alamos National Scientific Laboratory, first traveled to her ancestral island in her early 30s. On the rocky coast of Favignana she witnessed her first mattanza, an unexpected "font of primal energy, beauty, and suffering, all in a tiny square of sea." After observing the coordinated efforts of the fishermen, who battled to drive the three-quarter-ton fish into a carefully constructed maze of net traps, Maggio came to develop an appreciation for the hunt in Sicilian village life. It is a ritual as laden with meaning as the buffalo hunt in Plains Indian cultures.

Theresa Maggio lives and writes in Vermont, but enjoys a does of Sicilian sun when she can.

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Bendiksen, Orleans and Starr
Voices from the Waterfront: Portrait of the New Bedford Fishing Industry

Voices from the Waterfront: Portrait of the New Bedford Fishing Industry is an 80-page book based on interviews conducted over a five year period with 43 individuals from the New Bedford/Fairhaven fishing community. Their voices provide a rare first hand accounting of life and work in the port. Those interviewed include retired and active fishermen, lumpers, auctioneers, shoreside business owners, fisheries scientists, a tug boat captain, fishing family members and others. Oral history excerpts edited by Co-Directors of the Working Waterfront Festival, Laura Orleans and Kirsten Bendiksen are accompanied by black and white portraits taken by Markham Starr, a Stonington Connecticut based photographer. Most of these interviews were conducted at the Working Waterfront Festival as part of the festival's ongoing effort to document and preserve the history and culture of the commercial fishing industry.

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Astrid Tollefsen
Following the Waters: Voices from the Final Norwegian Emigration

Astrid Tollefsen was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts and is the daughter of the late Captain Sigvart Tollefsen of Skudeneshavn, Norway and New Bedford and the late Muriel Caswell Tollefsen of New Bedford. Her father -- a fishing captain and owner of the New Bedford F/V Valencia -- drowned at sea when his boat sank in 1938. Her book, Following the Waters: Voices from the Final Norwegian Emigration (Leifur Publications) is an oral history which chronicles the lives of those fishermen and families who were part of the 20th century Norwegian emigration to New Bedford and Seattle/Alaska. She also weaves within the chapters many aspects of Norwegian culture, New Bedford and Norwegian history, stories of courage, faith, heroism, loss and success, as well as her own search for her Norwegian heritage. These courageous emigrants built the scallop industry on two coasts, improved the fishing industry and were pioneers in the crab fishing industry. (Tollefsen delivers an oral history and personal chronicle of the twentieth century Norwegian fishermen who settled in New Bedford and helped found the scallop industry.)

Ms. Tollefsen earned her masters degree at Kent State University and did post-graduate work at the University of California, Irvine. She is the mother of Dr. Kristian Simsarian, California, and was a teacher, naval officer, YWCA executive and CEO of a fund development consulting firm. She is a member of the Norumbega Lodge, Sons of Norway, and is listed in the 58th edition of Marquis Who's Who in America. After living both in Europe and in many location in the states, Ms. Tollefsen now resides in West Barnstable, Massachusetts.

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