9/25/25: Solo Exhibition Opening Reception and Reading by Artist/Author Shanna McNair
5:00pm-7:00pm: Opening Reception, You Know This by Heart: New and Selected works by Shanna McNair, Emery Gallery
7:00pm: Reading from McNair’s debut novel, Soul Retrieval, Emery Performance Space
Free and open to the public
Emery Community Arts Center and the UMF Visiting Writers Series are very proud to feature an art exhibition and reading by Maine-based artist, author and UMF alumna, Shanna McNair. The opening reception for McNair’s solo exhibition, You Know This by Heart: New and Selected works by Shanna McNair, will take place from 5:00-7:00pm on September 25th in the Emery Gallery, followed by a reading from her debut novel, Soul Retrieval, at 7:00pm in Emery Performance Space.
The exhibition opens in conjunction with the recent publication of McNair’s novel. She writes, “My love of painting and drawing came roaring back when I realized my novel, Soul Retrieval, which is a “gritty, lyrical reimagining” of Kahlil Gibran’s masterpiece, The Prophet, needed to include my own original artwork. The Prophet contains original illustrations by Gibran. My book, then, needed my art. And so it began.” The show presents the original figurative and abstract works that became the illustrations in Soul Retrieval, including oil and acrylic paintings and mixed-media works on paper, as well as large-scale murals, graphic design, audio work and more. These new and selected pieces reflect McNair’s journey from an undergraduate student at UMF to her current career in the arts, and explore themes of tradition, identity and the age-old question, “what is art?”
Poet Mary Dixon yearns for meaning and understanding in Soul Retrieval, a gritty, lyrical reimagining of Kahlil Gibran’s soul-searching masterpiece, The Prophet. Soul Retrieval begins in present-day, with the chapter “The Coming of the Ship.” Mary is riding a train in France. She is a visitor, traveling alone. She doesn’t speak the language and can’t find her seat. A conductor offers her a spot to sit in between railcars. As the French landscape rolls by, she pulls out a copy of The Prophet. She hasn’t read it in decades. Page after page, she grows more and more transfixed by its profundity and beauty. And she sees how her story interweaves with the greater story of humanity. She is flooded with hope and reaches an epiphany: she is only as lost as she chooses to be. She only has to find her story. Tears of awe stream her cheeks. She has found new purpose. Mary, she thinks, it’s time that you love your life. Love your life like a question is meant to be loved. Your soul knows the great questions of The Prophet. McNair’s debut novel was published in June, 2025 by High Frequency Press.
Shanna McNair is Founder and Director of The Writer’s Hotel and Founding Editor and Publisher High Frequency Press and The New Guard literary review. Shanna writes prose, poetry and scripts, is a multi-disciplinary artist (visual art, music) and is an award-winning journalist. Her debut novel Soul Retrieval (illustrated, full color) was published by High Frequency Press in June, 2025. It was a BookLife Editor’s Pick.
Her artwork has shown at various places in Maine; many cafes and spaces and most notably at UMaine at Farmington and The Grand Movie Theatre in Ellsworth. Also of note, she’s shown at SFMOMA and Mad Magda’s in San Fransisco and Mash Tun in Portland, Oregon. Her creative writing has appeared on KGB Bar Lit online, The Galway Review, WAVEBACꓘ and in Maine Magazine, Naugatuck River Review and elsewhere; her work in journalism appears on Village Soup.
She was selected for writing residencies at Studio Faire (2022 and 2024) and Gullkistan (2024). She has been a writer-in-residence at Hewnoaks Artist Colony, at the Thomas Lynch Cottage and at the Stonecoast Ireland Residency. She is a graduate of the Dartmouth College Creative Writing MALS program, the Stonecoast MFA program, University of Maine at Farmington (double-major Creative Writing BFA/ Studio Art BA) and holds a Creative Writing Certificate from Oxford University, via Dartmouth. She has worked extensively in the visual and performing arts. Shanna lives and works in Maine, alongside her husband, the writer Scott Wolven. More at shannamcnair.com.
Praise for Soul Retrieval:
“Shanna McNair is a writer of great astringency, intensity, and lucidity, but also one of deep feeling. She’s perhaps a lapsed idealist, as Mary McCarthy said of one other, but in the best sense, in which the ideals still show plainly through. . . The model for this elevated, poignant, lacerating, romanticist vision of human longing is the Denis Johnson of the early period, the guy who wrote Angels, and perhaps, via Denis Johnson, the Isaac Babel of Red Cavalry, where the very worst human tendencies are somehow the long slow way, the very costly way to God.” —Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm
“. . . richly drawn and nuanced, the story here is intriguing and deeply imagined, and completely unexpected in its turns. Elegant language, humor, and wit draw us into her words. . . a captivating must-read.”
—Chris Abani, author of The Secret History of Las Vegas
A voice-driven work of literary fiction weaving stories that echo my own stories . . . The narrative voice evokes the radical awareness of an individual who is often too smart for her own good and riddled with flaws that she wears as humble marks of her humanity. Hers is a wayward voice finding its way back to itself, a woman’s voice with nothing left to lose . . . weeping tears of joy as well as pain, and where one least expects it, trip-wiring stunning flashes of beauty.” —Diane Oatley, author of Swoon and translator of The History of Bees
“Shanna McNair writes with power, grace, originality, and vulnerability about old truths in a new era. We know that the world is a hard and wonderful place; but in McNair‘s work, we do more than just know it. We feel it, with the intensity such a realization or remembrance deserves. I’m grateful for this novel.” —Rick Bass, author of For a Little While
“. . . the rat-a-tat wordplay and rhythms of Jack Kerouac . . . the bell-clear reflectiveness of Marguerite Duras, McNair’s inaugural book is the most original kind . . . A fierce, technicolor ride, brimming with calamity, sorrow, flashes of wild humor, and an overarching love for whom we meet and what we might become.” —Alexandra Oliver, author of Hail, The Invisible Watchman
“. . . sustains the clarity and no-word-wasted dramatic propulsion of the best memoirs. . . with the chronic intensity found only in someone who has lived what she knows. Page by page, the quiet and not-so-quiet discomforts that teethe on our days—that drive us to make distraction a sacrament—are illuminated for us. . .” —Tim Seibles, author of Fast Animal
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