Bowdoin’s Kisner Meets the Last Two Shakers in the World

The youngest Shaker in the world is sixty-seven-year-old Brother Arnold Hadd, writes Kisner in a recentNew York Times Magazine article.

"He lives alongside Sister June, 86, in a magnificent brick building designed to sleep about 70." This building, explains Kisner, is the dwelling house of the last active Shaker village in the world, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine, less than thirty miles from the Bowdoin campus. Between them, Brother Arnold and Sister June "constitute one of the longest-running utopian experiments in America."

Founded in England nearly 280 years ago, the United Society of Believers, commonly called Shakers, relocated to America in the 1770s, setting up their community at Sabbathday Lake just over 240 years ago.

Kisner, who recently joined the Bowdoin faculty, teaches courses in creative nonfiction and is a regular contributor to the NYT Magazine. She spent almost two years interviewing the two subjects for this article, along with their friends. Read more.