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Tickets are now on sale for the Exeter LitFest’s annual Love Stories fundraiser at the Word Barn on February 1.
This special event features 10-minute true stories of love told live by a variety of local notables. This year includes Todd Hearon, John Herman, Beth LaMontagne, and Austin Sorette. Stories will feature love stories of all types from romantic love to platonic love to a love of objects, food and wine.
This event always sells out so be sure to buy your tickets early!
Exeter LitFest is a volunteer-run non-profit that celebrates the rich literary heritage of Exeter, New Hampshire, with an annual literary festival, held annually the first weekend of April.
This year’s festival will be on Saturday, April 4, 2026.
Todd Hearon is a poet, songwriter and author of four books and three albums, as well as an English and creative writing instructor at Phillips Exeter Academy.
He's going to tell us the story behind one of his songs (and sing the song behind the story).
Maine writer and storyteller Austin Sorette is no stranger to the stage. A frequent performer at Portsmouth’s Long Story Short, Austin’s love story starts with a girl he met on Tinder and gets heated when he tries to win over multiple members of her large family.
In addition to publishing fiction and non-fiction in magazines and literary journals, Austin published his debut novel Reasons to Be in 2024 and is working on his second.
Beth LaMontagne is the host and producer of Long Story Short, a quarterly live storytelling series based at 3S Artspace in Portsmouth. Beth learned a terrible secret about her husband and was faced with an impossible choice: keep the secret and the peace or blow up her life.
Starting over during midlife and having a new perspective was frightening but also led to love when she least expected it. Beth is headed into her fifth decade taking on new things, including cycle classes, paint by number kits and telling this story for the first time.
There was a time when improv theater director and teacher John Herman of Newmarket won a lot of contests, thanks to a strategy that worked. He won a car, then won $17K worth of home furnishings with a video starring his cat. He was such a winner that he was a tax liability early in his marriage.
John’s story is about the last contest he entered and the love that held him together when he finally reached too far. John is active in numerous community nonprofit boards and committees and is the author of Wentworth Cheswill’s Ride: Chasing a Would-Be American Folk Hero.