Born from a borrowed dock
Flat Lake began in 2017 as a gathering of twenty friends on a private dock in the Maine highlands. There was no stage, no program — just a notebook passed between a poet, a physicist, and a fisherman at dusk.
Eight years later, the festival welcomes four hundred curious souls for three unhurried days of conversation, readings, and slow music. The lake has not changed. The hush between speakers still feels the same.
See the 2025 Program →Our Values
Quiet Attention
We design every moment for presence. Phones away. No livestreams. The ideas are the point, and the lake holds the room.
Editorial Curiosity
Our program is curated like a magazine, mixing essayists, scientists, novelists, and folk musicians into one continuous conversation.
Care for the Place
The lake is borrowed, not owned. We cap attendance, source locally, and leave the shoreline exactly as we found it.
I have spoken at a hundred festivals. Flat Lake is the only one where the audience listens the way the water does.
The editorial vision
Flat Lake is programmed by a small editorial team that reads everything — submersion essays, climate dispatches, quiet fiction, field notebooks. We commission twelve new pieces each year and print them in our annual volume.
The lineup is deliberately mixed. A marine biologist might share a stage with a banjo player. A philosopher arrives by canoe. Nothing is paired for spectacle, only for resonance.
Browse Past Editions →By The Numbers
The team behind it
We are seven full-time staff and a rotating council of advisors from independent publishing, ecology, and the arts. Most of us live within twenty miles of the lake year-round.
Our founder, Maren Hollis, edits the annual volume and books the headliners. Our operations lead, Theo Vance, built the floating stage. Everyone else swims in the morning.
Meet the Council →Join us at the water's edge
Tickets for the 2026 edition open in March. The waitlist is short, and the lake is wide.
Join the Waitlist →