Artscape Beaufort & Soiree begins its weekend art sale November 13-15, 2015 at the Old Bay Marketplace Loft & Rooftop, 917 Bay Street in Beaufort, benefiting Lowcountry Montessori School.

An encore presentation of a conversation with bestselling author Pat Conroy about his work from the page to the screen

Story and Photos by Mark Shaffer

October 29^th the ‘Pat Conroy at 70 Literary Festival’ kicks off with a special screening of The Great Santini at the USCB Center for the Arts. The film was a cinematic landmark for South Carolina: the first major motion picture to shoot in Beaufort, the first of several Conroy adaptations, and the movie that put the state – and the Lowcountry – on Hollywood’s hot sheet. I’m set to moderate a post-screening panel with the author and some of the film’s stars, including Michael O’Keefe and David Keith. (Keith was also in The Lords of Discipline.) This is familiar ground and territory I never tire of covering.

When Vince and I were dating, he used to love to tell me all about Beaufort. One of Beaufort's claims to fame (that he repeated way more than once) was that The Great Santini had been filmed here. “You know, from Pat Conroy's book. He's Conrack. He's the guy who wrote The Lords of Discipline.”

‘Lowcounty Oils and Silks,’ an exhibit of works by renowned Charleston fabric artist Mary Edna Fraser, is currently hanging at the USCB Center for the Arts, where it will make an ideal backdrop for the ‘Pat Conroy at 70’ Literary Festival, October 29 – 31.