Author Kate Bolick in Conversation With Nicholson Baker, Lucy Sante, Oline Eaton, and Annie Weatherwax

“Kate’s Place” began in 1994, when Newburyport native Kate Bolick waited tables at the late, great Scandia Restaurant. Every Thursday, after walking around town taking photographs, the late Bud Atkinson stopped in for a dozen oysters and a Bombay Sapphire martini. Over weekly chats they cooked up a scheme: When the young waitress grew up, they’d turn the old black-box theater on Water Street into “Kate’s Place,” where she’d host interesting people doing interesting things. A neon sign of kicking Rockettes would stretch from the roof all the way to Salisbury Beach.

Time passed. Bolick grew up. Atkinson died. The theater became a residence.

And now, 30 years since that fateful summer, and nearly 20 years since Atkinson’s death, the scheme has at last come to fruition! To celebrate the inaugural meeting of “Kate’s Place,” Bolick invited four particularly ingenious writers to come share their latest projects, each more different than the last, all exploring the mysterious, overlapping borderland between the end of words and the beginning of pictures, and/or vice versa.

• 3:00 PM: Nicholson Baker: Finding a Likeness: How I Got Somewhat Better at Art

• 3:45 PM: Lucy Sante: I Heard Her Call My Name: A Memoir of Transition

• 4:30 PM: Oline Eaton: Finding Jackie: A Life Reinvented

• 5:15 PM: Annie Weatherwax: “Monster in a Dress” (a “kinetic short story”)