Whatever the Genre, Elizabeth Hand is Brilliant
Cass Neary, the narrator and protagonist of Elizabeth Hand’s Cass Neary crime novels, photographs the dead and dying. In her furious punk days on the Lower East Side in the 1970s where the first book...
View ArticleExclusive Outtake: From Christina Baker Kline’s New Novel
Christina Baker Kline’s A Piece of the World is the story of Christina Olson, the unlikely anti-muse of painter Andrew Wyeth, and the cranky mutual respect they developed as neighbors in rural Maine....
View ArticleGrowing Up in Maine’s “Cancer Valley”
This essay originally appears in Freeman’s: Home. Mexico, Maine sits in a valley or “River Valley” as we call the area, because I suppose you can’t have one without the other. The hills are low and...
View ArticleStephen King and I: How the Master of Horror Made Me a Better Father
I sat up with a jolt. I couldn’t sleep. It was in early August of last year. I could hear the rain pelting our tiny motel room. My wife and I were staying somewhere in Massachusetts; we’d stopped on...
View ArticleSearching for My Mother, 16 Years After Her Murder
One cold March, just a few years ago, I rented a flawlessly clean silver car and drove up to Maine from my home in Brooklyn. I’d made it just north of Boston when the trees started to press in close,...
View ArticleWishing I Were John McPhee
John McPhee is supposed to be a hard guy to interview. He has been called “a deeply private writer” by the New York Times. Howard Berkes of NPR once noted, “He seems to value privacy,” and a 1978 “All...
View ArticleA Literary Long Weekend in Portland, Maine
Hanging off the northeast edge of America, Maine is the only state in the union bordered by just one other state. But Maine is hardly a literary outlier and has long been at the fore of producing and...
View ArticleMy Life in a Buddhist Cult with “The Master”
To be fair, even before my parents found the Master, I had a sense of God. An elemental, gut feeling. I remember being given the word by my mother when I was very young, as we peered through hay...
View ArticleStephen King: On the Origin of Scott Landon’s Driving Music
Stephen King’s 2006 novel, Lisey’s Story, focuses on the character of Lisey Landon, widow of famous writer Scott Landon. King wrote the following letter to explain the mix tape he created for Landon...
View ArticleExclusive Outtake: From Christina Baker Kline’s New Novel
Christina Baker Kline’s A Piece of the World is the story of Christina Olson, the unlikely anti-muse of painter Andrew Wyeth, and the cranky mutual respect they developed as neighbors in rural Maine....
View ArticleGrowing Up in Maine’s “Cancer Valley”
This essay originally appears in Freeman’s: Home. Mexico, Maine sits in a valley or “River Valley” as we call the area, because I suppose you can’t have one without the other. The hills are low and...
View ArticleSearching for My Mother, 16 Years After Her Murder
One cold March, just a few years ago, I rented a flawlessly clean silver car and drove up to Maine from my home in Brooklyn. I’d made it just north of Boston when the trees started to press in close,...
View ArticleWishing I Were John McPhee
John McPhee is supposed to be a hard guy to interview. He has been called “a deeply private writer” by the New York Times. Howard Berkes of NPR once noted, “He seems to value privacy,” and a 1978 “All...
View ArticleHow My Father’s Strike Nearly Broke Our Town in Two
My father went on strike. Twice. Once in 1980 and again in 1986, both when I lived at home. The gist of the second strike, the most turbulent, was this: Boise Cascade, the owner of the paper mill where...
View ArticleWe Should All Probably Be Eating Seaweed
I have come to an evening seaweed-cooking class at the Island Community Center in Stonington, Maine. The weather is warm, the light drowsy with the end of summer. An old Quonset hut contains the...
View ArticleNo Such Thing As a Free Lunch: On Food Insecurity in Small-town Maine
Across America in June, school lets out. Kids get jobs, cruise around town, get into trouble, lounge carelessly in backyards until class resumes in the fall. In Rumford and Mexico, Maine, where I grew...
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