“All of us are better when we’re loved.” By the time I came upon those words at the end of Alistair MacLeod’s 1999 novel, No Great Mischief, I was changed, altered as a reader. I found this work by sheer accident. I was not looking for anything in particular to read, just something with which […]
Down East, Maine is a unique place. I have been writing about this “uniqueness” for some time now, so it’s refreshing to find a new book that offers a trove of some quirky stories that add to the unusual luster this place provides. In Jim Harnedy’s new book, Forgotten Tales of Down East Maine, place […]
Life seems to come in two chapters: a time when we are young, looking forward to the future; and that time when we are older— glancing back, remembering, trying to stave off tomorrow’s arrival. In Deborah Gould’s novel,The Eastern: Later On, we find a story that is woven from the fabric of both young and […]
For sailors out there, Maxwell Taylor Kennedy’s newest book, Sea Change: A Man, A Boat, A Journey Home, provides a gripping adventure even a landlubber would appreciate. With the swagger of a sea story, a monumental task pursued, hardships faced with subtle glints of humor thrown in for measure, the book tackles the reality boats bring […]
What is it like to be among boats during the process of their birth? To walk upon the wood shavings, to work with hand tools along-side mentors of an old craft, to become one with the wood, glass and other materials that give life to an idea, to a design, is a dream realized by […]
“The quote is important to Dene. This there there. He hadn’t read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.” In the beginning it was the […]
“When you read a short story, you come out a little more aware and a little more in love with the world around you.” – George Saunders And more aware I am, now that I have finished this beautiful work by Elaine Ford. Ford is no longer with us, but the totality of work she […]
“The wonder is that we can see these trees and not wonder more”— Ralph Waldo Emerson And wonder is what I walked away with after having read The Overstory by Richard Powers. I have always been enamored with trees. In every place I have lived there was a tree that somehow spoke to me. From the […]
This book is about a family, the sea, and the art of boatbuilding. Anyone who has spent time in or around a boatyard understands the marriage between family and boatbuilding. Just as wood breathes and expands over time, so does the boatyard. With its workers, its love of an art, generations of young and old, […]
The written word is powerful and made more so by time. And if that time was spent manning a lighthouse, and what you have written is eventually found by family, well, there’s no telling the impact it could have on a life lived then and lives being lived now. On Porphyry Island in the Thunder […]
