2020 Award Winner Interviews
Short Works Competition in Poetry
"Other Fathers" and other poems by Jefferson Navicky
What inspires you to write poetry?
So much inspires me to write poetry! Much of what gets created ends up not very good poetry, but sometimes a good one pops out. Things that have been recently inspiring me: Maine history (think: the beautiful Pettengill Farm in Freeport); firewood and its long, laborious and exhausting stacking; Wanda Coleman's poetry; my wife's cooking (think: purple cauliflower cream sauce!); Archives and old photos that shock me with their beauty and death energy; playing evening wiffleball with my wife and our speedy canine utility outfielder; fireflies.
What impact do you want to leave on readers?
This is actually a pretty hard question. Of course I'd like someone to fall on the floor after they read one of my poems, but how often does that happen? Honestly, I'm just happy anybody reads my poems. And I'm happy with any impact at all, even the most slight. Actually, I think everybody should read poetry, or at least more poems. I think people should start staff meetings with a poem, or instead of the pledge of allegiance, the principal should read a Sonia Sanchez poem. This kind of integration of poetry into our everyday lives would help normalize the stigma against poetry, and help people understand that you should feel poems, rather than understand them. I don't always understand poems, but sometimes even when I don't understand one, I can feel it, and it's that feeling that sticks with me. So -- roundabout answer to your question -- I think that if we as a culture become more familiar with poems, the impact of poems on readers will rise. It's like getting in good physical shape -- we need to get in good poem shape, and when we do, we appreciate more poems. And to be honest, I think Maine is in pretty good shape with poetry.
How do you approach writing a poem?
It usually changes from poem to poem. Sometimes I hear a phrase that catches my ear, or a lyric on the radio (I especially like the lyrics I can't really understand, or the ones I grossly mishear.) Sometimes something happens to me that almost writes itself and all I have to do is hang on and write it down. Other times my wife will give me a slip of paper that says something like "Preppers" on it, and I'll see if I can write a poem about it. Sometimes I try to approach a poem from above, or like, sneak up on it and come in from the side; I think I'm writing about one thing, and then ten lines into the poem, I realize it's about something else. I think my least successful poems are when I think too much, and try to be like, Ah ha, I'm going to write a Blah-Dee-Blah poem. Usually those poems end up boring. I try not to write boring poems. But sometimes I can't help myself.
Youth Competition in Poetry
Lulu Rasor for "Grendel's Mother Takes the Mic"
What message do you hope readers will take away from “Grendel’s Mother Takes the Mic”?
I hope it inspires people to look at old stories with new eyes and to wonder how popular myths and fairytales might change when seen through a different perspective. The inspiration for "Grendel's Mother Takes the Mic" came from reading Beowulf, noticing the family tree at the back included several nameless women as mothers, wives, or daughters, and wondering what the most important nameless female character in the epic would have to say if she was given the spotlight.
What inspired you to write poetry?
I'm often inspired by mythology, folklore, and fairy tales, which is an interest that's always influenced my writing, whether in poetry or in fiction. I started out writing mostly fiction, but a really great poetry class I took my junior year of high school got me hooked on poetry and I continued to be inspired by mythology in my writing. An Open Letter to Ophelia, the book of poetry that "Grendel's Mother Takes the Mic" was published in, is inspired mostly by the women of history, mythology, and classic literature. I'm fascinated by what kinds of stories endure or what new kinds of new interpretations can be found for them.
What advice do you have for other young poetry writers?
Read a lot of poetry! It's been very helpful for me to get a sense of what's out there and learn from other poets. Also, try to really dig into what you're interested in writing about and what unique or specific perspective you bring to it. Why are you writing this poem and why are you the only one who can?
Youth Competition in Fiction
Catherine Morrissette for "Growing Pains”
What inspired you to write this story?
Falling asleep one night, I got to thinking about ways the body could betray itself, and what would happen if a person grew right out of their skin. My preferred writing style is mixing the figurative with the literal, which is how I became interested in exploring the implications of each for what is essentially human molting. I wrote the first draft when I still thought my short story collection, Songs In The Parking Lot, would center around types of love, this piece being blind young love and sibling love. I felt a strong parallel between physically outgrowing a body while mentally and emotionally outgrowing a relationship.
What are your hopes for the future in terms of your own writing?
I hope to continue writing for young people, using my confusion and exploration of myself to help those who might have similar experiences. It’s important for young people to write for one another and hear what others their age are thinking and saying, and I hope to facilitate that. As I continue my studies at Brown University, I’m excited to see how my writing evolves after meeting new people, working with new teachers, and reading new material!
What advice do you have for other young fiction writers?
Take this chance to be vain; the best way to start writing is to write only for yourself. If it’s because something popped into your head, or your brain is too loud, or you want to read your idea all written out, it doesn’t matter. Start writing as much as you can about anything, and often. Worrying about what you’ve put down on paper comes later.
Short Works Competition in Nonfiction
Jennifer Lunden, for "Fugitive Justice"
How do you hope to impact readers with “Fugitive Justice”?
“Fugitive Justice” is unlike any essay I’ve ever written in that I didn’t know what I was writing about, exactly, until I finished the first draft. There is almost always a social justice aspect to what I set out to write, and so I generally have an idea about the story I want to tell and the message I want to convey from the outset. But on a road trip to Canada to visit my folks, my husband and I stumbled upon the site of the capture—just two hours before—of David Sweat, a cop killer who, with murderer Richard Matt, had escaped from prison in upstate New York and led the authorities on a 23-day manhunt. I wrote a post about our experience on Facebook, and the essayist Ned Stuckey-French commented with one word: “Essay.” Well, first of all, Ned (who, sadly, died last year) was well aware that the word “essay” comes from the French for “try,” and he was among those who say that the best essays emerge from trying to figure something out on the page rather than knowing everything you want to say beforehand. And second, when Ned Stuckey-French tells you to essay, you essay.
So I wasn’t expecting it to be an essay revealing my compassion fatigue from my work as a therapist, but there it was, on the page.
But all of this isn’t really answering your question.
This essay explores the societal influence on human (mis)behavior. My hope is that it inspires readers to think beyond the idea of “good guys” and “bad guys” and reflect instead on the complexity of human beings. I think that builds compassion. I hope the essay provokes thought about the problems in America’s justice system, and, more broadly, that it moves readers to contemplate what we need to change in order to make this country more just and better for all of us. I don’t expect this one essay to galvanize a movement, but I believe small changes in mindset can sow the seeds for social change.
As a proponent of therapeutic writing, how does sharing this story impact you?
Dozens of studies from around the world have documented physiological and emotional benefits to writing down our difficult stories. The psychologist Richard Pennebaker was the first to do this sort of research. He led a series of studies that found that students who wrote about troubling or traumatic experiences for just fifteen minutes on four consecutive days made 43% fewer visits to the health center than those in a control group who spent the same amount of time writing about superficial, non-emotional topics. Other research has shown benefits that could be objectively measured by examining markers of immune function.
Among writers, the idea that anything other than journal writing can be therapeutic is a controversial one. Because when we’re writing for print, we are crafting something. And I think memoir writers in particular contend with people saying to them, “Oh, that must have been so therapeutic for you to write.” And that feels condescending to writers because it ignores the work and intent that goes into making words into art.
For me personally, writing is always therapeutic on some level, whether I’m journal writing or crafting an essay. It helps me make sense of the world. Writing “Fugitive Justice” put down on the page something that I was feeling inside. Having readers meant I no longer carried it alone. So publishing my work helps me feel seen. From feedback I got from some readers, this essay helped them feel seen, too. I gave voice to their experience of the world. And of course, writing essays that explore social justice issues makes me feel less helpless about the things that are wrong in the world. With my words, I feel like I am doing something to inspire change.
How did you come to pursue both nonfiction writing and social work?
Growing up in Ontario, my best friend’s grandfather was the renowned Canadian writer W.O. Mitchell, and he and his wife would visit from across the country every year or so. I very clearly remember telling my parents one day when they were driving me home from my friend’s that I thought I’d like to be a writer when I grew up. I must have been 11 or so. They were not unsupportive of the idea, but told me that most writers have to do other work in order to make a living. So I knew from a young age that I would have to pursue a paying career and do my writing on the side.
Therapists and nonfiction writers have some things in common. Each looks for the story, wresting order out of chaos. Each thinks deeply about the human condition and the nature of suffering. Each is curious about people and their motivations. Each, in their own way, wish to make the world a better place.
I’m no longer practicing as a therapist. Right now I’m working on what I realized only many years into it is actually a very social-worky book. It’s called American Breakdown: Notes from an Industrialized Body, and it blends memoir, history, science and social criticism to explore the health hazards of industrial capitalism. What makes it so social-worky is that in the book I’m examining the cultural and economic sources of individual suffering. If people want to read more about it, they can check out my description on my website, where they can also subscribe to my very intermittent newsletter.
Drama Award
Linda Britt for "I Smile, Of Course, And Go On Drinking Tea"
How did the idea for this play come to you?
I was driving to work one morning in 2011 listening to Maine Public Radio, and Garrison Keillor came on with the Writer's Almanac. He told a story about the unhappy marriage of T. S. Eliot to Vivienne Haigh-Wood, and how Eliot had her committed to an asylum. Keillor also mentioned Bertrand Russell and Virginia Woolf, both friends of Eliot. It was during this broadcast that I first heard the description that Woolf used for Vivienne, a "bag of ferrets" around Eliot's neck. Both Russell and Woolf are characters in the play, and "bag of ferrets" is a line that Woolf utters in the play to describe Vivienne. It was impossible for me to resist using it, along with colorful characters such as Russell and Woolf, in "I Smile, Of Course, And Go On Drinking Tea." It wasn't until December of 2013 that I had the time to work on the play; I was lucky enough to be granted a sabbatical from UMF for Spring semester, 2014. And around the same time the UMF library was culling books; there were a bunch of collections of Eliot's poems, along with a biography or two, that landed in my possession, and they proved fertile ground for inspiration.
How did you write characters based on real people and authors (the Eliots, Virginia Woolf, and Bertrand Russell)?
The biographies are available, and there's plenty of material contained in them; there is even another play about the Eliots, called "Tom and Viv," by Brian Gilbert. But I really wanted the focus of my play to be on Vivienne, and I was especially excited about using lines from all the writers; primarily T.S. Eliot, of course, but also Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell. There were multiple challenges: choosing the lines that I thought would work, finding places in the play for all the lines that I wanted to use from the available works (those in the public domain), and making them blend in seamlessly with the original lines that I created. Although Eliot aficionados will certainly catch some of his more famous words, I wanted the audience not to recognize which of the other lines came from me. It's especially fun to hear Eliot's lines from the mouths, say, of Vivienne's parents, who are the other two characters in the play. I wanted to make the play somewhat historically accurate, but I also wanted to put a new spin on the story.
As a professor of Spanish language, literature, and culture, what inspired you to write plays?
One of the things I have long valued about teaching at UMF is the close collaboration between faculty from multiple disciplines, and I am lucky enough to be in the same division as the really talented creative writing faculty, so that's inspiring. I was able to take poetry writing with Wes McNair, for example. But I came to playwriting in particular through a collaboration with my son, Colin, who is a musician and composer (and was commissioned to write the choral piece for the Maine bicentennial). My first several plays were musicals; I wrote the book and the lyrics, and he composed the music. We started writing the first one, "Billionaire Vegans," when he was thirteen. Later I focused on straight plays; I found that a better medium for character development. There have been two instances when my job provided specific inspiration for plays. The first was when I taught a First Year Seminar on the Inquisition, and included a chapter on McCarthyism. That directly led to "Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington," a one-woman play about Senator Margaret Chase Smith which toured around Maine for a time. The second was when I wrote "American Dreams: Immigration Stories" as part of an effort at UMF to focus attention on the various immigration bans and other policies instituted since 2016. That play has been performed in New York and in Washington State, as well as in multiple venues in Maine. I am grateful every day for having landed at UMF, as it has allowed, even encouraged me to explore a creative side I might not have been able to pursue otherwise.
What inspires you to write poetry?
Mostly other people's writing. There is a particular intimacy about entering into certain writers' language, like entering into other words, other people's experiences. Of course it isn't that, exactly, because there are holes and gaps in everything, including, or maybe especially, language—but when you read a writer like Susan Howe or Ali Smith or James Baldwin, just to name a random few, you feel the expansion of what is possible in words and what is possible between people. I guess that feeling is what inspires me to write poems.
What role does poetic form play in your writing?
A big role! Though I'm not sure my definition of "poetic form" would be the same as others.' I think of the sentence as a poetic form, for example, and the fragment. Generally I like to work within some kind of invented or half-invented structure, and the work doesn't really get going in a meaningful way until I've found the right form.
How does the environment shape your writing?
I write as a kind of meditative practice, and attunement to the place of writing is an important part of that. There are certain challenges that arise when you commit to some degree of being present in your writing: if you write in the same place every day, as I often do, for example, the challenge might be not getting bored by what you are looking at every morning out the same window, making that same view (which is of course never really the same view) feel distinct and meaningful to yourself. If I am bored by what I see, that's on me, not on the world. Imagine being bored by this world! Being responsive or open to what is around me is valuable for me as a practice, regardless of whether the writing ends up being published or even "finished," whatever that means. It's a way of learning or remembering how to be in the world.
Short Works Competition in Fiction
Rebecca Turkewitz for "At This Late Hour"
How do you work within a word limit?
I’m not usually writing to any specific word count, but if a draft of a story is longer than 8,000 words, I often pare it down. I tend to include a lot of character development and backstory that don’t wind up feeling urgent, so my first step when revising is to cut out anything that makes the story seem bloated.
From which authors do you most draw inspiration?
I take a lot of inspiration from Alice Munro, Lauren Groff, and ZZ Packer, who are all masters of the short form. Reading their work was the first time I really understood how much a short story could do and that it was a completely different animal than a novel. I also love Louise Erdrich and Shirley Jackson and return to their work often when I’m feeling stuck in my own writing.
How did the idea for this story come to you?
The seed for this story came from a tour of the Lowe Hotel in Point Pleasant, West Virginia during the annual Mothman Festival. The hotel owners seemed to revel in the idea that their hotel was haunted, which fascinated me. I told the friend I was with that I thought it would be fun to write about a hotel clerk who loves ghost stories so much she goes around faking hauntings. And (eventually) I did write that story, and it was pretty fun.
During your research, what did you learn about the role of silence in your own life?
I learned how complex silence really is -- that it always contains its positive and negative, that my relationship to it is an ongoing inquiry, and always changing.
How do you choose what to write about?
I’ve written five books now, and each one had a particular origin. I first hoped to write about silence back in 2001, after a visit to the Senanque Monastery in France. There, I had an encounter with silence that was both overwhelming and mysterious, and my hope was that in writing about it I might begin to understand it. But I couldn’t find a way to structure a book about silence, and I didn’t know how to define my scope. It’s an endless subject, as I soon found out. I also realized I needed to find something specific and concrete to anchor the shape of the book. I discovered the structure only many years later, after I’d completed two other books. I visited Eastern State Penitentiary, a stabilized ruin in Philadelphia, which was also the first use of silence and solitude in our criminal justice system. I saw how the penitentiary could stand as a counterweight to the monastery, and that an exploration of both could tease out many aspects of silence. Framing my inquiry with the penitentiary and the monastery also gave me concrete worlds with which to explore a very abstract topic.
Where do you begin your writing process?
I’ve always believed that, in the beginning, it’s important to for me to let the work remain undefined for a good while. The beginning is an opportunity for exploration, for figuring out what I really want to write about. I’m not sure exactly where the process begins. I spend time at my desk, certainly. But when my work is going well it also runs as an undercurrent throughout the day. The ideas and realizations begin to pile up and organize themselves. Soon enough, if I’m fortunate, the work begins to take shape.
Book Award for Excellence in Publishing
Restoring Your Historic House (Tilbury House) (co-winner)
Scott T. Hanson
What inspired you to become an architectural historian?
My interest in historic buildings is rooted in visits to Monticello and Colonial Williamsburg when I was seven. I found it easy to imagine the historic events that had taken place in these places while touring the buildings and settings they took place in. At age 11, I got involved as a volunteer in the restoration of my hometown railroad station as part of the startup of the Conway Scenic Railroad in NH. This hands-on experience taught me to appreciate the craftsmanship of historic structures. Visits to other historic sites, like Olana in New York state and Shelburne Museum in Vermont expanded my interest. I did not discover architectural history as a field of study until after high school, when I was an art student at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. Once I found rows of books on the subject in the Pratt Library, I was hooked.
What challenges did you encounter in writing Restoring Your Historic House?
The book is more than 700 pages long with 2,136 photos and drawings, capturing my experience and lessons from more than 40 years in the historic preservation field, so figuring out how to organize all that information was the first challenge. I spent a lot of time developing a detailed seven-page outline for the book, organizing the topics I wanted to include in a rational order. Having this structure to plug the text into as I wrote it over four years was critical to keeping it, and me, organized. Keeping a consistent tone and pace to the writing over that length of time was somewhat challenging. I occasionally went back to sections drafted months or years earlier to edit for consistency with how my writing style evolved through the project. The biggest challenge came at the end, when I had to sort, select, place, and caption the two-thousand-plus images. I had folders containing tens of thousands of images from my past work and travels from which to select the ones to go into the book. It was very time consuming and it quickly became apparent that it would have been far more efficient to select and place images as I drafted the text. A lesson for future projects.
What was your process for researching this topic?
Because I was writing about what I do in my professional life as an architectural historian and preservation consultant, I did not have to do a lot of research specifically for the book. Instead, I was able to draw on the research I have done on hundreds of projects over decades in the field. Because the technology of the preservation field evolves as it does in most fields, I made a point to research the latest accepted practices in areas of the work I have not had recent experience in as well as regional building traditions I don’t have experience with here in New England. For instance, I got a crash course in restoring historic adobe houses from the architect who designed the restoration of the Santa Fe adobe house that is one of the 13 restored houses featured between the how-to chapters. Between the information she gave me and the books she recommended, I was able to write knowledgably about a type of construction I don’t have first-hand experience with.
Book Award for Excellence in Publishing
Setting Sail in America (Seapoint Books) (co-winner)
Alan Silken & Cory Silken
What inspired you to write Setting Sail in America?
In many ways, I felt compelled to write this book. I didn’t feel I had a choice. The book had to be written, and I just happened to be the one to take on the task. This book focuses on a classic boat that is special in its design, its sailing performance, and its history in American society. The Herreshoff S Class sailboats are inspiring as icons for an important time in American history. The boats were designed by the greatest American yacht designer and they were owned and sailed by prominent Americans at a very formative time in America. The true inspiration came from a lifetime of passion for sailing, an activity that links the human spirit to the world around us— the wind, the water, and the boat. In many ways, I’ve been waiting most of my life for the opportunity to write a book that gives sailing a prominent place in society.
How did you do the research for this book?
I first started researching the history of the Herreshoff S-boats when fellow boat owners asked me if I knew anything about the early owners of their particular boat. When I started researching the individuals who first owned these boats, it was amazing to discover that the vast majority of them were very prominent members of American society in the 1920s and 30s. They were highly successful entrepreneurs, politicians, judges, physicians, bankers, inventors, all of whom shared a respect and enthusiasm for yachting. Relatively small compared to yachts of the times, the S-boats allowed owners to handle the tiller themselves with an amateur crew in one-design (all boats identical) fleet racing that tested sailing skill more than individual boat design. While the Herreshoff S Class was not the first one-design sailboat, it may be the oldest American one- design class still racing in the original boats. Though much of the research for the book was obtained from published books and numerous sites on the Internet, I also gleaned crucial information from first- hand sources including other boat owners, maritime museums, yacht clubs, Hart Nautical Collection at MIT, and interviews and conversations with Dyer Jones at the Herreshoff Marine Museum, Halsey Herreshoff, Nathaniel Herreshoff III, John Rousmaniere, Maynard Bray, Fred Roy, and others.
What was it like to collaborate as father and son?
Working with my son has been one of the great privileges of my life. Cory and I share a love of sailing, and we have sailed and raced together over many years aboard our S-boat, Firefly. Cory has been recognized as one of the most talented Marine photographers in the world. He has achieved this reputation based on his very high standards, which he brought to this book project. It was a true collaboration in that Cory was responsible for the incredible photographs that bring the history of the boats to life, and remind the reader that while these boats have a classic legacy, they are still actively sailing and racing today. Merging the contemporary photography with the historic text required much give-and-take until we found the perfect balance. Cory’s eye for page design and overall concept was essential, while I worked to keep the text relevant and to give the S-boat its place in the American story.
Seapoint Books
What did you find compelling about this book?
“Setting Sail in America” is a unique combination of a serious, detailed history of American yachting, and of the foremost yacht designers and yacht manufacturers of the turn-of-the-century. It is also a window into turn-of-the-century life on the New England coast. All that is combined with amazing contemporary photographs of the S Class boats by a world-renowned marine photographer. The S Class boats are still very active and celebrated their centennial in 2019. We had a rare opportunity to present this text and art in a very large format, 10”x15”, with the highest production values. Each page was designed and redesigned many times before everyone was satisfied. The book has photos that spread both pages—10”x30” for a remarkable visual impact. The reproduction is nearly museum quality.
So: we had a very good author, a renowned marine photographer, a fascinating lens on America at a seminal time in its history, all pegged to an important event: the centennial of the S Class sailboats. For a publisher, that’s a “compelling” package.
Who is the target audience for this book?
There is no one target audience for this book, or any other book that I know of. Some of the audiences (or markets) for this book are: sailing enthusiasts, yachting historians, owners and friends of S Class sailboats, historians of the New England coast, and aficionados of beautiful books. To reach those audiences, we needed to provide our sales reps, bookstores, book wholesalers, internet sellers, reviewers, and opinion leaders with advance copies and information about the book. “Setting Sail in America” has found an appreciative audience and has exceeded its sales expectations.
What advice do you have for other people who want to write special interest books?
What isn’t a special interest book? We have published fiction, poetry, cookbooks, autobiographies, maritime books, pop culture books, business books and more. None of them are more “special interest” than the others. Writing a book takes perseverance, a willingness to write and rewrite, an ability to focus on the reader and the subject, and a desire to communicate. Despite the mythology of the solitary writer, writers need to communicate with advance readers—both critical and supportive— as the book develops. The writer should be known in their field to help the publisher with advance quotes, book reviews, author appearances all resulting, ultimately, in good sales.
When were you inspired to write about your life growing up near the Walpole Prison?
I began writing these stories in college way back in the early 1980s. Over time I picked up the manuscript here and there--in graduate school in the late 90s, at a writing residency in the mid-2000s--and then I got caught up in writing my first book, so put this Walpole book aside for about a decade. In 2014, I had a sabbatical and so I picked up the manuscript and decided to focus on it exclusively.
What was the biggest challenge in writing your memoir?
I wanted to convey the consciousness and voice of a teenage girl, but also to weave in the reflective voice of my older and hopefully-wiser adult self as I tried to make sense of those adolescent experiences. I also wanted to include some research and culture of the 1970s. The challenge was synthesizing the material into a coherent narrative: how to know what to include or exclude, and how to weave together different narrative threads, i.e., my personal story with the prison story, feminism, sociology of families and psychology of adolescents, current events and zeitgeist of the 1970s, etc. I ended up writing almost two book-lengths of material, and then paring down and shaping the narrative.
How did you become interested in a career as an author?
I think of writing more as an obsession and passion than a career choice. I've always loved writing, even as a child, and while I didn't really know how to "be" a writer in college or after, since I had little guidance, I always wrote. It took having a mid-life crisis of sorts at 35 to realize that I hadn't even attempted to reach my life-long goal of writing a book, an aim I recorded as far back as in my high school yearbook. At that point, I had to figure out how to work less and live on less so that I had time to write. I spent the next decade living in self-imposed penury, almost at the federal poverty level-- house-sitting, squatting in friends and family's homes, no health insurance, 200,000 miles on my car--earning just enough to pay for necessities while I wrote. I was lucky enough to get a couple small grants along the way to keep me afloat so I could survive on part-time work and have time to write.
What inspired you to write Chasing Maine’s Second, your first book?
Journalism was my first trade and I missed it, so that was one thing. The other was that I heard smart people talking about rural places in ways that were superficial, to put it charitably. That kind of screamed through in early news stories about the Congressional race in Maine’s Second. Everything, it seemed to me, was this goofy mash-up of lobsters, shuttered paper mills, and gun-toting locals. So, to be uncharitable, I thought those stories were bs and decided to take a closer look.
What was the process for writing this book?
Mostly, it was a lot of fun. I would go into a coffee shop or a small business and ask questions. The Congressional race was a conversation starter, but I would let people take conversations wherever they wanted and often follow their tips if they suggested someone else to speak with. I stayed away from the political pros, for the most part. I think I made both sides in the contest nervous because they did not know what to make of someone who was not that interested in the horse race part and they likely thought I was some kind of opposition researcher.
The productive process for me was to pivot from talking with people to reading basic facts about places around the Second, like census data and economic and social history. I wrote pretty much every day about what I was seeing and later put those observations in a structure that threw out a lot of detail and tried to keep a narrative thread.
How do you think the role of journalism in politics has changed since you began your career in the 1980s?
I think traditional journalists have less influence on politics now. In part that’s because the business models of local and regional news outlets are essentially gone and without a fully formed replacement yet. But the even bigger factor is that there are fewer voters in play to be influenced by any media. More than in the 1980s, voters are seeing their political affiliation as part of their personal identity. When more voters can potentially swing to one side or the other, what political journalists are reporting has more influence. It is a preaching to the choir game right now.
The counter to that is that you see lots of stubborn people out there – including Maine journalists and people across the state – who understand the obligations of self-governance and the stakes if we keep riding exclusively into tribalism. My bet is that American democracy will survive and get healthier. My other bet is that when we look back at how that happened, we will find the fingerprints of all kinds of people and maybe a few extra fingerprints from Maine’s Second District because the place is so stubborn, authentic, and extraordinary.
How did you find inspiration for your signature character, Jack McMorrow?
Jack McMorrow is my alter ego in some ways, the reporter I would have liked to have been—if being McMorrow in real life wouldn't get me hurt or thrown in jail. I was a reporter at the weekly Rumford Falls Times, my first newspaper job, when I realized that the stories I was seeing were way beyond the confines of a weekly newspaper. I always say my stories in my daily newspaper life at the Morning Sentinel ( and later columns) were true but I needed fiction to write the truth about whatever subject I was covering. The distinction is important to my work in both arenas, which had parallel lives for many years. I could interview people, insert myself in their lives, but there was so much more to all of those stories than could be squeezed into a newspaper story. I decided early on that fiction—and specifically crime fiction—was the best medium to do justice to what I was experiencing. McMorrow is the quintessential reporter in that sense. He keeps asking questions until he gets to the truth behind the incident or the story or the person he's met in a courtroom or a crime scene or a jail cell. He peels back the layers over the course of the novel and the end result is the truth that was hiding behind that news story all along.
How does your work as a reporter shape your fiction writing?
I've seen my fiction writing described as terse and spare. I've never thought of it that way, but if that is the case, it's probably because I always had to write to fill a finite space (this was before online newspapers) so every word had to count. In my fiction, I like to think that I weigh every word, especially in the edit of second drafts. In my columnist life, I was allotted 80 lines on the section front. Not 81. Not 79. There is a discipline to that sort of writing, and if you have something important to say about someone you find compelling, you want all of the words to be impactful. I think that has crossed over to my fiction. Another way my reporting shaped my fiction is that I was an at-large columnist, which meant I was free to roam and find my topics. Because I wrote about people—regular folks, people in traumatic situations, criminals, inmates, police of all sorts—I had to be able to write, but more importantly I had to be able to listen. Subjects shared very personal stuff with me and before they did that, they needed to know I was sincerely interested and hearing them closely. That allowed me to tell their stories but also gave me the opportunity to hear the way people talk—the rhythm of their speech, the inflection, the ways they slowly reveal the truth, or a lie. I think that training has very much informed the way I write dialogue. I read my own dialogue aloud and listen just as I did as a newspaper writer. Very closely, attentive to anything that doesn't ring true.
How did you become interested in both journalistic and fiction writing?
Journalism taught me to write clearly and succinctly, and introduced me to thousands of people. It gave me a sense of how people really talk, and the situations I inserted myself into, especially in my crime reporting, were perfect fodder for crime fiction. I felt I had the raw materials for fiction. I also felt a need to express more than I could in a newspaper column, and to invent characters of my own. As a journalist, I sought out interesting people and told their stories. In fiction, I was able to invent characters and tell their stories. Those people were inside me, lingering in my imagination. I'd experienced this sort of creative process when I was writing short fiction in college. When I started my first novel, I had the same urge to create characters of my own, but newspapers had given me the ingredients to make them more whole. I still work as a journalist, writing for magazines, and love the craft and discipline of that sort of reporting and writing. When I sit down to work on a Jack McMorrow novel, it's a different sort of writing, very freeing. I don't think I could be a fiction writer without journalism lurking somewhere in the background.
Book Award for Fiction
A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed
Jason Brown
What inspired you to write this book?
My main inspiration was my experience growing up in Maine with my immediate and extended family, particularly my grandparents. I knew them well and spent a lot of time living with them in the summers. My grandmother was an artist and my grandfather was an English teacher. They were both what I would call self-mythologizers. There was nothing remarkable about them or the rest of us. We were not rich or famous or important in any way, but my grandfather had an ability when talking about himself and our family’s past that reminded me of the way Salinger wrote about the Glass family. Although my grandfather was not a writer, he was always telling the story of us. I grew up feeling part of something distinct and unique and larger than life. In the process of growing older and moving around and losing my grandparents, I felt that I was missing something I wanted to recover even though I knew I couldn’t. Instead of recreating my past, I created a similar world with a version of me and versions of my family members. The writing process became personally exciting. At the same time, fictionalizing my experience served as an antidote to nostalgia by providing me distance from my own history and allowing me to see myself and my past through a critical lens. Pure nostalgia can be personally satisfying, but it is self-indulgent for a writer who writes for other people. We are always writing for sympathetic strangers.
What is your process for developing characters?
Most of my characters are based on people I know or have known. I start with some of the basic elements of those people—elements that make them distinct in my mind—and I then begin to exaggerate those elements or build in fictional traits to distance the character from his or her real life inspiration. Some writers probably create characters out of the blue, so to speak, without using a model. That sounds wonderful but doesn’t usually work for me. When I try to do that, the characters end up feeling like types. For me the point of realistic, character-based fiction is to create characters that feel like real people. The point of fiction is to explore what it feels like to be human. It’s also true for me that I feel closer to some fictional characters (like Olive Kitteridge) than I do to most of the people I’ve known. Olive helped me understand what I didn’t know about my grandmother. Writers allow us inside the lives of their fictional characters. We form a kind of intimacy with them that is hard to achieve with actual people. Then we carry those characters around inside us for years after we have finished reading the book. It’s a powerful and mysterious process.
As an author, what challenges must you overcome in your work?
I’m slow, inefficient, self-loathing, self-centered, dyslexic, and seemingly incapable of writing in the long (i.e., commercial) form—I’m a disaster! I forgot lazy. I’m also lazy. In my experience, the older one gets, the more everything in life (especially oneself) conspires against writing just one decent page. (Melodrama is also a problem. I enjoy television a little too much for my own good.) These are shark-infested waters, even though the sharks are mostly projections of my own fears. In order to keep writing, I have to keep things pretty simple. I love to make things, either out of wood or words. I’ve gotten better at both mediums—slowly. My goal is to keep working on a regular basis. Once in a while, after an enormous amount of effort, I produce something that I am not ashamed to show to another human being. When that happens, I feel alive and real.
What inspired you to assemble On Democracy?
When I finished E. B. White On Dogs (2013), I had no plans for an encore, but then the 2016 election hit like a ton of bricks and suddenly the news was full of fascism and nationalism and presidents who play golf. First, I simply wrote letters to the editors of the various newspapers, hoping to correct the record or define the words or add the context of history. Inevitably, though, I found myself quoting my grandfather, both because it was obvious we had been down these roads before, as a nation, and also because he wrote so clearly on the subjects. The more I read from his books, especially The Wild Flag, the more obvious it was that these pieces needed to see the light of day again. It’s uncanny how timely they are and how much we have forgotten, or never learned, as a nation.
What is the message you hope the anthology will leave with readers?
If there is one point of view that I wish readers would reflect on, it would be the immediate need for a more global outlook, and global governance. E.B. White’s essays on the dangerous limits of nationalism – which seemed idealistic to him, even as he wrote them – have proven out. If we weren’t convinced before, this pandemic should have driven the point home by now. We are one earth, one people, sink or swim.
How has working with E.B. White’s writing influenced your own?
I take “Omit needless words” to heart, but also play with breaking the rules, like the child who strung all the prepositions together at the end of the sentence: “What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to out of up for?”
How do you hope to influence young readers with Biddy Mason Speaks Up?
I want them to become curious about who they are and where they come from and know themselves as a part of an interconnected web of being.
I want them to be critical thinkers, learning to ask questions that center those who have been made invisible and marginalized within this socio-political enterprise.
I want them to realize that if there is to be systemic change, we need to collectively come together to make that change happen.
I want them to tend to the people and plant-life around them, grow their own gardens, and learn the stories of the land they live on and the healing and spiritual properties of the botanicals around them.
What inspires you to write?
The historical moment and time in which I live; the destruction of the feminine; my love for those I love. It is the energetic pull of wanting to communicate something that feels inexpressible, to examine and re-experience a moment through the configuration of words, that always drives me to write.
What do you think is the role of poetry in spreading empathy and knowledge?
What empathy and knowledge need is attentiveness, the ability to cultivate a dynamic stillness that allows you to be receptive and responsive. Poetry slows you down, lets you be in the company of your senses, emotions, and spirit; it is an activation into sensation and sensitivity, which can broaden how we connect to and apprehend our private and public worlds.
Book Award for Children’s
Maybe Tomorrow?
Charlotte Agell
What inspired you to write Maybe Tomorrow?
Many years ago, I bought a small clay figurine of a rhino. She sat on my desk. All I knew about her was that her name was Elba and that, despite being very colorful, she was VERY sad. Not too long ago, one of my sixth grade students asked me if I ever got writer's block. I ended up telling her that, no, I was more likely to have too many ideas -- sort of like butterflies. Somehow, Elba's sadness and the block and the butterflies conspired, and, suddenly, I found myself writing Maybe Tomorrow? It's the first book of mine for which I was not the illustrator. Elba is no longer a rhino. Yet Ana Ramirez Gonzalez's illustrations are so perfect, so full of love, that I am far from sad about that!
How do you hope to impact children with your writing?
In my writing and illustrating life, I hope to impact children the same way I hope to impact them as a longtime public school teacher. I hope to foster imagination, to provoke "what ifs," to impart a sense of the wide wild wonderfulness of our weird world. (Note: When you work with kids, it's okay to go overboard with alliteration.) I hope to give children the message that it's okay (crucial, even!) to BE YOURSELF and to be kind.
Why do you write children’s books?
I have written them since I was a kid, so it's more a matter of not ever stopping.