2021 Award Winner Interviews
John N. Cole Award for Maine Nonfiction
Maine and American Art: The Farnsworth Art Museum (co-winner)
Michael K. Komanecky, Jane Bianco, & Angela Waldron
How did the idea for this book come about?
We had long recognized the need to prepare a new publication to our 2000 book, Maine in America. Rather than follow the format of that book, as well as others often used in what are generally seen as collection catalogues, we felt a very different format was required to tell the distinctive story of the museum's founding and how its collection evolved to serve the museum's mission to celebrate Maine's role in American art. Hence there are separate chapters on individual artists, groups of artists working in the same period or locations, or media, as well as one devoted to the story of the museum's founding based on new information regarding Lucy Farnsworth's decision to found the museum.
What was your research process like?
Jane Bianco, Angela Waldron, and I divided up our areas of responsibility for these chapters and hence our research. Researching existing information on these subjects, delving more deeply into recent scholarship, and deciding upon the perspectives we felt need to brought to bear drove our research.
What do you hope readers will take away from this book about the state of Maine’s role in American art?
Hopefully they will see the diversity of reasons artists have come to Maine to work, and with that a richer understanding of how their experiences in Maine impacted their lives and careers.
John N. Cole Award for Maine Nonfiction
From the Mountains to the Sea: The Historic Restoration of the Penobscot River (co-winner)
Peter Taylor (editor) and Kara Douglas
What inspired you to write this book?
Peter: As someone interested in ecology and environmental issues, I had followed the Penobscot River Restoration Project from its beginnings in the early 2000s until its completion in 2016. I remember being awed by the scale and complexity of what they were trying to do. My writing and consulting work at the time dealt with similar issues, although not on the Penobscot River, so I knew the importance from a scientific and conservation perspective, as well as the enormity of the challenges. But I could only imagine everything the project participants were doing behind the scenes. When a member of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust approached me in 2017 about helping them to tell that behind-the-scenes story, I knew it was ripe for a book. I also knew that researching and writing the book would be quite challenging, so I was very happy to team up with Kara to make it happen.
What was your research process like?
Kara: Primary source interviews made up the foundation of this book's research process. Over the course of a year, we talked extensively with people directly involved in the Penobscot River Restoration Project, as well as those who offered specific insights from a less central perspective. Because we were asking people to recall events that occurred over the16-year duration of the project, we supplemented these interviews with research into written accounts of progress that appeared in media articles and meeting notes along the way. Background research was also essential: knowing the history of river restoration and its impact on species populations, representing the cultural, ecological and financial risks and benefits of a project of this scale, and creating a narrative that would appeal to both those in the field and to the general reader were important facets of the project.
Making site visits was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the research. Learning first hand how the Milford Dam's new fish lift operated, watching the alewives spawn at Blackman Stream, making observations at the bypass channel at the Howland Dam site, canoeing and camping along the west branch of the Penobscot all lent important details to the story that filled in some of the technical aspects. While we wanted the narrative to appeal to a wide range of readers from many locations, we also wanted it to be especially place-based, so we sought out experiences that would help us include details about the river itself, how it changes seasonally and what it's like to immerse oneself in its presence and history.
Why do you think this is an important story for readers today?
Kara: The Penobscot River Restoration Project accomplished something that is crucial to rebalancing human and ecological needs. By maintaining the Penobscot River's power-generating potential while removing primary obstructions to fish migration, this project became a blueprint for work that can be done world-wide. This was a hard-won accomplishment that required many stakeholders to come to the table repeatedly and negotiate in the best interest of something greater than themselves. It involved listening closely and expressing clearly what was most essential. The story of the Penobscot River Restoration is a rare and necessary success story in fortitude and finding common ground.
Peter: In today’s political and cultural climate, the Penobscot River Restoration Project shows what's possible when people with divergent values and priorities work together respectfully for shared benefits, rather than battling it out. The book reveals how they managed to do this. It’s fascinating and insightful, not just for environmental issues but any situation with competing perspectives. This story is also important because it demonstrates how changes viewed favorably by people at one time—such as damming rivers to generate energy—can turn out to have major negative impacts. Can we look critically at potential negative impacts of things that seem good right now—such as development of renewable energy sources—and avoid creating messes that future generations have to clean up?
Youth Award for Poetry
“Cedars Still Growing”
Clara Bossi
Your poem is full of vivid imagery. Where did your inspiration for these images come from?
I wrote my poem during a Native American Studies course, where we examined the tradition known as "Winter Counts" that certain plains tribes practice. Tribes would represent each year with a symbolic drawing on buffalo skin. We channeled this sentiment into a poetry assignment, composing a line for each year of our lives. I focused on specific objects from my younger years that stood out to me as especially meaningful, such as the image of the five cedar trees that were planted when I was born that now have grown taller than our house.
What was the writing process like for you?
As the poem was inspired by personal images from my life, the writing process was very nostalgic. Writing the poem allowed a lot of time for self-reflection and introspection.
What aspirations do you have for the future in terms of considering your own writing?
I have just embarked on my first semester at Haverford College, and with so much excitement surrounding me here, I have not had the chance to write for creativity's sake. I hope that poetry will arise organically from my life experiences in the future, and that the art form can be my avenue for reflection.
Where did the idea for this story come from?
I began writing this story when I was a sophomore in high school (I'm now a freshman in college). Its original idea emerged from an activity at a writing camp I was participating in with The Telling Room. We were asked to focus on creating vivid characters with clear descriptions, and in that quickwrite, Vito, my character who was "Death as a teenage boy" was born. From there, the story mostly emerged because I needed to have something to do with my new character. It seemed to me that there could be nothing more interesting than Death as a character looking for love, so I shifted the story to focus on the complex depths of mortality, love, sadness, and pain and how they often work and feed off of one another.
How did you first get into creative writing?
I remember writing a lot of short stories throughout elementary school, and in middle school, I participated in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) a lot. In high school, I began working with The Telling Room, which is where I really honed both my craft and my love for writing. The Telling Room also helped me realize that the creative writing I enjoyed most was short stories and poetry. Overall, though, I first got into creative writing just because I wanted to tell stories, and now, even more than that, I want to tell stories that reach people and connect them together.
What are your aspirations for the future in terms of continuing your own writing?
My most basic plan is just to never stop writing. While I'm no longer of age to be a Telling Room student, I plan to keep working with The Telling Room and experience some of the teaching side of writing, along with creating my own stories. Recently, I've found that the writing that fills me with the most passion is poetry, so I'd like to keep focusing on that and possibly look for more places and opportunities to share my writing and hear others. I'm also looking forward to possibly taking creative writing classes in college and developing my work even further.
How do you approach writing a poem?
"Approach" has the wrong subject here. Poems are shy creatures, so I try to create opportunities for the poem to approach me. Sometimes that's through writing prompts, sometimes dreams, sometimes exploring a metaphor that presents itself, but it almost always involves shutting down the part of my brain that wants to be in charge so the poem can tell me what it needs to tell me. Once I've got it on the page, I invite the bossy part of my brain back for the revision process.
Why is this short collection of poems titled “What Lasts”?
The two criteria for the contest were that the selected poems had to either have been written in 2020 or published in 2020. Boy, was that a stupid year! Trying to find five poems that fit those parameters AND felt like they belonged in the same room together was the first challenge. Once I'd narrowed it down to five, I noticed they fit into two categories: the ways childhood events shape us and the possibility of the end of humanity--what we survive and what survives us. "What Lasts" is shorthand for that.
Why do you write?
It's all my dad's fault. He started reading me poetry when I was tiny, before I even had the capacity to understand the language. No Berenstain Bears for this kid--instead, I got a steady diet of Frost, Yeats, Tolkien, and Ovid. But even though the poems' content was WAY beyond anything I could grasp, I learned to associate poetry with a certain kind of intimacy and connection. Sitting on his lap before bed, in that transition time between consciousness and dreams, listening to the music of it and the way his tone of voice would change in response to the poem's emotional register--that's what made me a poet.
Award for Drama
Hockey Mom
Travis Baker
What are some of the unique challenges or considerations you encounter when writing plays? How do you find playwriting different from other forms of writing?
The first consideration when writing for the stage is to remember that you’re writing for the stage. Theatre is a living, communal entity tracing its roots back to the dawn of human experience. It has evolved to include actors, stage hands, costumers, designers, ushers, box office, a director, board members and, most importantly, the folks who have come to see your work.
I advise people who want to write a script to get involved in theatre: get on stage, get backstage, build sets, and tear them down. Learn what is possible and what isn’t. Unlike other forms of writing, like poetry or prose, the script is but one part of a theatre and it’s going to take a lot of people to bring it to life.
The main difference in playwriting, as opposed to other forms, is that nearly all of the action of the play is conveyed through dialogue with the occasional stage direction. If the audience needs to know something or feel something, an actor will have to say the line that conveys that information or emotion. Or not, sometimes it’s what is not said that is more important. A properly constructed script will lead the actors and audience towards that engagement with each other with the goal being a transcendent experience.
Finally, the playwright owns the copyright. This means no one can change the script unless the playwright agrees to the change. They can ask, beg, threaten, suggest, bemoan, plead and/or bribe but the playwright has the final say and we are very protective of that right. This right, of course, comes with responsibility. A playwright must listen to everyone we can in the development of the script, to make necessary changes in service of the play and work our butts off to craft the best script possible from which the director, actors, designers and crew can make the best possible production and give an audience the best possible theatre experience.
What was your process for developing characters when writing this story?
The characters in Hockey Mom come from Clara, Maine, a coastal town of my own making based on places like Belfast and Rockland. This is my seventh “Maine” play and they have all presented themselves as I wander around my town and listen to the stories the inhabitants tell at the bar, the café, the hair salon, the general store and, in this case, the hockey rink.
It also came from a dozen years of being involved in youth hockey as a parent and coach as well as from my time as an English professor at UMaine with a number of hockey players, men and women, passing through my courses. Some went on to the highest level of the sport, most got degrees and got on with their lives. I spent a considerable time asking moms of players at all levels, from mites to the NHL about their experiences and sought to highlight the very special, and too often neglected, relationship between the moms in the stands and the kids on the ice.
My writing process is a messy one and I very much view it as a craft. I take an idea and shape it over time. Quite a bit of time. Usually about two years between first draft and being ‘production’ ready. The first several drafts are a venting process. I need to get down any personal feelings about a situation and then start cutting those out. If a line sounds like it's from the writer and not the character, that’s no good.
The characters emerge slowly. They begin to find their voice as the drafts continue. I took advantage of many friends having time on their hands to have multiple Zoom readings and elicit their responses. I have a few trusted readers whose advice I seek and, being familiar with my process, are generous and patient with their time, knowing how hard I’m working to achieve an end result. There have probably been another dozen drafts between the script that was so honored this year and the current version. I expect there will be a few more before rehearsals begin. I never stop rewriting, they just tell me its tech week.
The craft of playwriting requires patience and a good set of ears. One must listen to the story, listen to the characters, listen to the readers, and listen to yourself. Crafting an idea is like working with clay that you can’t touch or carving stone with tools that don’t exist. Eventually, a physical object will appear made from words on a page meant to be spoken. I’ve spent 30 years trying to make that happen. Sometimes it does.
What message do you hope to convey to your audience with Hockey Mom?
Writing a play with the intention of sending a message makes the thing dull and uninspiring. It becomes propaganda. I strive to present fully realized characters struggling with life in the best way they can. I am the conduit to their stories which are, of course, our own. The central story of Hockey Mom involves a mother and her son and the game they love. The mom, Cindy, wants the world for her son, Cole. Cole wants to go to the NHL but has begun to realize, while trying to come back from a concussion, that may not be a realistic goal. Cindy may take some convincing.
There are seven characters in Hockey Mom, each with their own wants, needs, ambitions, and fears. I can only work to convey them as honestly as possible.
Where did the inspiration for this story come from?
Love, Sophia on the Moon is an epistolary mother-daughter story about anger, imagination, unconditional love, and moonicorns. The story begins with Sophia furiously packing her bags at the end of a time out. She writes her mother a letter: Dear Mom, I’m running away and won’t ever come back. From now on I live on the moon. Don’t try to stop me. Love, Sophia. She blasts off in her rocket ship…and her mother writes back. The adventures unfold in further letters between Sophia on the moon and her mother back on Earth, and through artist Mika Song’s gorgeous illustrations.
We live in a world that doesn’t always allow ample space for the healthy expression of anger—especially female anger. I wanted to write a book in which it’s okay for a girl to get really, really mad at someone she loves: where it’s okay for her to feel how she feels, rage it out, and go off on an adventure—and, when she’s ready, to return home—because that love holds a safe space for her big emotions (and her big imagination).
Why do you write children’s books?
Because it’s fun! I have always loved making things up: games, rules, dance moves, songs, recipes, words, adventures. My favorite thing to make up is stories, and one of the best things about stories is sharing them with other people. I write to entertain myself and others, and to explore the questions I have about the world.
When I was a kid growing up on an island off the coast of Maine, books were my window into the world beyond that community, and I remember many of the books I read in childhood even more vividly than I remember the books I read last month. Reading made me feel like I was part of something much larger than me. Even once I grew up and moved to New York City, books continued to be not an escape from the world but a way of living more fully in it. I still can’t resist the invitation to peek inside others’ hearts, minds, worlds, and experiences—as a reader and as a writer and storyteller.
What advice would you give to young writers?
Write the kind of stories you love to read. Have fun playing with ideas in the first draft and don’t worry about getting the words “right” while you’re drafting—that’s what revision is for!
I talk a lot about my revision process when I visit schools (one of the best things about being a children’s and YA author is getting to talk with kids and teens about books and writing) and I love seeing the excitement and surprise on kids’ faces when they hear that writing is often hard for me, and that giving myself permission to write a truly terrible first draft that no one will ever want to read is the only way I can get a draft written at all. No story comes out perfectly from the start! But messes can turn into magic, if you keep stirring with everything you’ve got.
What do you believe is the purpose of poetry (if there is one at all)?
A difficult question for me, a question for living and thinking aloud with others—take my response as a point of opening rather than a definition. I like that poetry is not "for" any one thing but instead has results in us that we could not predict (as writers, as readers). I like the slipperiness of that. Poetry is something that reminds me—though I don't think this is its purpose—that outcomes interest me more than goals. Like human beings, poems are. To me their being is being-with, rather than being-for.
What role does form play in your poems?
Form is my primary way of thinking. By primary I mean it generally occurs first as well as that it occupies a major part of my thought. The firstness of form is in things like an initial sense that a poem or other text should have this kind of body or this kind of movement or this kind of structure among its ideas. It also happens that I work out ideas spatially, moving around the page. I think this is in part because, like most children probably, I learned to think spatially (walking, falling, dancing, drawing) before I learned to write, and I never lost that sense of space coming first. I get my understanding of form from the world: plants, land, processes of growing and moving, seasons, object-forms (like letters, books, vessels, maps, paintings), thought-forms (like sentences, fragments, non-English syntax, logical or geometrical proofs). I am much more likely to go to the world for form than for content. Form is how I understand structure and how I process argument and idea. Form communicates to me through its own development the movement of thought and feeling that is happening beyond me. It pushes my ability to ask questions (to myself and about the world) and helps me think through the world. Form teaches me about the systems of power we live inside and the relations that we are born and grow into. To me it is as central in creating and understanding sense as any image or idea in a poem.
What motivates you to write?
Another very difficult question to answer. The finality of the world and the beauty of it, in short. And writing has always been like breathing to me—something that is continuously happening, very animal, very quiet, very ordinary, for everyone, of which I am a part.
Your work draws on your own experiences growing up in a mill town, as well as research on the larger environmental effects of the mill on its people. What did your writing process look like? How did you effectively combine memoir with journalism?
The material I gathered was like a pile of tangled necklaces. Then I spent about ten years untangling them and lining them up in a way that made sense to me and to the story I was telling, which is to say, the story had many and varied threads. I just wrote what I wrote with no genre in mind but for nonfiction and to tell a story that hadn’t yet been told. I had to be in the story of course, but was it a memoir? I am not sure. I think a memoir focuses more on the self? In any case, any writing requires research, so I made sure to also interrogate myself, my family, my town, and history itself so that I could show how our lives told the entire environmental history of the United States.
Did your understanding of home change while writing this book? If so, how?
My relationship to Maine changed. I hated Maine. That hate drove me. Mill Town was never driven by love. Love was what I found writing Mill Town. Of course I learned a lot about things I had never known, like the Acadian genocide, the complicity of our government with the paper industry, and how what I found connected to my own identity.
What message do you hope your readers will take away from this book?
I didn’t write a book to give a message. I wrote it to open up conversation and reveal something that’s happening all over the United States and beyond; that disadvantaged people are more susceptible to social injustice.
What role does art play in your life?
If one defines art as inclusive of craft, then I would say it plays a foundational role. Mortise & Tenon Magazine is a small-scale publication, and I am responsible for editorial direction, writing articles, building furniture for those articles, photography, graphic design, and the varied skills involved in presenting and marketing a business. My artmaking is often a merger of woodworking, writing, and photography. These craft lessons spill over into the other areas of my life as well, whether it's farm animal husbandry, homeschooling our kids, or teaching at our church. Each of these areas involve a disciplined development of skill in order to create something beautiful in this world. I do strive for beauty in all I do, and occasionally get a glimmer of success in the pursuit. Those are sweet moments.
What do you hope readers will learn from Another Work is Possible?
When I watched these 21st-century people (who didn’t grow up with hand skills) successfully wield axes and chisels to frame a building from freshly harvested logs in only a few days, it opened my mind to what is possible for people today. Hand-tool woodworking, like many other handcrafts, is often described as a lost art. But the Carpenters Without Borders team showed me that it is not. We can learn to do this. We can learn how to shape our corner of the world with our own two hands if we so choose. This book is an invitation to do just that.
How did you go about documenting this project?
As these plans came together, I thought to myself, “How could I not share this project with the world?” I believe this was one of the most unique and convivial woodworking events in my generation, and if it was going to happen on my home turf, I felt responsible to extend it to others. My brother, Sam Klein, made an award-winning documentary film of the project (of the same name), and I made the book. These two formats complement each other so well. The book brings the anecdotes, emotions, and wider life applications about skill building, while the film brings the resonant thump, thump of axes on logs and the regional accents and perspectives from around the world. They are two facets of an amazing project that was truly a transformative experience for me. I hope the book and film can extend the inspiration to others.
How much do you find yourself drawing on your own life experiences in your writing, if at all?
I guess you could find traces of my life experience in everything I've written. Sometimes it's the genesis of the tale; more often it's reflected in what the characters say and do from scene to scene. I think this is inevitable. You see these characters in your mind's eye and they take on the mannerisms of people you've known. Or yourself, if you're honest enough.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about the fiction-writing process?
I don't think everyone understands how much effort is involved in making a piece of fiction work in all its aspects. Finding the right ending, for one example, can be excruciating. Someone once asked Hemingway how you finish a story, and he said, "Out of a hundred possible endings, you must pick the inevitable one." Now just imagine how much stamina is involved in that!
What advice would you give to aspiring authors?
Read everything to see what other writers are doing or have done, and finish what you're writing even if you think it's not very good. Your first draft is usually only an exploration, so don't worry about quality. The story will change on the way through, as will the cast of characters, and you won't know what they're really up to until you get to the end. Then the fun begins, because you know what's going on and you can rewrite with that in mind.
Short Works Competition in Nonfiction
“What We Want is Simple”
Sarah Twombly (co-winner)
Who do you hope to reach with your story?
This piece is about parenting, but it's also about growing up, about that moment when we look back and recognize what it must have been like for the adults who raised us. That's part of the profundity in rearing children; they force us to reconsider the narratives of our own childhoods. While I hope this piece lands as a love letter--a bit of catharsis--for parents, I also want it to find its way to any adults who might be looking over their shoulders and pondering their own childhoods.
You write of struggling to reconcile “this double helix of desire, one strand urging me to desert my children, the other to rip the world apart protecting them.” Societal conversations surrounding motherhood do not often leave room for such nuance. What impact do you hope your piece will have on its readers?
I remember being awake at 2am, breastfeeding our sleepless infant, and desperately scouring the internet for pieces about the hardships of parenthood, the exhaustion, the hormones, anything that spoke to the distress I was feeling. Back then, there was hardly anything. Historically, our culture has valued only one narrative about parenthood: that it is magical. Finally, we are starting to see a shift. Novels like Night Bitch by Rachel Yoder and the viral blog post "I Read All the Baby Sleep Books," by Ava Neyer represent a flourishing, new literary tradition in which parents can be angry or frustrated or exhausted, and still love their children. I hope this essay adds to that conversation by offering an honest reflection of parenthood, its trials and triumphs. I want parents to feel seen and acknowledged. I want them to know that what we are doing is hard, especially right now, and it certainly isn't magical, at least not all the time. And that's okay.
Where do you find inspiration for your writing?
Some people understand the world by talking about it, or reading about it, or drawing it. I understand the world by writing it. It is not so much about inspiration, as it is compulsion. My brain gets tied in knots, and the only way I know to untangle them is to write them out. Writing, as solitary an act as it is, is the only way I know how to be in the world.
What inspires you to write horror?
I don’t know how much of a choice I have! I’ve been a fan of horror and stories with darker themes since I was very small, but it certainly isn’t all that I read or watch. What I do find is that when I write, it does tend to skew dark. Even when I wasn’t trying to write horror, I would find that I was, after all. So, I decided to embrace it, and since then I’ve really found my place, started to find more publishing success, connect with other horror writers, and find readers that enjoy my work. It’s no surprise that some of my favorite authors, the ones that inspire me are writers like Shirley Jackson, Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter, Donna Tartt, Kelly Link, and M. Rickert among many, many others. There has been a real resurgence of horror in the last couple of years, some great writers working in both mainstream and independent publishing. It’s really been exciting being part of it.
Where did the idea for this collection come from? Was there one thread you had in mind when crafting each story, or did the stories form independently of each other?
This collection spans about ten years of writing stories, some have their roots much further back than that, while at least one was finished just before publication, so they were all formed independently from each other. Some were written for themed anthologies, while with others the ideas formed more organically. One was written specifically for the collection. Trepidatio, my publisher, had an open call for short story collections, and I realized that I probably had enough stories to put one together. The challenge then was to decide which stories to include and in what order. I wanted to show the range of what I could do, while at the same time make the reader feel like they were on a journey. There are threads that run through the stories because there are certain themes and obsessions that I go back to over and over
What experience do you hope to create for your readers with this collection?
One of my favorite sensations when I am reading a story is when I think I am on solid ground, and everything just shifts slightly, leaving me off-balance. You know something has gone awry, but you’re not sure yet what that might mean. I hope that some stories do that. On the other side of the scale, I wanted other stories in this collection to be akin to a punk rock song, where you are thrown into the weirdness immediately. Ultimately, a lot of the readers’ experience is out of my control, so my hope is that they enjoyed it, engaged with it, found something in it that spoke to them.
How did you decide to write a novel in verse form? How does the form help to convey your meaning?
When I brought the first pages of Three Things I Know Are True to my writing group, it was in prose. One of my writer friends (shout-out to writer Sally Stanton!) suggested I try it in verse since my prose tended to be spare and poetic. When I changed to verse, it felt like the form was perfectly suited to the story. When told in verse, I think there’s an immediacy and a paring-down to the essentials of a story. I also liked using ‘titles’ for each poem, as a way of distilling or conveying what the heart of each poem was about.
Has your own experience working as a nurse shaped your writing? If so, how?
It definitely shaped the writing of Three Things. I’ve worked in hospitals as an obstetrics and labor and delivery nurse but caring for sick children in their own homes was a very different experience. I got to see firsthand how the child’s illness or disability affected the whole family, from parents to siblings and even extended family members. Seeing the grace and compassion that siblings showed was a big part of the inspiration for the book.
What do you hope young readers will take away from this story?
Since Three Things was my debut novel, I had no idea what it would be like to have it go out into the world. One of the biggest surprises was the many different ways readers connected with the novel. Some people saw it as a story of forgiveness, some felt it was about sibling bonds, and other people thought it was about finding a way to heal after tragedy. There were other interpretations and reactions, too. It probably shouldn’t have been such a surprise to me, since I’m the same way—when I read a book, I take from it what I need at the time or what has meaning to me. So, I hope the same for young readers, that they take from it whatever speaks to them.
Book Award for Memoir
Sigh, Gone: A Misfit's Memoir of Great Books, Punk Rock, and the Fight to Fit In
Phuc Tran
How did the classic works of literature that you reference shape your understanding of your own identity? As a classics teacher, how do you see the classics as relevant, or even essential, to the lives of young people today?
The lens books for each chapter in SIGH, GONE were books that helped to crystallize experiences and emotions for me that were murky and bewildering. For example, I remember so clearly reading The Scarlet Letter for the first time, diving into Hester Prynne’s feelings of isolation, seeing how Hawthorne articulated the hypocrisy and the complexity of all the relationships—I was thunderstruck by that reading experience.
My brother and I went through so many things that to us (as kids) made no sense. We had no frame of reference. And no adult ever sat us down to talk to us about those experiences (and how could they have?). They got filed away in my mind. When the right books came along, they unlocked and illuminated the experiences for me.
And beyond that deeply personal benefit, classic books were always a way for me to connect to other people (books in general still are). My sense of identity is always shifting and changing, and I think it’s rich for me to experience the world, art, and my community through multiple lens, through multiple senses of self rather than through one, fixed sense of who I am.
I think identity is a social construct—its application is really through the social group. I can have whatever identity I want, but if the larger group says that my identity is so-and-so or such-and-such, then that’s the reality of my experience, so the idea of identity is this constant negotiation of how I see myself and how other people see me (and treat me). The challenge is when those things are disconnected or even at odds with each other.
The funny thing is that those lens books from SIGH, GONE are not necessarily my desert island, top ten books, but they were powerful books that shaped me when I was most vulnerable and malleable.
I think it’s dangerous to frame the Classics (or the humanities in general) as “relevant” or “essential” without talking about the origins of the liberal arts education. This is because we’re borrowing language from the one mode of arts to assess the other without clarifying what “relevant” or “essential” mean.
Aristotle organized the arts into the servile arts and the liberal arts. The servile arts were the skills that produced practical things—skills like carpentry, farming, metal smithing, etc. These were called the servile arts because they were often performed by slaves in the ancient world. The seven liberal arts (that is the skills performed by free men) were the skills that Aristotle believed were essential for every free man to be an active and participatory citizen of the Greek polis (these liberal arts were: Grammar, Rhetoric, Dialectic, Music, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy).
I think that the classics are essential (as part of the humanities)— that philosophy, literature, history are on the other side of the STEM subjects, and they help us explore the gray and subjective areas of this thing we call life and the pursuit of happiness. They create space for students (and teachers) to debate and challenge and struggle with uncertainty, and this is essential for having an educated and informed citizenry. Public education as a social endeavor is the creation of the public, and the Classics, great books, philosophy should be fundamental to that endeavor (as much as math and science are).
What was the biggest challenge you faced in writing your memoir?
Honestly, it was time. I was working full time as a Latin teacher, tattooing and running the tattoo shop at night and on the weekends, and I only had one day off during the week (and I have two young daughters at home). My poor wife! I had to be incredibly regimented and disciplined about my writing schedule and about making sure that I reached my writing goals on the days that I did write.
What advice do you have for young writers trying to find their voice?
I think there’s a funny premise that young or burgeoning writers have to find their voice (and a person has only one voice!). Everyone has a voice already, and the goal as a new writer is to be able to identify what makes your writing voice unique and to be able to adjust or modulate that voice for the writing that you do. The more aware you are of your writing and the more you trust yourself (specifically, the choices that you make), the stronger and more distinct your voice will be. And that comes from a lot of writing and reading.
So I guess my advice is to read a lot, write a lot, and get feedback from trusted and respected friends and collaborators.
How did you first get into mystery writing?
I’m not sure it was ever a conscious decision on my part. I hadn’t written fiction for nearly three decades when the writing bug bit again. One day I sat down and started banging away on my iPad and a crime novel began to spill out. It really was that simple. Like I’d never stopped. I guess John Byron was trying to breakout into the world.
Has your own experience working in law enforcement shaped your writing? If so, how?
Absolutely. As a crime fiction author I couldn’t have picked a better career. And not just the procedural aspect. I draw heavily on my own experiences and the experiences of those with whom I worked. Human interactions, stressful situations, political pressure, life, death, and everything in between. The raw emotion and reality of policing combined with the difficulties of holding together a normal life outside of the job, are the things I imbue into characters to make them more realistic for the reader.
During my career I felt as though I had given up writing to do something else. I now realize that what I was actually doing was research for my return to writing. Some folks take the road less traveled. I opted for the long way home and it has made all the difference.
What is the key to crafting an engaging work of crime fiction?
I think it always comes down to emotion. Writers should imbued their characters with feelings and experiences shared by the reader. While the reader may not have lived the life depicted on the page, they will empathize with human emotions experienced by the characters in each scenario. Thus building a bond between the reader and character.
Another important component is to keep the pressure on. Never let the story become too static. As a writer I want the reader to keep turning pages. They should be worried about what might happen next. Any reader who can put the book down may not pick it up again. And no writer wants that.
How does it feel to write and share such a personal piece?
It took me many years before I could write about my family. I wrote thinly disguised fiction for many years, believing I had firmly avoided anything to do directly with my past. And anyway, I couldn’t believe anyone would really want to read about my dysfunctional family. I also waited until most of them were dead. What to me was nearly reduced in my mind for years as mundane and every day, since I lived and grew up under Parker Sr. and Evelyn’s household, apparently was quite compelling to people who were outside of it. Sharing it with others is both gratifying and anxiety producing, but not without regret and shame. Doesn’t every child have a story of a mom and dad getting into a fist fight? And that the mother can hold her own against her husband? Apparently not, and I remember the shock of realizing that what I had witnessed was outside most people’s experience. I feared I had been a member of a kind of freak show, one that was ultimately life-draining instead of life-affirming, which luckier families seemed to be able to impart to their children. Most of my siblings died of their own addictions when they were still relatively young, having spun, almost against their wills, into wells of despair and self-loathing. Despite this grimness, it has felt like a kind of obligation to resurrect them, find a way to capture them as they really were, to get their stories straight that is fair and accurate, jumping into the details with them that was the heartache of my family, while trying not to forget the larger world in which we lived, and the forces it imparted on us, the mid-1970s in Hawaii, where I spent my teenage years.
Your story balances a range of emotions—anger and sympathy, fear and love. Has the act of writing itself played a role in processing some of that emotional nuance? If so, how?
Being a psychotherapist, writing “Detox” was both cathartic and re-traumatizing. Sitting with feelings I hadn’t let myself have for years was humbling, to put it mildly. I would find myself crabbing at the people I love in my present world after a writing session, having inhabited again that developing young man of thirteen, really a boy still, who had limited weapons in which to defend the world he had found himself in, one that is still lodged decisively in the man he would become. I found myself pulling for him and having a greater sympathy for what he had to face at such a vulnerable age. I felt almost fatherly toward him, wanting to embrace him and give him kind, gentle, wise advice: do this, don’t do that, watch out for this… The range of emotions was what I found at the bottom of my brain, and I simply wrote them down, almost like a third person who was witnessing them in real time. I spent hours, “back there” in that red house in Hawaii, 98-914 Kaonohi Place, Pearl Ridge, Oahu. I felt anger and sympathy for my mother and father, contradictory emotions that nonetheless captured most accurately my feelings for them, whose combination extruded a new feeling in the present day, one I tried to express and capture in action and what dialogue I could remember taking place at various moments. My brother and sister I felt, and still feel, only sympathy and regret. Regret I wasn’t able to help them avoid the steps they took in their lives that resulted in their early deaths.
What impact do you hope your story will have on your readers?
We all have our stories. I run process and didactic groups for folks struggling with addiction issues at the hospital where I work. When a new member enters our group, we go around and introduce ourselves to them, tell them our story. Since members sometimes retell their stories several times, as we often have new group members on successive days, they retell their stories a lot. And they often get irritated at the iteration. But I tell them that doing this helps them edit themselves each time, pick out the details of their lives that will best help the new person understand them—and perhaps at the same time help them understand themselves a little better. They usually realize then why I ask them to do this over and over. I’m mindful that this is what writers also do, retell their stories over and over until they get it right. I hope my essay, above all, inspires another person to write their story—over and over if need be—to get it right. I think it is one of the most important things we can do with our lives: how did I end up here, in this place, in this state of mind, in this day? It can be heart rending and frightening, but it can also be deeply satisfying and affirming.
What, in your opinion, makes poetry an effective vehicle for resistance? Can it respond to the current moment in which we find ourselves differently than other forms can?
Poetry is an effective vehicle for resistance because poetry is, literally, language made new, and poetry is also the art of memory. Poetry can say something that responds to the immediate now in a new way and also poetry recalls and bears within it histories that create the immediate now. Poetry differs from other forms of activism because of its temporal reach, that is, being both of the moment and also of history. Poetry, lyric poetry, is speech condensed. It is quick and can be, should be, intense. Poetry can remain meaningful even after the events to which it responds have passed. My hope for Enough! is that the collection stands as a long-lasting response to the political and human crisis in America in 2020. And because poetry is also an oral art form, meant to be shared in a group, when a poet reads aloud, the poem has the power of the individual voice and also becomes part of the shared experience of a community. So in a reading, resistance and protest is given a presence and voice through the poet's presence and voice. Poetry can inspire a group of people in the moment of hearing. The book is not just a written testimony but can be a spoken one as well. It gives voice to a community.
What effect do you hope this anthology will have on its readers?
The effect that I hope the anthology has had and will have is to create a permanent statement standing up for George Floyd, for the very essential right to breathe that was taken from him. I also hope the collection will help to foster and sustain dialogue about race and racism in America. Enough! includes not only poems about BLM and the protests around George Floyd's murder, but also gives voice to other forms of oppression, resistance and protest in poems by Indigenous American poets. I think Agnes and I both hope that the book could become part of school and university curricula in Maine, because of the way that what is learned in school often shapes people's understanding of social worlds.
Where did your inspiration to assemble this collection come from?
I brought the idea to Agnes, whom I did not know at the time, and to Littoral Books, because the heart-breaking political situation our nation was facing that spring/summer of 2020 overwhelmed my consciousness. I took the idea to Littoral Books because I understood it to be a press committed to publishing works addressing social issues and I knew that I, and some other poets in Maine, had been writing poems in response to the human rights abuses of the Trump administration. The murder of George Floyd was the catalyst, more than any other event, for feeling an urgent and pressing need to respond, to speak up, in a lasting way against that crime. It was so good to find in Agnes someone who was equally passionate about these issues of racial equality and human rights.
Short Works Competition in Fiction
“The Blessing Tobacco”
Morgan Talty
How did the idea for this story come to you?
This story is actually one of the few that sort of partly wrote itself. I was attending the Stonecoast MFA, and one morning I had this story/frame come to me: a boy whose grandmother thinks he's her dead brother and projects the past onto him, and that past just so happened to be the incident with the blessing tobacco where she makes him smoke cigarette after cigarette as a punishment (which she had done to her brother). The first section of the story I wrote quite quickly, and what is there is pretty much what I wrote in that first draft. What followed after that first section, however, was much harder to write. I had to figure out the story's logic, and it took quite a while (some months). So, I got lucky, in that the idea just came to me! I wish it were always like that...but maybe not. Some of the fun in writing is the struggle.
What is the greatest challenge you face in writing fiction?
The greatest challenge I face is myself, to be honest. I can get in the way of my writing by overthinking things or feeling not so confident. Other than that, I'd say another challenge is the whole process of writing fiction. Just when we think we've figured out how to write a story, what we know goes out the window, so to say, when we go to write a new story. Each story is unique--it has its own logic--and it always requires its own approach.
From which authors do you most draw inspiration?
There are so many! Louise Erdrich, James Welch, Denis Johnson, Anton Chekhov, and Alice Munro. These writers (plus so many others) have taught me a great deal about writing, sure, but also about humanity.