Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains
Kerri Arsenault
St. Martin’s Griffin
Kerri Arsenault grew up in the small, rural town of Mexico, Maine, where for over 100 years the community orbited around a paper mill that provided jobs for nearly everyone in town, including three generations of her family. Kerri had a happy childhood, but years after she moved away, she realized the price she paid for that childhood. The price everyone paid. The mill, while providing the social and economic cohesion for the community, also contributed to its demise.
Mill Town is a book of narrative nonfiction, investigative memoir, and cultural criticism that illuminates the rise and collapse of the working-class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxics and disease with the central question; Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?
Midden
Julia Bouwsma
Fordham University Press
In 1912 the State of Maine forcibly evicted an interracial community of roughly forty-five people from Malaga Island, a small island off the coast of Phippsburg, Maine. Though Malaga had been their home for generations, nine residents (including the entire Marks family) were committed to the Maine School for the Feeble Minded in Pownal, Maine. The others struggled to find homes on other islands or on the mainland, where they were often unwelcome. The Malaga school was dismantled and rebuilt as a chapel on another island. Seventeen graves were exhumed from the Malaga cemetery, consolidated into five caskets, and reburied at the Maine School for the Feeble Minded. Just one year after the start of the eviction proceedings, the Malaga community was erased.
Midden confronts the events and over one hundred years of silence that surround this shameful incident in Maine’s history. Utilizing a wide range of poetic styles–epistolary poems to ghosts, persona poems, erasure poems, interior poems, interviews and instructions, poems framed both in the past and in the present– Midden delves into the vital connections between land, identity, and narrative and asks how we can heal the generations and legacies of damage that result when all three of these are deliberately taken in an attempt to rob people of their very humanity. The book is a poetic excavation of loss, a carving of the landscape of memory, and a reckoning with and tribute to the ghosts we carry and step over, often without our even knowing it.
Still They Remember Me: Penobscot Transformer Tales, Volume 1
Carol A. Dana, Margo Lukens, & Connor M. Quinn
University of Massachusetts Press
Newell Lyon learned the oral tradition from his elders in Maine’s Penobscot Nation and was widely considered to be a “raconteur among the Indians.” The thirteen stories in this new volume were among those that Lyon recounted to anthropologist Frank Speck, who published them in 1918 as Penobscot Transformer Tales. Transcribed for the first time into current Penobscot orthography and with a new English translation, this instructive and entertaining story cycle focuses on the childhood and coming-of-age of Gluskabe, the tribe’s culture hero. Learning from his grandmother Woodchuck, Gluskabe applies lessons that help shape the Wabanaki landscape and bring into balance all the forces affecting human life. These tales offer a window into the language and culture of the Penobscot people in the early twentieth century.
In “Still They Remember Me,” stories are presented in the Penobscot language and English side-by-side, coupled with illustrations from members of the tribal community. For the first time, these stories are accessible to a young generation of Penobscot language learners and scholars of Native American literatures at all levels, from grade school to graduate school.
Some Glad Morning: Holding Hope in Apocalyptic Times
Rob McCall
Pushcart Press
Not so long ago dire forecasts of doom were the domain of splinter groups of Revelation-besotted Christians, back-country tub-thumpers, and leather-lunged street-corner prophets. Today, visions of the end of the world are presented afresh daily to anyone who reads the morning news or follows on-line media. Even the venerable New York Times has been salting its sophisticated offerings with doses of apocalypticism. Once a tiny dark corner of the obscure realm of theology, eschatology, the study of the end times, has been mainstreamed to the masses and the question of whether the world will end in fire or ice is parsed over coffee and at the dinner table, often with heated debates over the details. Suddenly those street-corner prophets aren’t looking so crazy anymore.
Tragically, the deep chords of hope for a coming new age, which resounded throughout ancient accounts of the end-times, are too often unheard on today’s stage. Little attention is given to Nature’s powers of healing. Little thought is given to how to weather the storms and sail on to the new land, or to what that new land will be like. As a result, many people are overcome and paralyzed by fear, rage and hopelessness. Depression, suicide, anxiety and addiction, including wealth addiction, are rampant and threaten to crumble industrialized societies from within, playing into the hands of demagogues and the greedy.
Some Glad Morning is aimed straight at this malaise. Arranged in the circle of the seasons, this small volume will feed the soul and strengthen the heart for these times.
Cold Spell: The View from the End of the Peninsula
Todd R. Nelson
Down East Books
A Must-Read for any Mainer . . . or anyone who dreams of becoming a Mainer. Giving up a life in Chicago, Todd R. Nelson moved with his family to the stark contrasts of Castine, Maine. What began as a leap of faith turned into a family epoch of wonderful activity, professional and personal development, an unlimited inspiration, hard work and struggle, friendship and enchantment. What lucky fools, Nelson writes in his introduction. Cold Spell is a collection of stories–warm, humorous, and at times cautionary–about living in Maine. Here are stories about the seasons, the critters, the neighbors, the land itself, and the community that Nelson calls home.
Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau
Ben Shattuck
Tin House
On a summer morning in 1849, Henry David Thoreau stepped out his front door to walk the beaches of Cape Cod. Over a century and a half later, Ben Shattuck does the same. With little more than a loaf of bread, brick of cheese, and a notebook, Shattuck sets out to retrace Thoreau’s path through the Cape’s outer beaches, from the elbow to Provincetown’s fingertip.
This walk through Cape Cod is the first of six journeys taken by Shattuck, each one inspired by a journey once taken by Henry David Thoreau. As he first traverses the Cape, then Mount Wachusett and Mount Katahdin, Shattuck encounters the unexpected–like the enigmatic millionaire who buys him dinner in a Provincetown pub, or the kind couple who take him in for the night as an oysterman once took in Henry–and comes to see for himself the restorative effects that walking can have on a dampened spirit. And when he returns to New England, years later, to once again follow Thoreau’s paths–this time due west, then to the Allagash in Maine, and finally back to Cape Cod–Shattuck finds himself uncovering new insights about family, love, friendship, and impending fatherhood, and understanding more deeply the lessons walking can offer through life’s changing seasons.
Interweaving passages from Thoreau’s many writings alongside Shattuck’s own thinking and memories, Six Walks is an intimate, beautifully crafted meditation on Thoreau’s work and personhood, and a resounding tribute to the ways walking in nature can inspire us all.
Notes on the Landscape of Home
Susan Hand Shetterly
Down East Books
“If you pay attention to the land where you live, you enter into conversation with it, until it becomes a voice inside you, and some of the boundaries between you and it dissolve,” write Susan Hand Shetterly. In this collection of elegant, spare, and often passionate essays, Shetterly explores what it is to live in a Down East coastal town, and to pay attention, over time, to what it offers of land, water, wildlife, and community. She takes her cue from Henry David Thoreau and Wendell Berry, who advocate for the virtues of staying in one place, believing that as we delve deeper into the landscape of home the more we learn about the world. As in many other places, this particular home place is in trouble. Shetterly celebrates the work of communities to restore environments their people know and love, and takes a closeup look at what is changing and what has been lost. Among her subjects are the reestablishment of the bald eagle, the reintroduction of the American turkey in Maine, and the turkey vulture’s northward trend. She also writes about shorebird migrations, the bluefin tuna and the humpback and right whales in the Gulf of Maine, counting alewives along a stream in the spring, seaweed cultivation in a bay, a forest’s rebirth, the island that gave her the imaginative space she needed, and more. She recounts how she and her neighbors kept each other company at a distance during the long months of the pandemic, and she celebrates coastal culture, its particular, deep history that anchors a person’s sense of place.
Night of the Living Rez
Morgan Talty
Tin House
Set in a Native community in Maine, Night of the Living Rez is a riveting debut collection about what it means to be Penobscot in the twenty-first century and what it means to live, to survive, and to persevere after tragedy. In twelve striking, luminescent stories, author Morgan Talty-with searing humor, abiding compassion, and deep insight-breathes life into tales of family and a community as they struggle with a painful past and an uncertain future. A boy unearths a jar that holds an old curse, which sets into motion his family’s unraveling; a man, while trying to swindle some pot from a dealer, discovers a friend passed out in the woods, his hair frozen into the snow; a grandmother suffering from Alzheimer’s projects the past onto her grandson; and two friends, inspired by Antiques Roadshow, attempt to rob the tribal museum for valuable root clubs. A collection that examines the consequences and merits of inheritance, Night of the Living Rez is an unforgettable portrayal of an Indigenous community and marks the arrival of a standout talent in contemporary fiction.