A Coastal Companion: A Year in the Gulf of Maine, from Canada to Cape Cod (Tilbury House, 2008) is part field guide, part almanac; a celebration of the natural world that also highlights people who have chosen the Gulf of Maine as the setting for their life’s work. Poems by contemporary Maine poets open each chapter, and illustrations by two Maine artists, Kimberleigh Martul-March and Margaret Campbell, are featured throughout the text. Author Catherine Schmitt, a science writer for the Maine Sea Grant College Program, opens this reading with an excerpt from the book, then introduces contributor Annaliese Jakimides (pictured at right) for a poetry reading.

“Weaving History and Literature: the African American Oral and Written Tradition” brought five writers together to read from their work and discuss how African American history is revealed through storytelling and literature. The speakers were JerriAnne Boggis, founder and director of the Harriet Wilson Project; Kate Clifford Larson, biographer of Harriet Tubman; novelists Michael C. White and David Anthony Durham; and poet Patricia Smith. Biographies of the speakers are available here; download the walking tour map of the Portland Freedom Trail in PDF format here.

Created by the Maine Humanities Council, Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® is a national award-winning reading and discussion program for health care professionals. The Maine Public Broadcasting Network’s Tom Porter interviewed Literature & Medicine Program Officer Lizz Sinclair when the Literature & Medicine anthology, Imagine What It’s Like, was published by the University of Hawai’i Press in the summer of 2008. Here, with permission from MPBN, is a re-broadcast of the interview.

For her doctoral dissertation in American history, scholar Mimi Killinger researched the life of homesteader and writer Helen Nearing. Her dissertation became the biography The Good Life of Helen K. Nearing (University of Vermont Press, 2007). Here, Killinger uncovers the roots of her project at the Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine, and reads excerpts from the biography. Killinger earned her Ph.D. from the University of Maine, where she is now Rezendes Preceptor for the Arts at the Honors College. The photo of Helen Nearing is courtesy of the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert P. Tristram Coffin (1892-1955) was a native Mainer, Bowdoin College graduate, and longtime Bowdoin faculty member. Though a popular writer and speaker in his time, his work is not widely known today. In this podcast episode, Kevin Belmonte, who recently completed a Master’s thesis on Coffin for the American and New England Studies program at the University of Southern Maine, considers why. In the process, he shares pieces of Coffin’s correspondence and, with permission from Coffin’s literary executor, reads three poems aloud. Kevin Belmonte is the author of William Wilberforce, A Hero for Humanity (Zondervan/HarperCollins, 2007), for which he received the John Pollock Award for Christian Biography, and has served as a script consultant for the BBC and PBS. He lives in York, Maine, where his family has resided since the 1630s.

Playwright Victoria Mares-Hershey’s “How Did You Get Here?” gives voice to Africans in Maine, during the period of slavery and beyond, by giving audiences a sense of their everyday lives. This reading of the play’s first act was recorded on March 21, 2008, at the Museum of African Culture’s new location on Brown Street in Portland. Museum Director Oscar Mokeme welcomes the audience and architect Stephen Oliver introduces the show, then volunteer actors join with Mares-Hershey to perform the excerpt.

Through different historical characters, humor, little known facts, and thought-provoking stories, Taxing Maine explores what taxes mean for Maine communities, the state government, the Maine landscape, and Mainers’ wallets. The performance, featuring David Greenham and Dennis A. Price from the Theater at Monmouth, encourages us to consider how history and a range of opinions and beliefs about taxes have influenced our current taxation system.

The Council sponsored a poetry reading by Wesley McNair at the State Street Church in Portland during the Fall of 2002. He was introduced by fellow Maine writer Cathie Pelletier. McNair has a long-standing relationship with the Council. He has led workshops for Maine teachers about using poetry in the classroom, and he granted an interview for our Fall 2001 newsletter.

Charles Calhoun is Scholar in Residence at the Maine Humanities Council. He is the author of Longfellow: A Rediscovered Life (2004), A Small College in Maine: 200 Years of Bowdoin (1993), and the volume on Maine in the Compass American Guide Series (4th ed., 2005). Born in Monroe, Louisiana, he studied history at the University of Virginia and law at Christ Church, Oxford. In this talk, Calhoun identifies storytelling techniques (such as suspense, fulfillment, gratification, and apt quotation) that biographers can adopt in their own writing. With input from Teaching American History Through Biography participants, he analyzes passages from three contemporary biographies—Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Blanche Wiesen Cook’s Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933, and Peter Guralnick’s Searching for Robert Thompson—for examples of these techniques.

Nancy Riley is a professor of sociology at Bowdoin College whose work focuses on family, gender and population, and China. She has completed years of research in Dalian on the family lives of women factory workers, and taken groups of students (and one group of faculty) to Asia with the support of the Freeman Foundation. Publications include (with James McCarthy) Demography in the Age of the Postmodern (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and “Challenging Demography: Contributions from Feminist Theory” (Sociological Forum, 1999). In de-mystifying cultural practices such as foot binding and arranged marriage, Riley explains how she encourages students to get beyond the assumptions they’ve made about women in China.

Alison Hawthorne Deming is the author of three books of poetry, three nonfiction books, and two limited-edition chapbooks. Her place-based writing has earned her fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown , the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and the Tucson/Pima Arts Council; as well as many awards, including the Bayer Award in science writing from Creative Nonfiction for the essay “Poetry and Science: A View from the Divide.” Deming was born and raised in Connecticut, but currently lives near Aqua Caliente Hill in Tucson, where she serves as Professor in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. Here, she is introduced by Stonecoast faculty member Barbara Hurd.

Nalo Hopkinson is one of the world’s best known fantasy and science fiction writers. She is the author of four novels (most recently The New Moon’s Arms, Warner, 2007) and numerous short stories, and editor or co-editor of several anthologies, including So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Visions of the Future (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004). Hopkinson was born in Jamaica and lived in the Caribbean until the age of 17, when her family moved to Toronto. Here, she is introduced by fellow science fiction writer Michaela Roessner Herman.

Shara McCallum is the author of two poetry collections, The Water Between Us (University of Pittsburgh, 1999, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize) and Song of Thieves (University of Pittsburgh, 2003). McCallum was born in Jamaica, where she lived until she was nine with Afro-Jamaican and Venezuelan parents. She directs the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University. Here, she is introduced by fellow poet Charles Martin.

Lewis Robinson is the author of Officer Friendly and Other Stories and the forthcoming novel Water Dogs, due out from Random House in January 2009. A graduate of Middlebury College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and a PEN/Oakland-Josephine Miles Award. Here, he is introduced by fellow fiction faculty member Lesléa Newman.

Jennifer Hodsdon, a 2008 graduate of the Stonecoast program who now coordinates the Maine SpeakOut Project, led this discussion of some of the rewards and challenges that come from using writing as a transformative exercise to effect social change. The panelists were three Maine-based writer-activists—Gary Lawless (pictured at right), Cathy Plourde, and Chiara Liberatore—whose experiences range from writing workshops with homeless youth, veterans, and immigrant populations to theatrical performance with incarcerated youth and adults. You may have seen Lawless at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick, which he co-founded in 1979. Plourde founded Add Verb Productions, and co-wrote that organization’s play “When Turtles Make Love: Real Talk Between Parents and Teens” with Liberatore.

Penelope Schwartz Robinson, a 2004 Stonecoast graduate in Creative Nonfiction, won the first Stonecoast Book Award for her essay collection Slippery Men. She received an honorarium and a publishing contract with New Rivers Press, a teaching press at Minnesota State University, Morehead. Slippery Men will be published and distributed nationally in the fall of 2008. Robinson’s work has already appeared in Ascent, Willow Springs, Fourth Genre, and River Teeth, among others. At this reading, Robinson, who currently teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Maine, Farmington, was introduced by finalist judge Katha Pollitt.

“A Dialogue of Flower and Song” is a one-act play written by Stonecoast student Cindy Williams Gutiérrez and performed here by Bridget Madden, Elsa Colón, Julie Manon, Luis Luque, and Kathleen Clancy. Gerardo Calderón of Grupo Condor provides live pre-Columbian music. The play re-imagines a 15th century Aztec literary event, drawing together three women poets from different periods in Mexico’s history—pre-Conquest Tenochtitlan, colonial New Spain, and the current Mexican Diaspora. This recording begins with an introduction and acknowledgements from the playwright.

The play is a work-in-progress. If you would like to provide feedback as part of the development process, please email Cindy Williams Gutiérrez. All rights are reserved by the playwright. For permission to reproduce, perform or publish this work, please contact her via email or at (503) 631-4113.

Charles Martin is a renowned poet and translator. He is the author of six poetry collections, three of which have been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His verse translation of Ovid”s Metamorphoses received the 2004 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. In 2005, the American Academy of Arts and Letters honored him with the coveted Award for Literature. Martin lives in Manhattan and teaches at CUNY and Syracuse University. Here at Stonecoast, he is introduced by Patricia Smith.

Tayari Jones was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia where she spent most of her childhood with the exception of the one year she and her family spent in Nigeria, West Africa. As a visiting writer at Stonecoast, Jones read from her newer novel, The Untelling (Warner, 2005). Her debut novel, Leaving Atlanta (Warner, 2002), won the Hurston/Wright Award for Debut Fiction. Currently, Jones is an Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Newark University. She is introduced by poet Tim Seibles.

One of the highlights of each 10-day residency in the Stonecoast MFA program is the “flash reading” by faculty members. Each writer gets three minutes in which to share his or her work before introducing the next writer in the queue. We have made a special page for these recordings, all between three and ten minutes long, which you can access here.

We welcome your feedback on this Stonecoast podcast. You can leave a comment here.

Maine poets Annie Finch and Baron Wormser led students and fellow Stonecoast faculty members in this wide-ranging conversation about the place of poetry. They based their discussion on two books: The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde and The Song of the Earth by Jonathan Bate.

When the Born to Read program selected books for its anti-bias initiative, Many Eyes, Many Voices, there was a distressing gap in the field of contenders: a suitable children’s book about Maine Native Americans. The few titles available were either too stereotypical or too distant—tales populated by warriors with headresses, or set amidst Plains buffalo or Southwest deserts. That changed in 2005, when Tilbury House publishers in Gardiner, Maine, published Thanks to the Animals by Passamaquoddy storyteller Allen Sockabasin. Born to Read Program Officer Brita Zitin sat down with Sockabasin and his editor, Audrey Maynard, to talk about the story behind this important book. To learn more about Sockabasin, see this newsletter article.

This is the first book that author Amy Hest wrote about the bear named Sam, a character inspired by her own son, Sam. Here, the book is read aloud by Rachel Davis, children’s librarian at the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth. Rachel then teaches two fingerplays about kisses.

Here’s a funny book by British author Simon James, read aloud by Rachel Davis, children’s librarian at the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth. After she reads the book, Rachel teaches a fingerplay called “The Baby Grows” and a poem called “Bend and Stretch.”

Amy Hest’s third book about the bear named Sam is read aloud by Rachel Davis, children’s librarian at the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth. Rachel then teaches two fingerplays that you can do after you read the book.

Here is another story by Martin Waddell about Little Bear and Big Bear. It is read aloud by Rachel Davis, children’s librarian at the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth. Then Rachel shares two fingerplays.

Owl Babies is not the only bedtime book by Martin Waddell. He also wrote this book about a bear who cannot fall asleep. Amy Hand, children’s librarian at the Camden Public Library, reads the story aloud, then shares two rhymes and a song about the night sky.

Here is one of Amy Hest’s popular books about a bear named Sam, read aloud by Amy Hand, children’s librarian at the Camden Public Library.

Amy Hest is the author of this book about a duck who learns to love the rain. Here is Amy Hand, children’s librarian at the Camden Public Library, reading the book aloud and sharing a rhyme and two songs. For more children’s books about rain, see this Born to Read booklist.

Storyteller Jody Fein visited the East End Community School in Portland on May 15, 2008, to tell stories to the Kindergarten, 1st Grade, and 2nd Grade. She selected the stories “Abiyoyo,” “Stone Soup,” and “The Wind and the Sun,” all of which tie into the Born to Read initiative Peaceable Stories. This event was part of the Maine Festival of the Book. Audio recordings of other Festival events are on the MPBN website.

Colin West is a prolific British author who writes nonsense verse and humorous books, such as this one, about a lobster who takes his joking one step too far. Rachel Davis, children’s librarian at the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth, reads the book aloud and then teaches two fingerplays about the ocean.

While walking through the woods in autumn, Oliver chases a leaf and gets separated from his parents. This is the story of how he finds them again. It is read aloud by Rachel Davis, children’s librarian at the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth, who then shares two fingerplays about leaves.

This bedtime story by Sue Heap is set in the Wild West. As Rachel Davis, children’s librarian at the Thomas Memorial Library in Cape Elizabeth, reads the book aloud, you can follow along in your own copy or a copy borrowed from the library. Then, listen to some fingerplays about cowboys.

Storyteller Pamella Beliveau has performed for children of all ages at libraries, schools, festivals and other children’s events throughout Maine and New England. She has created early childhood literacy programs at public libraries, done residency work at schools throughout the state, and been recognized by the Maine Arts Commission for her quality storytelling programs. Here, she shares stories with a group of toddlers and preschoolers, then talks with their parents and caregivers about the strategies she has used.

Amy MacDonald is a children’s book author who lives in Maine. The Portland Stage Company Affiliate Artists have created staged readings of three of Amy’s picture books, with different actors playing different characters. With Amy’s permission, their performance of her very first picture book, Little Beaver and the Echo, is available here.

Amy MacDonald is a children’s book author who lives in Maine. The Portland Stage Company Affiliate Artists have created staged readings of three of Amy’s picture books, with different actors playing different characters. With Amy’s permission, their performance of Please, Malese!, a trickster tale from Haiti, is available here.

Amy MacDonald is a children’s book author who lives in Maine. The Portland Stage Company Affiliate Artists have created staged readings of three of Amy’s picture books, with different actors playing different characters. With Amy’s permission, their performance of Rachel Fister’s Blister is available here.

Author Maria Testa combines readings from her book for young adults, Something About America, with discussion of events in Lewiston and Kosovo that inspired the story.

In this picture book by Martin Waddell, illustrated by Patrick Benson, three baby owls whose mother has gone out into the night try to stay calm until she returns. As Vicky Smith, editor of children’s book reviews for Kirkus, reads the book aloud, you can follow along in your own copy or a copy borrowed from the library.

Vicky Smith is the former director and children’s librarian at the McArthur Public Library in Biddeford. She is now the editor of children’s book reviews for Kirkus. She has been active in the Public Library Association’s early literacy program, Every Child Ready to Read, as well as the Council’s own Born to Read program. Drawing on all of her experience, Vicky offers this brief introduction to early literacy skills for parents and other caregivers.

Born and raised in New York City, Ashley Bryan is another author “from away” who has found a home in Maine. Folklorist, writer, illustrator and performer, Bryan draws on African myths and tales, his own and others’ experience, and his literary, artistic and thespian talents to create children’s books (enjoyed by adults, too) and storytellings in schools and other venues, sometimes under the auspices of the Maine Humanities Council. (Read about his appearance at the 2005 Born to Read conference here). Bryan’s newest book is Let it Shine: Three Favorite Spirituals (Simon and Schuster, 2007).

Hannah Holmes took a geology class at the University of Southern Maine that led to a career as a science writer, someone who turns the facts of science into stories, sometimes mysteries, with exciting plots and intriguing characters. She has toured the world for “Discovery,” making the complexities of science comprehensible, and scientists comprehensibly human as well. Much nearer home, she studied her backyard in Suburban Safari: A Year on the Lawn (Bloomsbury, 2005).

Two journalists in one Portland household—and both write for the New York Times Magazine. Mike Paterniti and Sara Corbett are often away, however, laying the groundwork for their articles and books. Sometimes alone, as when Paterniti was Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America with Einstein’s Brain (Dell, 2000). (Read an excerpt from the book here.) Sometimes together, as when Corbett recounts her experience of learning Spanish in Spain, in “Learning the Lingua Franca” in Travel and Leisure. Paterniti has won National Magazine Awards for features and profiles; Corbett’s New York Times essay “The Permanent Scars of Iraq” has been widely discussed. Paterniti and Corbett are also co-founders of The Telling Room, a Portland-based writing center designed to nurture and encourage Maine’s next generation of writers.

Born in Mississippi, educated in Michigan and California, a sometime resident of Montana and New Orleans, his Pulitzer Prize-winning Independence Day set in New Jersey, Richard Ford now lives in Maine. And he writes about it: “Charity,” in Contemporary Maine Fiction (Down East Books, 2005), for example, is about people from away who see the possibilities of Maine in very different ways. The considerable debate about whether Ford is a “Southern” or “ex-Southern” writer now has a new dimension, “Maine writer.”

Like other writers interviewed for this series, Bill Roorbach has written about a very personal part of Maine. Temple Stream (Dell, 2005) considers the stream that borders the fields below his house in Farmington; it won the nonfiction Maine Literary Award. His stories and novels deal with equally real and natural people. And he produces “teacherly tomes” on memoirs, essays, and Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: The Art of Truth (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Richard Russo retired early from Colby College in order to write full-time. He has set several novels in New York and Pennsylvania, but given his fascination with decaying towns and their struggling inhabitants, he was bound to write of a Maine mill town sooner or later. Empire Falls (Knopf, 2001) won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. It was followed by The Whore’s Child and Other Stories (Knopf, 2002). Russo’s newest book is The Bridge of Sighs (Knopf, 2007)

Monica Wood learned her craft early, growing up in a family of Irish Canadian storytellers and ballad singers in Mexico, Maine. Her short stories and novels are well known; the latest is Any Bitter Thing (Chronicle, 2005). She also writes for writers, on her website and in works like The Pocket Muse (F & W Publications, 2006). “The best advice I have for aspiring writers is to read, read, read. Read everybody.”

Now living in Tennessee, Cathie Pelletier remains a very Maine writer. Born here and educated at the University of Maine, she speaks in her novels, including most recently Running the Bulls (University Press of New England, 2005) of northern Maine. Pelletier also writes screenplays, poetry, and short stories. Writing as K. C. McKinnon, she has produced some of her most popular work, notably Dancing at the Harvest Moon (Doubleday, 1997).

Andrew Walkling is Dean’s Assistant Professor of Early Modern Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton, where he teaches in the departments of art history, English, and theater and is affiliated with the faculties of history, music, and philosophy. He earned a Ph.D. in British history from Cornell. A Fellow of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, he works in an interdisciplinary field focusing on the courts of Charles II and James II (1660-88). He is writing a book entitled Masque and Opera in Restoration England. Two handouts accompanied his talk on 17th-century interpretations of the Aeneid. You can download them both in PDF format: Handout 1; Handout 2.

Barbara Weiden Boyd is the Henry Winkley Professor of Latin and Greek at Bowdoin College, where she has taught since 1980. She earned her Ph.D. at Michigan and has written extensively on Latin literature, notably two books on the poet Ovid. In recent years she has prepared a series of school texts and teachers’ guides to Virgil’s Aeneid. She has also been a visiting professor twice at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. Her talk on translation relies on a handout, which you can download here in PDF format.

Peter Aicher is Professor of Classics at the University of Southern Maine in Portland, where he frequently teaches courses on Homer and Virgil, in translation and in Greek and Latin. He combines these literary interests with a fascination with the city of Rome, which has resulted in several books and numerous articles and talks. He recently designed a course entitled “The City of Rome: Romulus and Mussolini,” which explores how an architectural language of power has evolved and persisted over the millennia. This is only the first part of Professor Aicher’s talk. In the second part, he uses maps of Rome and the ancient world to show where the events described in the Aeneid took place. This part of the talk will be available soon on video.

Michael C. J. Putnam is MacMillan Professor of Classics and Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, where he has taught since 1961. Educated at Harvard, he has written 11 books on Latin literature and has edited four others. He is widely regarded as one of the leading interpreters of the work of Virgil. He has been closely associated with the American Academy in Rome for many years and is a summer resident of Rockport, Maine.

Miriam Colwell was born in Prospect Harbor in 1917 and still lives in the house built by her great-great-grandfather in 1817. She is the author of Wind Off the Water (1945), Day of the Trumpet (1947), and Young (1955). As a small town resident and long-time postmistress, she has watched change upon change wash over the fabled coast for nearly nine decades. She explores those themes in her fourth novel, Contentment Cove (Islandport Press, 2008), which is set in a Down East coastal village in the 1950s, when social clashes and changing values were starting to tear at the fabric of Maine’s traditional way of life.

Neil Rolde’s 2006 book, Continental Liar from the State of Maine, is a biography of James G. Blaine, the Maine politician who dominated the American political stage from just before the Civil War and almost until the twentieth century. A former Maine politician himself, Rolde is a prize-winning historian and author of Unsettled Past, Unsettled Future: The Story of Maine Indians; The Interrupted Forest: A History of Maine’s Wildlands; Maine, Down East and Different; and many other books. A former Board member of the Maine Humanities Council, Rolde won the Constance H. Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2005.

The Steel Wave is the second novel in what will be a trilogy of World War II stories by Jeff Shaara, who has also written about the Civil War, the American Revolution, the Mexican War, and the first World War. Shaara is the son of the late Michael Shaara, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Killer Angels, and got his start as a novelist when he was asked to write both a sequel and a prequel to his father’s bestseller.

David Scott Kastan is the Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the English Department at Columbia University. He specializes in 16th- and 17th-century literature and culture, Shakespeare, and the history of the book. He is the first American to serve as General Editor of the Arden Shakespeare, and he also served as General Editor of the 5-volume Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature, which was published in 2006. Kastan is presently working on a book called The Invention of English Literature, a project for which he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004.

Alice N. Persons, founder of Moon Pie Press, is a sometime English teacher and an adjunct instructor of business law at the University of Southern Maine. A Maine resident since 1983, she volunteers for animal welfare organizations and also works with Port Veritas, a spoken word collective in Portland. Six of her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac on NPR. Her first two chapbooks were Be Careful What You Wish For (2003) and Never Say Never (2004); in June 2007, Sheltering Pines Press published her third, Don't Be A Stranger.

Michael Macklin of Portland works as a carpenter, edits reviews for the Cafe Review, and dreams of spending time at the ancient monastery of the island of Sceilig Mhichil off the west coast of Ireland. He received his MFA from Vermont College. He has published poems in the Cafe Review, The Aurorean, Animus, Rattle and other journals, and several anthologies. He owes a great deal to the support of his wife Donna and his son Gabriel, a hip-hop DJ.

Kevin Sweeney has degrees from California (PA) State College and the University of Massachusetts. He is the chair of the English Department at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, where he has been for more than twenty years. He is a native of Pittsburgh and dreams of retiring someday to be an old gringo in Mexico, watching Steelers games via satellite. Kevin lives in South Portland with his wife and pets. He has been on a diet, with lapses, for 46 years.

Patricia Hagge and Annie Finch opened the library’s 2008 Poetry Festival with this reading. Hagge earned her MFA from the Stonecoast MFA program. She serves on the boards of SPACE Gallery and The Telling Room. Finch, who directs the Stonecoast program, is a professor of English at the University of Southern Maine.

Michael C. Connolly and Kevin Stoehr are the editors of John Ford in Focus, a collection of essays that offers a comprehensive examination of Ford’s life and career, revealing the frequent intersections between Ford’s personal life and artistic vision, including his roots in Portland. Stoehr is associate professor of humanities at Boston University and lives in Boston, Massachusetts. Connolly teaches History and Political Science at Saint Joseph’s College of Maine. He is the author of They Change Their Sky: The Irish in Maine.

Martha Tod Dudman’s first novel, Black Olives, turns her unflinching candor and sharp wit on reconstructing the end of a love affair. Dudman is the author of the powerful memoirs Augusta, Gone (which was adapted into an award-winning Lifetime Television movie) and Expecting to Fly. A professional fundraiser, Dudman lives in Northeast Harbor with her son and daughter. She has lived in Maine since 1975.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas was nineteen when her father took his family to live among the Bushmen of the Kalahari. Fifty years later, after a life of writing and study, Thomas returns to her experiences in The Old Way: A Story of the First People. She recalls life with the Bushmen, one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on earth, and discovers among them an essential link to the origins of all human society. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas is the author of many books, including The Hidden Life of Dogs. She lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire.

In addition to reading books, we like to read about books, but few people know what book reviewers really do or how they do it. William Bushnell has been a professional book reviewer and freelance writer for thirteen years. He has more than 1,350 published pieces in thirty magazines and newspapers. He is professionally affiliated with the National Book Critics Circle and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and he teaches a class on book reviewing at the University of Southern Maine. He lives in Harpswell, Maine. In conjunction with this talk, Bushnell compiled a list of recommended titles from among the books that have recently crossed his desk. That list is available in PDF form here.

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of nine works of fiction, including The Good Mother and While I Was Gone, and the nonfiction book The Story of My Father. Her new book, The Senator’s Wife, revolves around the marriages of two women—a young mother and the wife of a promiscuous politician—who live side by side in a New England townhouse. Miller lives in Boston. In this recording, she is introduced by Portland novelist Monica Wood.