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The September Issue
After a recent trip to a southern city where no one wears fleece, I took a moment to reflect upon my Maine mud season couture. (This involved a certain amount of sighing.) Things have gone downhill since I worked in public relations at a Boston hospital, when I dressed up every day. Now I work at home and mostly wear jeans. Style—if you could call it that—is subdued in Maine. I suppose this is due to practicality, puritanism, and an emphasis on the natural....
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Commonplacing
Here in central Maine, the world has come down to bone. The songbirds are gone and crows, which poet Mary Oliver terms “the deep muscle of the world,” have taken over my street. The landscape seems empty; the ground, a carpet of desiccated leaves. One longs for the blanketing stillness of snow. The world, dark at four, appears grim. I’ve started keeping a commonplace book in the hope of seeing better....
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Unstaged Irish
When I say I’m writing a book about my Irish American family (the reason I’ve transitioned to occasional guest posts for Good Letters), I receive reading suggestions. First on the list is usually Frank McCourt’s Angeles Ashes, which, alas, I found unreadable. “Why?” people cry....
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The Desert City
As I’ve noted before, I often struggle with writing, as I labor with the new life I’ve undertaken since leaving a fulltime job couple of years ago. I often feel in the wilderness, running forward in the dark, plagued by the bad dreams I’ve had since childhood. In the creative process, I sit for hours, unable to....
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Caught in the Light
For most of my adult life, I’ve been resistant to allegiance—to people, to places. The latter may seem strange, since I’ve lived in northern New England on and off since 1972. In many ways, Maine’s iron earth seems my native country. But then, on other days, I think....
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Current Issue
Issue 71
Fiction by Larry Woiwode, interview with Joe Henry, art by Fabian Debora, essay by Barry Moser.
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