Why was it love at first sight when, accompanied by my boyfriend, Blake, I first saw Bruce Springsteen perform in 1977? Was it because of my up-and-down relationship with Blake? He hadn’t even wanted to go to the concert at the Augusta (Maine) Civic Center. Or was it because I just loved Born to Run…

“Writing is my one talent,” Mary Gordon once said. This came to mind as I finished Donald Hall’s memoir, Unpacking the Boxes, which I finally obtained from the library. (I was frugal long before the term recessionista emerged). The book centers on the poet’s life before he met his wife, Jane Kenyon, as well as…

“You are the universal fugitive / Escapist as we say.” —From The Masque of Mercy, by Robert Frost Some years ago, I attended a wedding reception at an elegant B&B. We danced to the light of fairy bulbs strung high in the trees. The gentle currents of a lake lapped against the lawn’s long incline.…

“People who lived on the dark side…thanked God for their dark past, because it had deepened their soul, made a larger place for the love of God with which they were now on fire….” —from Circling My Mother, by Mary Gordon I read Brideshead Revisited for the first time recently and loved it. I also…

The longer you live in a small town, the more you see, so I like to walk. On one of my longer routes, I trek past the Cobbossee Stream, where I often see immature bald eagles, looking for breakfast. After the steep incline of Winter Street, I cut through a Civil War-era cemetery, filled with…

Patricia Hampl notes that successful memoir evidences a “hunger for the world,” yearning which “expands beyond its subject…into the endless and tragic recollection that is history.” Not long before her recent, untimely death, the memoirist Nuala O’Faolain referred to this hunger in an interview published in Ireland’s The Independent. Devastated by a terminal cancer diagnosis…

I was stacking wood Saturday when my plumber, Bud, stopped by. He was checking on the work of Loquacious Hank, his new subcontractor, who had replaced my kitchen ceiling. This related to the resolution of what Bud tactfully refers to as my plumbing “dilemmas,” which came with the house and never end. We talked about…

O my love, where are they, where are they going The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles. I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder. — From “Encounter,” by Czeslaw Milosz Recently, there has been some interesting and important discussion in this blog about the latest creative nonfiction debacle concerning“Margaret…

In Maine, people say, “If you don’t do winter, you don’t deserve summer.” But after I fell on the ice one too many times this winter, I flew south. On the plane, I read in USA Today about the recent Pew Trust U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which noted that Northern New England and the West…

“They’re dead where it doesn’t count,” says Fletcher, a newspaperman, in an episode of the current and last season of HBO’s The Wire, which I saw recently. I don’t subscribe to HBO, so I was watching at a friend’s. And I was jumping ahead; since discovering the series on Netflix six months ago, I’ve spent…