Maeve Tholen

A sophomore at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, Maeve Tholen was named one of two first-place winners in the MWPA’s 2022 youth competition in fiction for her short story “Chocolate Hope,” which is about a young woman from a family of cacao growers who emigrates from Brazil to Miami. Originally written for a class assignment, Tholen’s story was inspired by her family’s love for chocolate as well as by a picture book she read as a child. The overarching theme is “finding community in a new place, while staying true to who you are and your roots,” says Tholen. A writer of poetry and short fiction, Tholen previously had her poem “At Sunset” published by the Telling Room, and in 2021 she won a Scholastic National Gold Medal for another of her short stories. “I love writing because it allows me to process things that are going on in my life, and to share what I’m thinking about and feeling with others,” she says. “It’s a way to use my voice.”

Leela Marie Hidier

Yarmouth High School senior Leela Marie Hidier wrote and published her first novel, Changes in the Weather, through the Telling Room’s Young Emerging Authors (YEA) program, a yearlong apprenticeship that walks four high school students through the entire publication process, from pitching a story idea to picking out cover artwork. Originally from London, UK, Hidier moved to Maine in 2018 and now lives in a three-generational household. During the pandemic, she began journaling and spending more time outdoors to help process her emotions about the state of the world, which ignited her love for writing and interest in climate activism. Her story follows across the U.S. four young climate refugees who “find sanctuary—and strength—in their families, friends, communities, and even strangers,” says Hidier. “Along the way, they learn to use their voices to create change and discover what home really means.” Recently Hidier has branched out into nonfiction writing with an essay titled “Weaving Home,” published in the November edition of Amjambo Africa. She was also accepted into the Telling Room’s yearlong Young Writers and Leaders program, during which she will dabble in a variety of genres and styles. “I want to be a seed that sparks climate activism through my storytelling,” says Hidier. “I have learned to find my place in the climate and social justice conversations through [my writing].”

MacKenzie VerLee

MacKenzie VerLee, a winner of MWPA’s 2022 youth competition in fiction, is a sophomore at Falmouth High School who was awarded the top prize for her short story, “The Lighthouse Keeper.” Written as part of a class assignment, the story was required to take place in the future and to have a happy ending. “At first, it was tricky to think of a story that could have a positive resolution, because all that came to mind were horrible things like global warming and the fall of our government,” says VerLee. However, the image of a lighthouse on the rocks, a small sailboat, and a cunning old man at the helm kept popping into her head. “The old man is supposed to represent my grandfather,” she says. “He is someone who somehow knows the answer to every question.” An avid soccer player and track athlete, VerLee has recently taken up online journaling, which helps her to manage stress and organize her thoughts. As for her favorite part of the writing process, VerLee loves naming characters, saying that finding the perfect name helps her bring them to life.

Noor Sager

Noor Sager has been involved with the Telling Room since their freshman year of high school, when they participated in a summer program specifically for first- and second-generation immigrants. Now a senior at Gorham High School, Sager was most recently a part of the literary nonprofit’s YEA program, during which they wrote and published their first novel, A Destiny Borrowed. Inspired by Sager’s love of fantasy fiction, the book follows a nonbinary protagonist with fantastic powers and takes an interesting twist on the “chosen one” archetype. Inspired by fantasy fiction books they read in middle school, Sager wanted their story to create a world focused on magic, and imbued with queer themes that they wish they had found when they were 12. “If reading a novel about a chosen one who happens to be nonbinary gives someone the opportunity to understand how they/them pronouns are used, then that’s amazing,” says Sager, who plans to stay in Maine for college. An avid writer who loves world building, Sager will soon start working on their next book, although it remains to be determined whether it will be a sequel or something new. “I cannot wait to see the books that the next wave of Maine writers produce,” they say. “If the small pool of absolutely brilliant authors I’ve met at the Telling Room is anything to go by, we have a lot of wickedly funny and uniquely authentic stories coming our way.”

Read More:

• 
  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
• 
  “Lungfish” and the Alienating Act of Addiction
• 
  A Q&A with “Best American Essays 2022” Guest Editor Alexander Chee
• 
  The Elastic Nature of a Family in “Flight”
• 
  The Motivation of Parenting

The post Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Meghan Gilliss’s Lungfish, out this past fall from Catapult Books and longlisted for the Center for Fiction’s 2022 First Novel Prize, is that rare novel of stunning, viscerally alive sentences with an equally propulsive plot. It tells the story of Tuck, who moves with her family from Pittsburgh to a small fictional island off the coast of Maine where her grandmother died. Technically squatting—as the island has been passed on to Tuck’s currently unreachable itinerant father—Tuck and her family are grappling with the dueling ticking clocks of the season (the house where they are staying isn’t winterized) and their lack of legal rights to the property. Add to that the caretaking of their two-year-old daughter, Agnes, and Tuck’s careful, complicated relationship with her husband Paul’s newly disclosed substance abuse, and the book is rife with tension from the start.

At the time of the book’s writing, Gilliss was, like Tuck, trying to care for and love someone struggling with addiction. “A terrible experience,” she says. “But not uninteresting.” It was a position she found both hard and alienating to explain to those not in the throes of it. “Here was a way of trying,” she says of writing Lungfish. “Not to tell any particular person’s story, but to say: Here’s a version, here’s some of what it feels like.”

Early in the book Tuck says, “What’s new, now, is everything I didn’t see. My life behind the curtain.” And she is not wrong. In addition to her husband’s struggles, there are truths about Tuck’s life that we, the reader, spend the book trying to see and understand. “It was important to me that we never come to any feeling that Tuck has seen everything rightly,” says Gilliss. “There is still much that’s obscured to her, and I think always will be—particularly around her husband’s relationship to drugs. And that was the trickiest part of writing this book—allowing the reader to inhabit Tuck’s own state of unknowingness, but to show them enough to make whatever interpretations they need to make in order to have the footing needed to continue reading.”

The reader’s footing comes from every new jump and scene being formed with quick elegance. Gilliss describes the natural world, the physical sensations of living on this island, with bristling, penetrating force: “The bulbous capsules at the fringe of seaweed pop between her teeth as her mouth accepts the slimy brine.” And later: “It was dusk, and she led me by the hand deep into the ferns, to show me where the spring bubbled up into a little marsh, the frog eggs attached to the underbellies of wide blades of pale grass.”

But, true to Gilliss’s intentions, the book’s emotional investments—its sense of knowing and not knowing—remain slippery. Moving in short sections, the chapters—sometimes a single paragraph, sometimes a sentence—are named with oblique words like “Slough” and “Fade,” and “Catch.” These titles don’t attempt to explain or answer any questions, but to show a specific type of yearning. They ask the reader to inhabit the liminal and the uncertain.

Gilliss goes on, “The novel began by archiving emotional states that struck me as the kind my own brain would forget or wipe away once they were past; the kinds that felt too slippery to hold onto.” She also had a young child while the book was being written and felt powerless in many parts of her life. The book was a way of acting, of doing. “It was a form of exerting control. There was word choice, at least.”

This control is evident not only in the language, but in the way the book keeps our attention focused explicitly on Tuck. “I watch him sleeping in the bed next to me,” Tuck says. “Feel tender, I think. Feel tender, feel tender, feel tender.” She is conflicted, desperate, trying to keep their child fed and alive, trying to trust and love Paul while remaining vigilant enough to keep her whole family safe. But Paul, for us, as he does also for Tuck, remains largely an absence, unknowable and enigmatic. This is not a story of addiction where our main investment is with the person struggling with a substance, but of trying to still love and be loved, to retain a sense of being tender, in the wake of addiction’s effects.

As Gilliss wrote the novel, “For five or seven or thirty minutes in the early morning, on the days I was able to sneak downstairs without waking my daughter,” she says, the book began “to burn” in her. “I wrote on scraps of paper at work.” She began to think about it constantly. This urgency, the small snips of time and the compulsion, is evident. Tuck is traveling back and forth from the island to find money, to try to locate her father, get food and propane, find her family a more permanent place to stay. The sentences throughout are elegant, but also shot through with desperation. They convey a feeling that, if the next choice isn’t made, the next resource unearthed, her whole world will fall apart.

One of the main tensions of the book, and one of its great successes, is Tuck’s seeming passivity, her deep interiority, her desire not to act even as circumstances demand she does. “Her habits may not help her handle the problem in a traditional, recommended, take-the-bull-by-the-horns kind of way, but she gets there, arguably,” says Gilliss. “Ultimately, she exercises extreme agency. She figures out a problem in her own way.” Books are often built on action, interaction, reaction, but Gilliss is able to craft a compelling, ultimately capable character while allowing her to stay fully and complicatedly herself.

We, like Tuck, end the book with few answers and very little certainty. In the last paragraph, here is Tuck, speaking of her daughter: “Seeing is not the same as making. I can’t make her; can only show her how it’s done.” Lungfish too shows us something, gives us immediate and visceral access to a certain type of yearning and of loving, and in so doing gets us closer, without ever being presumptuous enough to think that we could fully touch it, to the weight and texture, the elemental, desperate nature, of Tuck’s specific ache.

Read More:

• 
  Claiming Space at the Table
• 
  How to Go Antiquing Like a Mainer
• 
  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
• 
  Milkweed Man
• 
  A Stitch in Time

The post “Lungfish” and the Alienating Act of Addiction appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Rachel Hurn: I was surprised at just how many Maine connections there are within the book. From you, of course, to Robert (Bob) Atwan’s foreword, which discusses E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake,” and then to the writers within—Jason Brown’s “The Wrong Jason Brown” from the New Yorker, and then also Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s “Futurity” from Harvard Review. Were you looking for Maine connections as you were choosing these essays? 

Alexander Chee: Not at all. In the case of Jason Brown, for example, I thought it was uncanny that he was from Portland, but the essay is so overwhelmingly powerful. All of these essays found their way to me in different ways. Jason Brown’s is something that I found on my own, whereas, in the case of Alex’s essay, while I do follow Alex on social media and I follow their career pretty intensely, it was actually a finalist that Bob sent to me. In both cases I was thrilled to find them, but I certainly wasn’t like, “And now it’s time for more Maine representation.” [Laughs.]

RH: Every writer in this selection has not been in BEA before, which is not always the case, as you know. How many of these pieces were ones that you did come across on your own and, and how much of the process was a collaborative effort with Bob?

AC: The process is intensely collaborative with Bob, or at least mine was. He told me up front that I would be able to make my own selections, but that he would be sending me lists. I had the ultimate say over what was included, but there were certain restrictions placed on the collection all the same.

I found myself very disappointed by a lot of what I was reading that year. And by disappointed I mean I felt like most of what I was reading was falling into certain staples of the convention of writing an essay, certain cliches. And then, once Bob started sending me his selections, and it became sort of “go time,” I realized that I had to start thinking about, how do I approach this body of work that I haven’t seen yet? In the anthology’s introduction, I address my attempt to create a criteria for myself, which involved not only doing the reading for the anthology, but also rereading favorites from the past, so as to reestablish some intuitive connection as to what I thought was “the best.” The thing about the adjective “best,” you know, is that it’s both a medal and a target. And what I saw in rereading past editions, was that every editor admitted that this was their own subjective opinion. No one tried to say that they were some kind of objective judge of all essays. 

RH: What were some of the limitations you came across when looking for your selections? 

AC: I was sad that many of my favorite writers had not published essays that year. In a few cases, I was sad they had not published essays in a way that I could find. I was trying very hard to find them, through Google and JSTOR. And at a certain point Bob had asked me, what is a list of writers you really admire? And he tried to keep an eye out also. But there were still essays that I missed all the same. But that’s partly the limits of the process, and it’s why I encourage people to nominate themselves. 

RH: Excuse me for quoting you to you, but I love when you write in the introduction: “Keeping them [the essays] keeps me. They retain a sense of who I was, when I first found them, and the possibilities they offered me returns when I reread them. And so I can follow the trail of those thoughts farther each time, following a sense of who I meant to be, and who I might still become.” 

That reminded me so much of that feeling one gets, especially a young reader and writer, that they have discovered a writer. And that the writer belongs to them. I used to do this a lot in my twenties. I would see the writer’s name all the time and be like, their work speaks to me and I’m the one who appreciates it the most in the world.

AC: [Laughs.] Yes. 

RH: Which is absurd, obviously, because I had thoughts like that about Joan Didian, for example. But what you write is so true about how writing speaks to us. This is your collection and not anyone else’s collection. Each essay that spoke to you will bring you back to a certain time in your life, and you can almost relive your life through that experience. 

AC: I think that speaks to that “private anthology of best essays” I mention in the introduction. It functions as a kind of key to memories of experiences of the self, that intimate part of our reading lives. And that is sometimes otherwise difficult to access.

RH: Yes. You also write about how something you do regularly is to read old literary magazines. That you don’t always read the most up and coming thing, the most recent issue of whatever, to be able to say that you did. That it’s not the point.

AC: Correct. And when I was writing that intro, we were seeing two magazines getting into trouble, possibly in danger of closing, which were Conjunctions and The Believer. Sort of an old school magazine and a newer one. I think of The Believer still as a very young magazine.

RH: Right. 

AC: And it’s why it’s also so devastating to see Astra go under.

RH: I was just thinking that as you were talking, yes. I was a happy subscriber. It’s very sad.

I wanted to also touch on what you mentioned about what kind of message you’re trying to present with this collection of essays. You talk about having lost faith at one point that writing can improve things between people. And how you go from that feeling to persisting both as a reader and a writer, mostly maybe as a writer, that what you write could change someone’s mind. 

AC: Well, I think it can and does. I wasn’t suggesting that I had completely given up. It’s more about how I felt like I had found the urge to give up a little too tempting. And I had come back around because of the essays I had found. But I was also finding myself increasingly wary of the idea that we had to be in service to a particular kind of effort as it were. In the sense that there’s a limit to what this writing can accomplish. Which doesn’t make it unvaluable or less valuable. It’s a way of acknowledging what the actual problems are. 

You know, something I did have to search for was writing by writers of color and marginalized peoples where the essays didn’t feel like they were created only to speak to that. People have talked about it, how white writers get to write about whatever they want to, and writers of color are only ever asked to write about racism. That does add up on a submission level when I’m looking at the finalists. I can see what the editors in a sense were up to. 

RH: Right, right. 

CH: And so finding an essay by Vauhini Vara, something I found on my own that did not come out of the submission pile, where she’s writing about her own difficulties with writing about her sister who died, but none of that is centered necessarily on her experience as a South Asian. It’s coming out of a personal sense of grief, and it’s about the presence of technology in our lives. Which is something that I think is on a lot of people’s minds in general in 2022, especially as we see what’s happening with Twitter. 

RH: Right. [Laughs.]

AC: And that speaks to the value of magazines like The Believer. 

RH: That’s right. So going back to Bob writing in the foreword about E.B. White’s essay “Once More to the Lake,” which was published in Harper’s in 1941. I haven’t done a lot of reading about E.B. White as a person, and I hadn’t realized he had struggled with mental health issues. It was interesting to take that in the context of—this is kind of silly, but there’s this line that shows up around Portland a lot. I don’t know if you have seen these, but there are these posters of Maine with a quote by White printed on top. They’re so prevalent here; they’re in people’s houses, they’re in stores for sale. The line says, “I would rather feel bad in Maine than feel good anywhere else.” Do you know what I’m talking about?

AC: [Laughs.] Um, I have not seen these. 

RH: Well, so, in light of reading more about him, I’m like, Oh, wow, that has such a different meaning now. Because he probably was struggling a lot of the time, which then, you know, makes that poster feel really inappropriate. 

AC + RH: [Laughs.] 

RH: But yeah, it was interesting to get more of a picture of him as a person. Do you have a history with E.B. White? 

AC: I haven’t really thought about E.B. White much in the last couple of decades. I know that Bob always goes back to the classics. That’s his thing, right? He has that really deep sense of the essay as an art form and its legacies and so forth. I think it made for a nice contrast or supplement to what I was trying to do, to take the conversation in a direction I hadn’t seen any previous editor take, which was to address the question of how much should we write about our own trauma and to what end? 

I don’t know if you saw this review of the anthology—in one of the Medium magazines called ANMLY—by Jennifer Chong Schneider, who I really appreciate. In it she talks about how I de-tokenized inclusivity in the way that I did this collection. And then near the end, she says, 

“Like all the volumes in the series, the foreword is by series editor Robert Atwan. For 2022, he writes about ‘Once More to the Lake’ by E. B. White. ‘Open any first-year writing anthology and there it was,’ Atwan writes. I took him up on this challenge, opened the book I use to teach my freshman comp class, and easily found it. In a beautiful essay that is destined to be plagiarized by freshmen for years to come, Atwan offers a well-contextualized close and critical reading of the classic essay. But my recurring thought while reading through this anthology is that, actually, this 2022 collection would be a much better Freshman Comp textbook than almost anything I’ve used in class (I’ve taught intro English for well over a decade). The volume opens with a professor getting arrested. What more could entice a new college student to get lost in these pages?”

AC + RH: [Laughs.]

RH: Right. I guess that’s what I was trying to get at when talking about writing that changes people’s minds, but also just writing that’s good because it’s good, and then there’s writing that does both. Your essay choices make this a very refreshing read. 

I imagine it’s hard not to feel like you’re still reading with this collection in mind, after having been so immersed in it for a time. Who are the people that are still speaking to you now, who you feel readers should check out?

AC: So, Chelsea Hodson was one of those favorite essayists who did not publish an essay that year. And Neema Avashia whose collection, Another Appalachia just came out. Also Lars Horn. They had a book-length essay called Voice of the Fish that was excerpted, and I was very sad to find that it wasn’t eligible as a result. Also Raquel Gutiérrez’s Brown Neon. That’s an essay collection that came out this year also. And there’s a really remarkable book that came out by the writer CJ Hauser called The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays.

RH: This is great, thank you.

So I want to let you move on with your life, but is there anything else you wanted to say about this process and about your choices?

AC: I think what I want to say is, part of what I was doing was trying to welcome into the anthology the people who I thought were really pushing at the limits of what essays can do. Whether it’s Elissa Washuta publishing an essay about becoming sober in Harper’s Bazaar, or whether it’s Brian Blanchfield, the aforementioned professor who was arrested…

RH: Right. 

AC + RH: [Laughs]

AC: Blanchfield is a poet and an essayist, and I thought what he did was so fascinating, the way he arranged it with every paragraph of the essay beginning with the same first line. And writing the essay in such a way that the reader is always playing catch-up to what has already occurred in the events described. It’s a fascinating mix of these kinds of efforts. I was also trying to concentrate on, where are readers finding essays now? And the answers are often social media, whether it is a newsletter like Roxane Gay’s The Audacity, where she publishes new and emerging writers and where this collection’s penultimate essay comes from, or whether it is me finding Tanner Akoni Laguatan’s remarkable memorial essay in Wired. His first ever published essay.

RH: Yes. The first thing I read when I picked this book up was the contributors’ notes. And that stuck out to me immediately, learning that it was someone’s first published essay. There isn’t this presumption that someone couldn’t be included in an anthology like this if they didn’t have an existing book, or several, or whatever.

AC: There’s a long running frustration that I’ve had, for example, every time the Whiting Awards are announced. Where the awards have gone a great deal to support a more inclusive sense of our literature. But it often means that when these writers are being featured, and you go to look for their work online or in magazines, they aren’t there. It took, in some ways, them getting the award to get the kind of attention from literary magazines—or other magazines, period—that they might otherwise get. And that’s messed up. That’s just wrong. 

So I don’t know how that changes at the level of magazines all across the country, but something that was certainly visible to me when I was going around checking the mastheads of different magazines to see what they published last year, was the remarkable lack of diversity still in so many of them. So it becomes more likely that, say, Tanner, working with a black editor at Wired as a freelancer, could pitch and publish that essay than he might have done somewhere else. Which is why we have to, for those of us doing this kind of work, why we have to pay attention to the places where we aren’t necessarily expecting to find this kind of literary writing.

RH: Right. Yes. 

AC: That was a very long answer. 

RH: No, it was great. It was a beautiful answer. Thank you. It’s been lovely to chat.

AC: My pleasure.

Read More:

• 
  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
• 
  “Lungfish” and the Alienating Act of Addiction
• 
  A Q&A with “Best American Essays 2022” Guest Editor Alexander Chee
• 
  The Elastic Nature of a Family in “Flight”
• 
  The Motivation of Parenting

The post A Q&A with “Best American Essays 2022” Guest Editor Alexander Chee appeared first on The Maine Mag.

I suddenly realized that I wrote a quiet novel about family,” says Lynn Steger Strong, author of the new novel Flight, out this month from HarperCollins. Yet each of Strong’s novels is, in some way, about family. Her first, Hold Still, followed the story of a mother and daughter repairing their bond after a tragedy. Her second, Want, was fueled by rage and followed a couple’s struggle to raise children in Brooklyn after filing for bankruptcy. Want is narrated by its main character and centers on her personal experience. Perhaps what’s different about Flight, Strong’s third book, is that it takes a broader view, examining the dynamics among members of an extended family. “The project of the book was the organism, the group, and not the individual,” says Strong.

Flight takes place at Christmastime in a family that has just lost its matriarch, Helen. Her three children and their spouses, with Helen’s grandchildren, convene on one of the couple’s homes in upstate New York, where the world is frozen over, to discuss what to do with Helen’s house down in Florida, their childhood home.

Strong’s omniscient narration leads us through each person’s experience of the reunion. She says writing, for her, is a way to explore the elasticity of language. “Everybody in this book inhabits the word ‘family’ in very different ways,” she says. For Tess, Helen’s daughter-in-law, “family is scary and painful.” Helen’s children, Henry, Martin, and Kate, adored their mother but now find them-selves grieving her in different ways. Setting the book during the holidays “was a useful way to ask this group of people to recalibrate their relationship to this word.”

Strong wanted to celebrate the joys of parenting as well as confront its complications in an age of climate change, growing awareness of neurodivergence, and economic struggle. “Parenting is this process of making peace with a complete loss of control,” she says. “In terms of wanting to do it best, there’s never a clear path. It also never stops being profoundly enriching.” The parents in Flight may contrast one another in their approaches to discipline, medication, diet, or education, but what emerges is not a hierarchy of best practices for parents but rather a spectrum of ways to love your children. “You have the extraordinary privilege of loving them on the exact terms that they are,” says Strong. In the book, two of Helen’s grandchildren are neurodivergent, but only one set of parents has chosen to medicate their child, despite fearing the slippery slope of overmedication; the other can’t afford to. One parent never lets her children go to bed without bathing.

Quinn is a young single mother raising her daughter Maddie under state supervision after an accidental overdose. Her social worker is Alice, the wife of Henry; their upstate house serves as the book’s setting. Unable to have biological children, Alice grows abnormally invested in Maddie. “Everything I write is to some extent about caretaking,” says Strong. “I’m always interested in the boundaries and borders that we establish, or fail to establish, in relationships that aren’t clear.” Quinn was a teenage mother who ran away from her own complicated family to keep custody of her daughter. She cannot afford childcare. “Quinn is absolutely the product of some deeply broken systems, but she’s also an acting, thinking human,” says Strong. “I need her humanity to mean as much to you as everybody else’s.” Quinn isn’t a victim; she has agency and makes her own choices. Just like the reader’s, some of them are better than others. “The book is interested in why and how we make choices, and how we live inside of those choices,” says Strong.

“All of these characters, maybe most of all Alice and Quinn, came from circling the word ‘shame,’” says Strong. Two other characters she alludes to are Kate and Josh, who lived on money from Josh’s family until he lost it all on bad investments. With two children, they’re hoping to move into Helen’s house, Kate’s childhood home in Florida, if only they can convince the family to let them. Tess thinks they don’t deserve it. Henry, an artist who makes work about climate change, would rather demolish Helen’s house—in need of repairs and destined to be underwater soon anyway—and donate her land to the state wildlife agency. “I think the fight over Helen’s house to some extent is meant to be a little bit absurd,” says Strong. “I look around at other parents, and everyone is so deeply mired in a sense of a future that doesn’t exist anymore,” due to the cascading effects of climate change, “but they can’t get out of it.” She relates to this reality-blindness herself. So what if Helen’s house will be gone by the time the kids grow up? Like Kate and Josh, “I want my kids to have a beautiful childhood,” she says.

Flight is an easy book to settle into; the reader wants to be a part of this family, even with its challenges. Jealousy, blame, grief, and all the myriad ways that children can think of to scare their parents intervene on this family reunion. Yet, they still decorate the Christmas tree and share memories of Helen. They band together when a child goes missing. “It was really important to me that each of these characters drive me a little bit nuts at the beginning,” Strong says, “and that I find a way to love them and find value in their point of view, by the end.” Patience and compassion for people real and fictional are muscles that parenting has helped her exercise, she says: “Becoming a parent and loving my children has only enriched and strengthened my work.” It’s shown her a greater capacity for love, even as the material circumstances of her life as an artist mean money is sometimes lean. Love is the most important resource for any family to have, and the family in Flight has plenty of it. It comes through every page.

Read More:

• 
  Claiming Space at the Table
• 
  How to Go Antiquing Like a Mainer
• 
  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
• 
  Milkweed Man
• 
  A Stitch in Time

The post The Elastic Nature of a Family in “Flight” appeared first on The Maine Mag.

Read More:

• 
  Claiming Space at the Table
• 
  How to Go Antiquing Like a Mainer
• 
  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
• 
  Milkweed Man
• 
  A Stitch in Time

The post The Motivation of Parenting appeared first on The Maine Mag.

To get to the Boylans’ home in the Belgrade Lakes region, I drive across a narrow causeway that crosses Long Pond. On this early fall day, the car is surrounded for a moment by glinting sun and sparkling waves before the trees close in again around the quiet road. A few minutes later, I’m sitting with Jennifer Finney Boylan on her lakeside deck, looking at the pond through the trees. These are, she tells me, storied waters. “You know ‘Once More to the Lake’?” she asks, referring to E.B. White’s timeless 1941 essay about memory, fatherhood, and mortality. “It’s that lake. Well, actually the next lake over.” The rustic, peaceful place seems at first an incongruous home for Boylan—a woman known across the country as a transgender activist who’s appeared not only on Oprah but also on the reality show I Am Cait. She has just returned from a celebrity-studded New York City gala. But, like White before her, Boylan has found in Maine a special place for writers—and for people looking to become who they truly are.

Boylan and her wife, Dierdre, came to the region in 1988. Boylan, a promising young writer, had been offered a one-year teaching position at Colby College, and they expected to move on after that. “Deedie and I fell in love with where we were,” she says. At Colby and in the Waterville area, they discovered a community that suited them. “There’s a sense of connection, a sense of less bullshit here. It’s less about posing and more about a sense of truth.” It was a moment when the “struggle for truth” was very important to Boylan. “When I moved here, I was a closeted transgender person who wasn’t out, in some ways not living very honestly. One of the things I hoped to find in Maine was an ability to live a life that was a little truer to my own soul and the people around me.” For her first 12 years in Maine, Boylan was living as a man, the gender she had been assigned at birth. She had two children, became a beloved professor at Colby, published some successful fiction, and developed friendships with other Maine writers, especially the novelist Richard Russo. Her happiness was double-edged: she had known since childhood that she was meant to be female, but worried that coming out as a woman would mean losing much that she loved. In 2000 she began to publicly and physically transition from male to female. “When I came out, a lot of people didn’t know what transgender was. They thought I made it up myself,” she recalls. “But at Colby almost everyone was supportive. The people who weren’t supportive didn’t say it to my face, which is almost as good.” Boylan found her identity accepted outside the college, too. “Politics aside, people respect your privacy here. I can’t say that the last half-dozen years haven’t made me feel more afraid. It’s not all sweetness and light. But there is something about New England in which people generally leave each other alone. As weird as things have gotten, I hope that remains true.”

In 2003 Boylan published a memoir of her transition called She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders. She describes its approach as “very human and relatable, instead of thinking of transgender people as rare creatures, like the duck-billed platypus.” The book tells the story of a boy carrying a soul-crushing secret through young adult-hood, marriage, and early career, then of a woman in rural Maine struggling through transition. It’s about the pain of living as some-one you’re not, and the costs—to self and others—of expressing one’s true being in a society that doesn’t allow it. When She’s Not There was published, “it took a lot of people by surprise, including its publisher,” Boylan says. The book was the first bestseller by an openly transgender American. Its success led to a two-day appearance on Oprah as well as a suddenly broader platform for Boylan’s work and words. Now, nearly 20 years after its publication, She’s Not There is a time capsule from a slightly different era, when people conducted relationships through long, searching email exchanges (some are reproduced in the book) and no singular “they ” or “them ” could pass an editor’s scrutiny. In some ways it shows what has changed in two decades. Yet, while the cultural presence and acceptance of transgender people has increased, a book that invites you into the life of a trans person remains a new experience for many readers. “I served as an object lesson that, yes, who I am and what I am is not so far from you,” Boylan says.

That message has remained central to Boylan’s work in the years since. She’s shared her story in three more memoirs—most recently Good Boy: A Life in Seven Dogs—that explore childhood, parenting, love, and other fundamentally human concerns. She’s published fiction for children and young adults and contributed to multiple anthologies on transgen-der issues as well as other topics. In 2014 she left Colby to become the Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College in New York City—a “dream job” that allows her to spend most of the year in Maine and to teach on campus in the spring. She also teaches at the Breadloaf Writers Conference in Vermont and the Sirenland Writers Conference in Positano, Italy. This fall, she’ll publish her first coauthored novel, Mad Honey, written with New Hampshire novelist Jodi Picoult. As a murder mystery, it might seem far removed from her usual concerns, but, told in alternating chapters by the murdered girl and the suspect’s mother, the book experiments with the idea of voice and explores, in the publisher’s words, “what we choose to keep from our past, and what we choose to leave behind.”

Boylan also devotes a good deal of time to nonprofit board work. She was on the board of GLAAD for seven years (and chaired it for four) advocating for the inclusion of LGBTQ+ people. After the end of her term at GLAAD, she joined the board of trustees at PEN America, an organization dedicated to the protection of free expression. She’s also just concluded a 15-year run of a monthly column for the New York Times, in which she linked her lived experience with pressing national issues, like abortion rights and presidential politics. She notes that she was the only trans voice regularly appearing on the opinion page, and expects to continue contributing “as my imagination, and/or the news cycle, demands.” Some of Boylan’s most popular pieces were about cocktails and dogs, but she tried to keep at least half of the content focused on LGBTQ+ issues. “It gets back to giving a voice to the normal, quotidian lives of LGBTQ+ people,” she says. “It’s showing that transgender people have children, have families, make bread, go to PTA meetings, vote, get their car washed. People think our lives are exotic. Just sharing all the joys of a quiet family life is a subversive act.”

So, the Boylans will continue to enjoy their Maine life, inviting friends over for patio cocktails and gourmet pizzas made in their outdoor oven, watching Long Pond sparkle through the trees. Boylan will continue to stretch her skills as an author: for the 2022–2023 academic year she’ll be a fellow at the Radcliffe Center for Advanced Study at Harvard University, doing research for a book about feminist pioneers. And she’ll be continuing her activism in her preferred form: writing. “To tell a story. It’s a radical act,” she says. “Tell me what’s more revolutionary than telling your story, telling it in a way that opens people’s hearts.”

A Jennifer Finney Boylan Reading List

START HERE
She’s Not There (Crown, 2003; updated 2013). Boylan’s best-selling memoir is a seminal work of trans literature: a story of love, sex, selfhood, and understanding. The book is the story of “a life in two genders”—and the space between—but it’s also a love story: the tale of how James became Jenny and how her marriage survived, and thrived. The 2013 edition included a new updated chapter as well as a new epilogue by Deirdre “Grace” Boylan, Jenny’s wife. And it also includes an afterword by the Boylans’ beloved friend, Maine’s own Richard Russo.

FICTION
If you prefer fiction to memoir, Boylan’s four novels provide mystery, humor, and wisdom. Long Black Veil (Crown, 2017) begins with seven college friends accidentally getting locked into the ruins of Philadelphia’s Eastern State Penitentiary one night, only to find that they are not alone. If you’re intrigued by Long Black Veil, you might also try Boylan’s first novel, The Planets (Poseidon Press, 1991). It’s the first book Boylan wrote after moving to the Pine Tree State, a story she wrote “during a time when I was newly wed, and new to Maine, and just in love with everything.”

YOUNG ADULT
The Falcon Quinn series (HarperCollins, 2010, 2011, 2016) is kind of the reverse of Harry Potter: young people turning into monsters are sent to a special school to teach them how to imitate human beings in order to survive in the world. It’s a not-particularly obscure metaphor for LGBTQ+ experience. Would you try to imitate someone you’re not, if it meant you could survive? Or would you embrace your true self, even if your true self were, say, a Sasquatch? Boylan wrote the three volumes with her then middle-school-aged children. “It was the most fun I ever had writing anything. Every day we’d come up with new monsters: A chupacabra? A were-chicken? I’m in.”

BOYLAN’S PICK
Boylan says her favorite one of her books is her memoir I’m Looking Through You (Crown, 2008) about growing up in an allegedly haunted house. It’s also an exploration of what it means to be “haunted,” and how we occupy our own bodies.

MAINE MORTALS
Don’t forget I’ll Give You Something to Cry About: A Novella, in which the Rileys of Bar Harbor drive to Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., where their youngest, six-year-old Otis, is supposed to play “Flight of the Bumblebee” on violin for then-Vice President Joe Biden. Also in the car: recently transitioned trans teen Alex as well as the jubilant, impossible grandmother, “Gammie.” On page one, the Rileys pass by a group of chefs smoking cigarettes on the street. “What happened,” Gammie shouts out gleefully, “did somebody spoil the broth?”

ESSAYS
“If I Had Loved Her Less: On a Queer Reading of Henry David Thoreau and the Daily Performance of Manhood,” LitHub, September 13, 2021

“Time Won’t Let Me Wait That Long,” The New York Times, December 9, 2020

“The Brilliant Uncertainty of the Grateful Dead’s ‘Dark Star,’” The New York Times, February 27, 2019

“What Peanuts Taught Me About Queer Identity,” The New Yorker, February 21, 2019

“How a Sliver of Glass Changed My Life,” The New York Times, September 4, 2018

“Inside of a Dog,” The New York Times, December 27, 2017

Read More:

• 
  Claiming Space at the Table
• 
  How to Go Antiquing Like a Mainer
• 
  Four Young Writers to Watch in the Pine Tree State
• 
  Milkweed Man
• 
  A Stitch in Time

The post How One Trans Activist Author Found Truth and Acceptance in Maine appeared first on The Maine Mag.