Hot muggy weather is hell on buttercream. Still, a lot of island-destination weddings and other grand events are planned for summer. Special cakes to mark nuptials, anniversaries, and birthdays, carefully constructed, decorated and set out to be admired before being carved up for consumption, are so vulnerable this time of year. Buttercream, with its heavy butter component, easy to spread…

I had spent the day online, taking a necessary but predictably dull class. As soon as we logged out for the day, I gathered my shoes, my hat, and my…

The striking thing about these poems is their down-to-earth, conversational atmosphere, couched nonetheless in precise diction and tightly made speech rhythms heightened into the music of poetry.

In a tour of the house Milliken offers memorable details, from the bottom step trapdoor where his mother hid her weed to the shellacked artist conk fungi that served as shelves for teapots. This was the place he considered most his home, “among the ghosts of this land’s previous inheritors. In the acute absence of anyone else.”

For many of us, jobs and schooling went remote, and many left crowded urban areas to reside in seasonal homes or with family or friends offering more room to spread out. Emotional support often was a low priority, and paranoia and distrust came to dominate our normal, instinctual desire to share and problem-solve in communal ways.

Most of his career was spent on shore, primarily as a seafood buyer at the Portland Fish Exchange for Foley Fish, and later as a salesman for Foley. Much of his book is devoted to his years on the Exchange and serving on the New England Fishery Management Council.

Kelly Morgan moved from California to Maine to work on an oyster farm. By way of the Maine Aquaculture Apprenticeship Program, she landed a job on the New Meadows River in Brunswick farming oysters with Bombazine Oyster Company.

Day in and day out, summer after summer when I was a kid, I flew back and forth over Casco Bay with my father in his Piper Cub seaplane. From…

To fund the first phase, the Friends won a $675,000 grant from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a $120,000 grant from the Maine Department of Environmental Protection, both of which enabled the replacement of the main building’s roof and asbestos removal, work that began in late spring.

Those of us who work in coastal communities understand the vital role working waterfronts play in supporting jobs in our communities…