Students rehearsing the play D&D. PHOTO: ALICE GREENWAY

Working Waterfront

It’s play time on North Haven

Spring is taking a particularly “playful” form on North Haven. Twenty playwrights, tapping at their laptops over the winter, have submitted manuscripts. Seven directors are taking time away from boatyards, school, and gardens. And 38 actors of all ages are striding the boards, which this year includes the fields at… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Plenty of grit in the women who lobster

Pretty Rugged: True Stories From Women of the Sea By Ali Farrell (Sea Street Publishing, Camden; 2020) Review by Tina Cohen This is a book about women who lobster, and it is about the grit of these fishermen (the term has become gender-neutral). Nothing is prettied up here. Author Ali… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

What World War II meant to Monhegan

The Second World War had a dramatic impact on the everyday lives of people across the country, and while far from the fighting, the residents of Maine’s remote offshore islands also were profoundly affected by the war overseas. The multimedia online exhibition World War II: On-Island and Abroad incorporates oral… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Carving her way from surgery to art

Carving from green wood is a whole different beast from dry-wood carving, says Danielle Rose Byrd, a Bar Harbor-based wood carver and sculptor. “It’s wet wood. It behaves differently when it dries. It wants to crack and people are super scared of that. And so I’m like … Why is that bad?” In Byrd’s new book, the self-taught carver presents step-by-step wood carving instruction, with some soul-carving instruction threaded in. SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Connection, as only music can provide it

Island winters are not for the faint of heart. My first winter on Islesboro was no exception. At the beginning of my fellowship, a wise islander gave me some sage advice: the only way to make it through winter on Islesboro is to have a really good hobby. SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Telling stories about the birds

Birds, says field biologist Richard MacDonald of Bar Harbor, have been “a unifying theme” in his life. At age ten MacDonald was banding ducks and in college he carried binoculars wherever he went. And for the past several decades he has led birding expeditions, local and way away (Antarctica), while running the Natural History Center on Mount Desert Island. SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

On the record with… David Hopkins, chair of Maine Arts Commission

Born in Bangor in 1953, David Hopkins grew up on North Haven Island. When he was 14 and his brother, painter Eric Hopkins, was 16, they asked their parents if they could open an art gallery on the family’s Hopkins Wharf. That was the beginning of a life-long connection for… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Winter in a Tourist Town

In our latest photo essay from The Working Waterfront, photographer Michelle Stapleton captures the quiet time in Old Orchard Beach. SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Poetry embedded in a fisherman’s diary

Review by Dana Wilde Didn’t Do Much but a Little of Everything: The Eagle Island Diary of Dalton Raynes Ian Ludders, ed.; Lulu.com It’s about 1961, a sunny day somewhere in Scarborough. Spread over what seems, to my 8-year-old eyes, like acres and acres of dry field, are sardine… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Restoring Hindu

What could be better than a vessel that encapsulates the timelessness of a love story, the enchantment of a fairy tale, and the mystical allure of a legend? Well, how about one with the spirit of Maine in its every fiber. [caption id="attachment_24228" align="alignright" width="700"] Josh Rowan and Erin Desmond.… SEE MORE