Working Waterfront

Olive ages, and faces regret

Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout (2019) Review by Tina Cohen You’d need a good memory or having both books (in hardbound) to realize this: Elizabeth Strout’s collection of stories, Olive Kitteridge, published in 2008, featured a single green leaf. And on the cover of her newest, Olive, Again, falling leaves… SEE MORE

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Is the fear about the ‘if, when’ virus unprecedented?

By Dana Wilde “This is like an atomic bomb, or worse,” Xiao Xingzheng wrote to me from his home in the island-city of Xiamen, China. This was in late March, when the covid-19 pandemic was subsiding there and intensifying here. He and his own family had, luckily, escaped illness so… SEE MORE

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With endowment, Haystack looks toward the future

By Laurie Schreiber One of the most defining characteristics of the legendary Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, an international craft school in Deer Isle, is the campus itself, designed by American architect Edward Larrabee Barnes and overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. When the campus opened in 1961, 11 years after the… SEE MORE

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A journey of infinite hope, faith, art—and prejudice

By Carl Little This year marks the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. As Lauren Katzenberg noted in the New York Times “At War” newsletter last August, “There will be many commemorations: the liberation of the concentration camps, Victory in Europe Day, the dropping of the atomic… SEE MORE

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Jeremiah Hacker, Portland’s ‘genuine homegrown radical’

By Tom Groening Jeremiah Hacker is not more than a footnote in Portland’s history, let alone Maine’s history. But examining his work as a crusading journalist through the middle of the 19th century opens a window on a world wrestling with slavery, brutal prisons, poverty without social safety nets, a… SEE MORE

Production still from The Lighthouse (2019) and Captain January (1936)

Working Waterfront

‘Maine in the Movies’ film festival March 6-15

By Tom Groening No, Mainers were not watching movies in 1820 when the state was established. But celebrating Maine’s role in film is an appropriate facet of the bicentennial celebration, say Mike Perreault and Tom Wilhite, who are producing the “Maine in the Movies” film festival. The festival brings more… SEE MORE

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Revisiting N. C. Wyeth

By Carl Little For a couple of months, the Portland Museum of Art is stealing some of the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Wyeth thunder. “N. C. Wyeth: New Perspectives” (through Jan. 12) offers 46 paintings and one drawing by the granddaddy who launched the family art dynasty at the turn of… SEE MORE

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New collection splits open from-away, native identities

North by Northeast: New Short Fiction by Writers from Maine and New England Agnes Bushell, editor/Littoral Books, Portland, 2019 Review by Dana Wilde In the 1980s, a minor civil war was waged in Maine’s literary subculture over who, exactly, was eligible for the label “Maine writer.” As I recall there… SEE MORE

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Poems of perception and place

Quarry: The Collected Poems of Peter Kilgore -- North Country Press, 2019 Review by Carl Little Over the last half century or so a number of major American practitioners of innovative verse have found a home and/or muse in Maine. The list includes George Oppen, Donald Wellman, Sylvester Pollet, Denise Levertov, Theodore… SEE MORE

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Pulling back Bar Harbor’s shingled curtain

Bar Harbor Babylon//Dan and Leslie Landrigan Review by Tom Walsh So, this summer's “beach book” wound up being a buzz kill? Sorry. You could have spiced up your summer in the sun with a copy of Bar Harbor Babylon, a historic anthology of killers, thieves, scammers, and seriously rich families involved in the… SEE MORE