If you happen to be in southern Maine on Black Friday, I hope you'll stop by the Portland Public Library and introduce yourself. The annual Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance Holiday Book Sale is one of the better one-stop-shopping events for book lovers. With 25 Maine authors, you're bound to find something for everyone on your list.
Real Men Read Jane Austen
Over at Maine Crime Writers today I have a post up about one of my least likely literary influences and her continuing impact on popular culture. Check it out.
Vermont Reading
I'm wrapping up my five-month book tour for Trespasser by hitting the road one last time. On Saturday, November 19 at 11 a.m. I'll be reading and signing books at Kingdom Books in northeastern Vermont. I have a lot of affection for the Green Mountain State, dating back to my days as a waiter at the Bread Load Writers' Conference, and always appreciate the opportunity to get over to the Northeast Kingdom, which is so similar to Maine and yet has its own unique attributes. Beth and Dave were extremely supportive of my debut, The Poacher's Son, and I'm looking forward to visiting their store and meeting some of my fans from Vermont and New Hampshire (and maybe even Quebec, you never know).
The Movie Version
I got an invitation to write a guest post for a blog called My Book, the Movie where authors are invited to imagine their books becoming films. Here's how I began my reply:
The first thing I should do is quote my film agent who says that, in his experience, novelists are poor casting agents for their own books.
Having said that, I’ll take a stab anyway. Mike Bowditch should be a great character for an actor to play—he’s brave and intelligent but impetuous and haunted by violence, both his own and others’—but Hollywood seems to have a dearth of promising male actors under the age of twenty-five (which is Mike’s age in this book). For that reason, I’d probably go with someone a little older like Ryan Gosling, who has the acting chops and has shown an inclination recently to play more physical roles. I haven’t seen enough of Charlie Hunnam’s work, but his performance on Sons of Anarchy has intrigued me.
No sooner had I hit send than the wisdom of my film agent's observation came home to me.
I had suggested that January Jones might be right for the character of Sarah (whom I have always seen as earnest and beautiful but bland). My wife scoffed. She wanted an actress in the role who could project intelligence, someone like Carrie Mulligan or Amanda Seyfriend or Michelle Williams. She's almost certaintly right.
Hey, what do I know? I'm just a novelist.
A Bloody Deer Season
Deer-hunting season got started in Maine a little more than a week ago, and as the clip above from Maine Public Radio explains, there have already been three human casualties, including one death. John Holyoke, of the Bangor Daily News, has a frank assessment of the consequences of these horrible incidents:
On Monday, I was trying to explain [to my non-hunting friends] how responsible most hunters are. I was trying to tell my friends that a single tragic weekend doesn’t mean that the Maine woods are inherently unsafe during November.
And I expect my words sounded less than convincing.
Consider: Over a two-day period spanning Friday and Saturday, three hunting-related shootings were reported to the Maine Warden Service.
• On Friday, a Portsmouth, N.H. man who was target shooting in the woods of Casco was shot in the stomach by a hunter. The victim was taken by LifeFlight to a Lewiston hospital.
• Also on Friday, a Hebron man was shot in the leg by a hunting companion as they tracked a deer that had been wounded in Oxford. The wounded hunter was also transported to a Lewiston hospital.
• And on Saturday, 46-year-old Peter Kolofsky of Sebago was shot and killed while hunting in that southern Maine town. The alleged shooter, 61-year-old William Briggs of Windham, was hunting nearby but was not a member of Kolofsky’s hunting party.
All it takes is a single weekend, however, to convince plenty of people that the woods of Maine are full of wild, gun-toting folks who don’t care what they shoot at, whether it’s a deer, the family pooch or another hunter.
It doesn't matter that statistics show that hunting in Maine is a safer pasttime than boating or snowmobiling or many of the other outdoor activities we engage in these days. What matters are stories like the ones Holyoke describes. It's human nature to extrapolate greater meaning from narratives, even fragmentary ones like those above.
Ultimately, the image of man in the woods clutching his bloody stomach is simply more convincing to us than any chart stacked with numbers.