After months of anticipation, I celebrated the official launch of The Poacher's Son with a fantastic party at the home of New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen and her husband Jake overlooking Penobscot Bay. The house was packed, and my local independent bookseller, The Owl & Turtle Bookshop, sold more than 100 copies of the novel.
Next comes a busy schedule of readings and signings that start in Portland, Maine, on Friday and take me to the American Library Association conference in Washington, D.C. in late June—and perhaps even farther afield as more events get added to the calendar.
All the more reason to take a moment and appreciate the fulfillment of my life's dream. I couldn't have asked for a better party or a better group of friends to help me celebrate.
In The Poacher's Son I have several characters who casually toss about some of my state's more colorful expressions. Retired Warden Service Chief Pilot Charley Stevens especially has a masterful command of the Maine idiom. Since my novel doesn't contain a supplementary glossary of regional expressions, I figured I should occasionally use this blog to clarify and explain what the hell these cussed* people are saying to my out-of-state readers. This term didn't make it into the final draft, I just happen to love it because of its sweet perfection.
TOOTH CARPENTER: a Maine dentist, especially one working in an upcountry town.
Update on 2010-05-09 11:35 by Paul Doiron
*CUSSED: A contraction of "cursed," but used in a familiar and genial manner; when applied to a person it usually signifies an obstinate but not altogether unpleasant individual.
I'm not giving anything away to admit that one of the themes of The Poacher's Son is loss—loss of relationships, loss of trust, loss of heritage and wilderness. Reflecting on the enormous changes taking place in the Maine North Woods persuaded me that it might add a poignant note to the book to set the second half of the story in two of Maine's ghost towns. As I write in the "Author's Note":
Many of the places in this story don’t exist on the map of Maine (at least not under the names I have given them), but two important exceptions are the townships of Flagstaff and Dead River. In 1950 the Central Maine Power Company built a dam at Long Falls and flooded the Dead River valley northwest of the Bigelow Mountains. Flagstaff and Dead River are gone, but sometimes, when the water is low on Flagstaff Lake, you can take a boat out and peer down at the ruins of what were once two vibrant North Woods villages. To anyone interested in learning more about these lost towns I recommend There Was a Land, published by the helpful people of the Dead River Historical Society. I hope that the survivors of Flagstaff and Dead River will see my decision to set this story in their vanished communities as an effort to keep their fading memories alive.
It turns out that I got a fact wrong here: There Was a Land was published by the Flagstaff Memorial Chapel Association, but it is distributed by the Dead River Historical Society, and if you are ever in the town of Eustis, Maine, I encourage you to pay their small museum a visit.
Maine musician Slaid Cleaves also wrote a song called "Below" about the flooding of Dead River and Flagstaff for his 2004 album Wishbones. Here's the video:
It's almost inconceivable today that a Maine town (let alone two) could be erased from the landscape by a single powerful corporation, but I suppose you should never say never.
Marilyn Stasio's review of The Poacher's Son in the New York Times is now online. Read it here. Or wait till Sunday and buy the print copy.
I also had the honor today of being included on the May 2010 Indie Next List by Indiebound, the organization of independent bookstores. The Poacher's Son appears as a May '10 Indie Notable with a review by Bill Cusumano of Nicola's Books in Ann Arbor. I had the pleasure of meeting Bill on my presell tour visit to Michigan, and I'm happy as hell he called my novel a "suspenseful, outstanding debut."
Until I actually received a copy of the printed novel, I think I was always going to wonder whether publishing The Poacher's Son was some sort of multi-year hallucination. I can now safely accept that this is really happening. (That's the audiobook beside the novel, incidentally.) I still expect May 11 to be one of the most surreal days of my life.
After months of anticipation, I celebrated the official launch of The Poacher's Son with a fantastic party at the home of New York Times bestselling author Tess Gerritsen and her husband Jake overlooking Penobscot Bay. The house was packed, and my local independent bookseller, The Owl & Turtle Bookshop, sold more than 100 copies of the novel.
All the more reason to take a moment and appreciate the fulfillment of my life's dream. I couldn't have asked for a better party or a better group of friends to help me celebrate. 
