C.J. Box Comes to Maine

This event has been postponed until September 29.

And I have the good fortune of reading with him. Chuck and I share the same literary agent, and I know that getting her two "game warden authors" together has been a pet project for a while. Well, she has finally pulled it off with a reading at the Blue Hill Library. Here's the listing from the Bangor Daily News:

BLUE HILL, Maine — Paul Doiron, author of the Mike Bowditch series of crime novels, and C. J. Box, the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen novels including the Joe Pickett series, will read from their new books at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 30, at the Blue Hill Public Library.  Paul Doiron will read from his latest book, Trespasser, and C. J. Box will read from Back of Beyond. Both authors work feature a fictional game warden as their primary character.

Paul Doiron is the editor in chief of Down East: The Magazine of Maine, Down East Books, and DownEast.com. His first book in the Mike Bowditch series of crime novels, The Poacher’s Son, was nominated for an Edgar Award, an Anthony Award, a Barry Award, a Strand Critics Award, and a Thriller Award for Best First Novel. A native Mainer, he is a Registered Maine Guide specializing in fly fishing and outdoor recreation and lives on a trout stream in coastal Maine.

This event is co-sponsored by the Blue Hill Public Library and Blue Hill Books. Books will be available for sale and signing. For more information, call 374-5515.

Edgar Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author C.J. Box is one of the most acclaimed writers in the crime and suspense genres right now, and his work has been an inspiration for me in the creation of my own Mike Bowditch series. I am delighted to be his opening act. Welcome to Maine, Chuck!

Advice from an Agent

I don't write many posts on the nuts and bolts of publishing. I used to do a lot of that work in my former life as the executive director of Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance (so long ago). And these days there's so much good advice on the Internet from professionals who know a lot more than I ever will. For instance, I stumbled on agent Rachelle Gardiner's blog the other day and, despite my best intentions, spent a fair amount of time reading her bracingly candid posts on all sorts of difficult subjects. I'd caution against trusting too much on any Internet source (when in doubt, I always ask my own agent), but the truth is there are now lots of reputable agents and other marketing professionals who are candidly writing and commenting online on this bizarre business of ours.

Some Elements of the Grotesque in Maine Fiction

One of my all-time favorite authors and a huge influence on my work is Flannery O'Connor who wrote about the South in a way I have sought to emulate in writing about Maine. Today, in a heated discussion, I was reminded of the wisdom of her wonderful essay "Some Elements of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction" and particularly of this section:

When we look at a good deal of serious modern fiction, and particularly Southern fiction, we find this quality about it that is generally described, in a pejorative sense, as grotesque. Of course, I have found that anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic. But for this occasion, we may leave such misapplications aside and consider the kind of fiction that may be called grotesque with good reason, because of a directed intention that way on the part of the author.

In these grotesque works, we find that the writer has made alive some experience which we are not accustomed to observe every day, or which the ordinary man may never experience in his ordinary life. We find that connections which we would expect in the customary kind of realism have been ignored, that there are strange skips and gaps which anyone trying to describe manners and customs would certainly not have left. Yet the characters have an inner coherence, if not always a coherence to their social framework. Their fictional qualities lean away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected. It is this kind of realism that I want to consider.

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost anything you say about Southern belief can be denied in the next breath with equal propriety. But approaching the subject from the standpoint of the writer, I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive. They cast strange shadows, particularly in our literature. In any case, it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.

I wouldn't call rural Maine Christ-haunted (although much of it is), but Yankees too have retained the ability to recognize the freak when he comes among us.

Suffice to say, I wish I'd had O'Connor's essay at hand as a rebuttal in my debate over the role of grotesqueries in my own books.

Dispatches from the Real Maine

Earlier this summer I moderated a discussion between two novelists with debuts out from Down East Books, Shonna Humphrey, author of Show Me Good Land, and Jim Nichols, author of Hull Creek. Both Shonna and Jim are native Mainers which automatically distinguishes them from the majority of writers (e.g. J. Courteny Sullivan) who have treated the Pine Tree State in fiction. Shonna and Jim are also unusual in writing about blue-collar people that don't make their way into print all that often.

In one of my questions I cited Sanford Phippen seminal (albeit dated) essay "Missing from the Books: My Maine," which was something of a rallying cry back in the 1980s among native Maine authors like Carolyn Chute and Cathie Pelletier. Phippen had little uses for books written by people "from away" in Down East parlance.

Here's one of our exchanges:

Paul: You both deal with the tension between locals and people from away in your books. InShow Me Good Land, it’s more aspirational. Rhetta is a woman with an out-of-state license plate, taking pictures of the potato fields with dreams of escape. In Hull Creek, Troy Hull has a more direct conflict with the well-to-do people who are buying up his coastal town. I was struck by the similarity and I wonder where this impulse to deal with this tension as a subject came from?

Shonna: My entire book started as a nonfiction essay about potato picking, and so that part is drawn from life because I did pick potatoes. I wasn’t very good at it. It was hard work, and I didn’t last very long. There was this sort of voyeurism that happened where people would just stop along the side of the road and watch us work. I imagined what it would be like for those people and what they saw when they saw all the kids picking in the potato fields. I actually did see the potato harvest on a calendar in the airport one time, and I thought, wow, that looks really beautiful and lovely but that wasn’t really my experience with it.

Jim: For me it was working for the air service [in Owls Head] and flying both fishermen and summer people out to the [Penobscot Bay] islands — I have worked at either restaurants or airports for a long time. There is always that tension between wealthy people who share the same ground as people whose ancestors settled it and maybe who can’t afford to live there anymore. And you read stories about a fifth generation home that has to be sold because the family can’t afford the taxes. To me that’s a very sad and troubling thing.

Indeed, it is a sad and troubling thing—also one of the reasons I wrote Trespasser.

Instant Nostalgia

One of my first and favorite stops on the Trespasser book tour was at Red Fox Books in Glens Falls, New York. I did a joint event with Julia Spencer-Fleming. We joined a friendly and interested crowd for lunch, trading stories and anecdotes about Maine and mysteries. I knew that the day would make for a nice memory, but I had no idea it would be a bittersweet one.

I just heard the news that Red Fox is going to close, driven out of business by a sluggish economy and a surge in ebook sales that is leaving lots of independent booksellers in dire straights. Glens Falls seems like a great little town, and I suspect lots of people will miss their favorite shop downtown.

I wish Susan and Naftali the best, and I am grateful for the warm welcome they and their customers gave an unknown Maine author.