Hurricane Irene put a damper on the planned reading I was scheduled to give with best-selling author C.J. Box in Blue Hill tomorrow night (his flight was cancelled). But Box and I will be back. The event has been rescheduled for Thursday, September 29 at 7 p.m. at the Blue Hill Public Library.
Maine Sunday Telegram Q&A
If you're looking for a break from the wall-to-wall Irene coverage (and still have access to the Internet or at least a soggy newspaper), there's an interview with me this morning in the Maine Sunday Telegram. The piece is in advance of my free lecture at the Portland Public Library on Wednesday, August 31 at noon. The conversation is a bit of a ramble, as so many of these phone interviews tend to be (I've written my fair share), but one section makes a point I always try to emphasize:
It's a misconception that a game warden's job is all about animals; it's about people, managing people's behaviors. There are poachers and ATV infractions and people falling through the ice.
Maine game wardens are tops in search and rescue, and they are brought in to help in lots of searches. Almost all the most notorious crimes in Maine, at some point, the game wardens are brought in to help.
Here's what I meant by that: The hurricane hasn't started in midcoast Maine yet, but I am aware of the wardens I know gearing up for a long day and night, unsure of what the storm might demand of them, but prepared to help people in danger. I am in awe of their dedication.
Update on 2011-08-28 11:38 by Paul Doiron
In the same edition there's also a review of my friend Vicki Doudera's new mystery Killer Listing. I agree with Lloyd Ferris's description of Darby Farr as "gusty and charming," and am glad he emphasizes Vicki's fantastic sense of humor, which is very much on display here.
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.