"Vacationland"

Over at MaineCrimeWriters today I have a post about the parts of Maine tourists rarely see, the backwoods trailer compounds and falling-down farmhouses. Carolyn Chute wasn't the first author to shine a light on my home state's hidden poverty. But she certainly got the attention of the reading public with The Beans of Egypt, Maine. And she remains an influence on my work. (My forthcoming novel, Bad Little Falls, is a tribute to her early books.) Meanwhile, photographer Steven Rubin is winning raves for a series of photographs he has taken in rural Somerset County, where The Poacher's Son mostly takes place. His pictures are absolutely haunting.

Moose Bones

My wife and I went birding today in the woods near Weskeag marsh (the real place that inspired the tidal creek where Mike Bowdich lives in The Poacher's Son and Trespasser) and we came across the partial skeleton of a moose. The bones had been picked clean. They had obviously been there a while.

Generation Gap

I first conceived of the character of Mike Bowditch, rookie Maine game warden, when I was in my early thirties.

I was a little older than the character—enough to have some perspective on the identity issues he was wrestling with—but not of an entirely different generation. It took me a while to write The Poacher's Son, however, and a while longer to get it published, and one of the results was that I aged faster than Mike. Three books into the series, he is still in his mid twenties while I am now in my mid forties. 

Maybe I'm rationalizing this, but I've come to see the age gap in my fiction as a positive. Most Millenials grew up wired at birth, and so Mike's decision to pursue what he calls "an old-fashioned profession" as a game warden and his rejection of texting and other aspects of the Information Age have become even more defining character traits for him.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the website 20SomethingReads asked twenty mystery authors to talk briefly about our work and recommend books we thought would speak to readers in their twenties. I like how the writer of the feature characterized me:

Paul Doiron, author of BAD LITTLE FALLS, shares books about people who  live their lives a bit off the beaten track, but carry within them a lot of soul.

Anyway, here are my recommendations. Frankly, I think you should read these books whatever your age is.

My Life in Libraries

I have a post up today at MaineCrimeWriters.com in honor of National Library Week. The library was the place where I decided to cross the line from reading books to writing them my myself. Being surrounded by all those wonderful stories opened up my imagination in surprising ways (sometimes exhilerating, sometimes disturbing). I know we're all supposed to be excited by the infinite possibilities of the internet, but there's a lot to be said for having limited choices at hand—being forced, in my case, to read Catch-22 because I'd run through all the other paperbacks on the free shelf and then discovering it spoke to me in ways I never would have imagined. Today, libraries are going through a period of deep soul-searching, as they increasingly become places where patrons come to browse the web and not the books. That's fodder for another post. But I would be remiss, given my success as an author, not to pay homage to the libraries that helped form my sensibility. 

Transported

It's not every day you hear your wife's poetry being recited by our own twenty-first century Will Rogers. Today, however, was such a day for me. On this morning's "Writer's Almanac," Garrison Keillor read the title poem of my wife's new collection, Transportation. I am immensely proud of her and hope you will give the segment a listen.