Browse Items (53 total)
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Brewing for Baxter
Profile on Maine engineer and brewer, Michael LaCharite. The founder of Portland, Maine's Casco Bay Brewing company, LaCharite was sought out to help develop the varieties of beer now produced by Lewiston, Maine's Baxter Brewing. LaCharite cites a family tradition of home-brewing as one of the foundations for his passion and talents. -
A memorial for Kerouac
Article part 2 of 2 on the recent Lowell, Massachusetts, city council vote to commemorate author Jack Kerouac with a park bearing his name. Full article title includes the line: "After years of indifference, Lowell votes to build a park." Charts Kerouac's sudden rise to fame with the publication of his novel, "On the Road." His ensuing lifestyle in the public eye, his behaviors scrutinized by many in Lowell. Kerouac's life and works as an affront to the popular values of his working-class hometown, and his apparent abandonment by fellow Lowellians. The recent apparent change in attitude toward Kerouac, though with some evidence of familiar resistance. -
In search of the real Kerouac
Review of the documentary film on Jack Kerouac, entitled, "Whatever Happened to Kerouac?" (Richard Lerner and Lewis McAdam, 1987). Film is a biographical portrait of the Lowell, Massachusetts, writer, featuring interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs, among others. Article written on the occasion of the film's showing in Somerville, Massachusetts. -
Kerouac's forgettable Montreal road trip
Article recognizing the brief hype surrounding the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's most famous novel, "On the Road." Discusses a much less explored event in Kerouac's life when, in 1967, the author appeared on the Montreal talk show "Sel de la Semaine." The Montreal crowd's reaction to hearing Kerouac speaking in a "rural and unlearned and folkloric" French. Other characteristics of the Lowell, Massachusetts native that the author here argues may be due to Kerouac's Québecois heritage. -
Big Liquor Seizures in Bennington, Vermont
Article on multiple criminal alcohol seizures from a number of Vermont social clubs in the 1910s. -
What Happened To Kerouac?
Documentary about Franco American writer Jack Kerouac, the American literary and cultural movement spurred on by what is known as the "Beat Generation, and the countdown of Kerouac's final days. Features support from the following persons: Allen Ginsberg, Edie Parker Kerouac, Gregory Corso, William Burroughs, Steve Allen, William Buckley, Charlie Parker, Neal Cassady, Carolyn Cassady, Gary Snyder, Jan Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, Herbert Huncke, Fran Landesman, Ed Sanders, John Clellon Holmes, Ann Charters, Ed White, Diane DiPrima, Father "Spike" Morissette, Joyce Johnson, Robert Creeley, Lewis Yablonsky. -
The Voice Is All : The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
Biographical portrait of Jack Kerouac, with uniquely heavy emphasis on the suggested influence of his French Canadian heritage - and the French language - on the style and content of his creative works. Written by a Kerouac contemporary and former friend. Covers from Kerouac's early life and those of his parents, to 1951, shortly after the publication of his first novel, The Town and the City. -
Memory Babe : A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac
Biography of Lowell, Massachusetts native, poet, and author, Jack Kerouac, widely known as a founding participant in the 20th century USA literary culture that came to be called the "Beat Movement," or the "Beat Generation." Kerouac's life from birth to early death; from Lowell, to New York, to San Francisco, to Denver, to Tampa and St. Petersburg, and back again. The cultural, interpersonal, and geographic contexts for his poetry and writings of autobiographical fiction. Anecdotes and aspects of his public and private lives, and where these lives changed and converged. Well-known for the biographer's extensive use of archival materials and interviews with Kerouac's contemporaries. -
Kerouac : The Definitive Biography
Recent historical biography of Lowell, Massachusetts writer, Jack Kerouac. Based largely on primary sources. Written by an independent scholar whose childhood and later life was also spent in Lowell. -
Inside Peyton Place : The Life of Grace Metalious
Biography of Manchester, New Hampshire author Grace Metalious. Famous for her novel "Peyton Place" and its various film adaptations. Emily Toth is also the biographer of novelist Kate Chopin.
From University Press of Mississippi: "The juicy biography of the scandalous novelist who lifted the lid off a New England town...Grace Metalious, an unpretentious housewife from the wrong side of the tracks, had written an explosive bestseller. From a ramshackle cottage in a small New England milltown, she zoomed to national stardom. She met movie stars, famous writers, and the hangers-on who gravitate to those who achieve sudden wealth. She partied with the glamorous; she traveled; always a generous friend, she entertained lavishly. It was a Cinderella dream. But it did not last....Grace refused to be confined by the fifties' notions of a woman's place. In her struggle to find herself, she lifted the lid off sex and violence, power and powerlessness, truth and hypocrisy, and became known as the Pandora in Blue Jeans. 'If I'm a lousy writer,' she said, 'then an awful lot of people have got lousy taste.'...Emily Toth has given us a complete and sympathetic portrait of Grace: the idealistic young scribbler, the partier, the sometimes reluctant wife and mother. Tracing the television shows, the films, the Peyton Place sequels and later novels, Toth shows Grace plagued by periods of self-doubt and loneliness, striving desperately and feeling pressured to create another 'hit.'"
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Before All Dignity Is Lost : The Living and Dying of an AIDS Victim
The life of a young man after graduating college, his battle with AIDS, and his friendship with a mentor and former professor, Norman Beaupré, as read through a chronological series of personal letters. From the author's website: "What would you do if you suddenly discovered you had AIDS? What would you think? 'Before All Dignity Is Lost' is the epistolary story of a young man who suffers through the ignominy of AIDS and dies from it at age 34. This is a true story based on real letters." -
Kerouac: A Biography
Seminal biography of native of Lowell, Massachusetts, Franco American, novelist, and poet, Jack Kerouac. Republished in 1994. Written by Ann Charters, who worked with Kerouac during the final three years of his life. In her writing of this book, Charters was assisted by Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and other contemporary artists close to Kerouac and essential to the Beat Movement in art, literature, and broader Americana. -
I Had a Father: A Post-Modern Autobiography
From Library Journal: "This unusual memoir focuses on the author's attempt to understand his dead father. Blaise, a prize-winning novelist and director of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program, combines fragments of memories, mostly concerned with locations, as he circles around the story of his difficult, much-married father, a French Canadian/American traveling salesman." -
Jack Kérouac : Essai-Poulet / A Chicken Essay
Un livre comme essai sur les rélations entre la vie et la littérature de Jack Kerouac - son écriture et son héritage - avec des réactions de l'auteur. -
Use My Name: Jack Kerouac's Forgotten Families
From ECW Press: "With this fascinating new book, Jim Jones debunks many of the myths surrounding the life and times of Jack Kerouac. Jones concentrates on those whose lives were most affected by Kerouac: daughter Jan Kerouac, wives Edie Parker, Joan Haverty, and Stella Sampas, as well as nephew Paul Blake Jr. 'Use My Name: Jack Kerouac's Forgotten Families' takes its title from advice given to Jan during her second and final meeting with Jack, who encouraged her to profit from the surname she shared with the famous author of 'On the Road.' Sadly, not one of these individuals so closely tied to Kerouac seems to have benefited from the connection, as Jones discovers in his in-depth interview with Jan. She discusses at length her 15 months as a prostitute, her own divorces, her hospitalization, and her life as an author, including a wild European book tour for [her novel] 'Baby Driver.' Although Kerouac is one of the most 'biographied' American writers of our time, Jones offers a new perspective on the King of the Beats and his generation, one in which formerly marginalized figures in the Kerouac storyparticularly womenbecome strong, central characters. He also exposes the cut-throat wheeling and dealing that has plagued the Kerouac estate and that continues today as the various players do battle over the legacy of one of the counterculture's biggest idols." -
Visions of Kerouac
Biography of Jack Kerouac published in his hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts.
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It Stops with Me : Memoir of a Canuck Girl
From Touch Art Books: "This story with its bold contrasts of good and bad, love and hate, inextricably connected, is situated in the context of the bigger history of French Canadian and Indian people amid mainstream American culture from the mid 1950s to the edge of the 21st century....Touchette’s story is rooted deep in the past in her parents', grandparents', and great-grandparents' experiences. Rooted in a changing, dying culture, and a community with a complex history, her mixed heritage held good and bad. With coal black eyes, Indian hair, French language, and woman-centered culture, she inherited a legacy of oppression and denial overshadowed by the powerful influence of the Catholic Church. But Touchette chose a different legacy for her children and the seven generations to follow that connected her to 5000 years of Jewish traditions, and milleniums of Native American spirituality." Also from Touch Art Books: "A visionary American painter examines an eventful life that spans fifty years, several cultures -- French Canadian, Indian and Jewish, and diverse places -- from Wellesley College, New York's Lower East Side, and Soho, to Indian Country, Navajo Nation and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Stories of families -- their agony and blessings, shame and pride, destruction and creation -- with brilliant illustrations, demonstrate the depth and resiliency of the human spirit, and make the personal, universal. Original." -
The Girl from Peyton Place: A Biography of Grace Metalious
A biography of the New Hampshire author, Grace Metalious, whose works include "Peyton Place," "The Tight White Collar," and "No Adam in Eden."
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Disobedient Ancestors
Personal and historical essay weaving a son's reflections on his Québec-born, rebellious, itinerant father through the changing shape of Catholicism in New France, Lower Canada, and Québec into the 21st century. The persistent grip of a longtime North American family's roots. His father's formative youth and later hatred of clergy, their tenuous relationship, the power of cultural narrative, and the shapes that one's departing quests from them can take. -
Brewing for Baxter
Profile on Maine engineer and brewer, Michael LaCharite. The founder of Portland, Maine's Casco Bay Brewing company, LaCharite was sought out to help develop the varieties of beer now produced by Lewiston, Maine's Baxter Brewing. LaCharite cites a family tradition of home-brewing as one of the foundations for his passion and talents. -
The Position of Workers in a Textile Community : Fall River in the Early 1880s
Textile workers in post-Civil-War-era Fall River, Massachusetts. The rapid economic and demographic growth of a city that would become New England's largest center for manufacturing. Immigrant worker diversity and some realities of their Fall River labor and living conditions. Industrial development's impact on the worker. Fall River's national reputation as being a "turbulent" environment for laborers, and a history of the business procedures and philosophies that point to this (238). Commentary on the 1881 study of the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics with specific consideration for the lives of laborers in Fall River.Tags Alcohol and Drugs, Business and Economics, Emigration and Immigration, English Americans, Fall River MA, Flint Village MA, Irish Americans, Labor History, Lawrence MA, Lowell MA, Massachusetts, Mechanicsville MA, Mills and Mill Work, New Bedford MA, Nonfiction, Nonfiction -- History -- Labor and Social, Quequechan River Valley -
Country Eastern
Documentary piece written on the country music culture of bottle clubs in Maine, with a focus on Harmony Hall in North Yarmouth. Features photos and story of a Maine country music band, as well as some profiles and interviews with other Mainers who find joy in the music and dancing at Maine bottle clubs.Tags Alcohol and Drugs, Alton ME, Bethel ME, Biddeford ME, Bucksport ME, Chelsea ME, Community: Customs and Social Life, Cumberland Mills ME, Friendship ME, Harrison ME, Lewiston ME, Limington ME, Maine, Mechanic Falls ME, Music, Nobleboro ME, Nonfiction, Nonfiction -- History -- Documentary, North Yarmouth ME, Portland ME, Québec, Saco ME, Skowhegan ME, South Waldoboro ME, Standish ME, Steep Falls ME -
Understanding the French Canadians of Lewiston, 1860-1900 : An Alternate Framework
Essay on the extra-cultural forces that helped to shape the French Canadian immigrant community of Lewiston, Maine. Class and ethnicity among the peoples of urban Lewiston in the second half of the 19th century. The impact of the industrial revolution on Lewiston's population and scale. The uniqueness of the French Canadian migration to Lewiston relative to other American cities. Historical comparisons between the periods of 1860-1880 and 1880-1900 regarding community, class, and business in that city. Featured in an issue of the Maine Historical Society Quarterly entitled, "Franco-Americans in Maine."Tags Alcohol and Drugs, Auburn ME, Business and Economics, Community: Customs and Social Life, Demography, Education, Emigration and Immigration, Ethnicity and Collective Identity, Family, Irish Americans, Journalism, Labor History, Lewiston ME, Maine, Mills and Mill Work, Nonfiction, Nonfiction -- History -- Labor and Social, Nonfiction -- History -- Local, Old Town ME, Québec, Religion, Social History, Travel and Movement, Violence, Waterville ME -
A memorial for Kerouac
Article part 2 of 2 on the recent Lowell, Massachusetts, city council vote to commemorate author Jack Kerouac with a park bearing his name. Full article title includes the line: "After years of indifference, Lowell votes to build a park." Charts Kerouac's sudden rise to fame with the publication of his novel, "On the Road." His ensuing lifestyle in the public eye, his behaviors scrutinized by many in Lowell. Kerouac's life and works as an affront to the popular values of his working-class hometown, and his apparent abandonment by fellow Lowellians. The recent apparent change in attitude toward Kerouac, though with some evidence of familiar resistance. -
In search of the real Kerouac
Review of the documentary film on Jack Kerouac, entitled, "Whatever Happened to Kerouac?" (Richard Lerner and Lewis McAdam, 1987). Film is a biographical portrait of the Lowell, Massachusetts, writer, featuring interviews with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs, among others. Article written on the occasion of the film's showing in Somerville, Massachusetts. -
Kerouac's forgettable Montreal road trip
Article recognizing the brief hype surrounding the 50th anniversary of the publication of Jack Kerouac's most famous novel, "On the Road." Discusses a much less explored event in Kerouac's life when, in 1967, the author appeared on the Montreal talk show "Sel de la Semaine." The Montreal crowd's reaction to hearing Kerouac speaking in a "rural and unlearned and folkloric" French. Other characteristics of the Lowell, Massachusetts native that the author here argues may be due to Kerouac's Québecois heritage. -
Big Liquor Seizures in Bennington, Vermont
Article on multiple criminal alcohol seizures from a number of Vermont social clubs in the 1910s. -
The First Franco-Americans : New England Life Histories from the Federal Writers' Project, 1938-1939
Selective reprinting of Franco American oral interviews from the late 1930s' Federal Writers' Project. Brief historical introductions to Manchester NH, Old Town ME, Woonsocket RI, and Barre VT, followed by the interviews with workers that took place in those cities. Rare voices from Franco American communities of this time period, in the aftermath of the Great Depression. A publication in the social and oral history traditions of Ann Banks's "First-Person America" and Studs Terkel's "Hard Work."Tags Acadians, Acculturation and Assimilation, Alcohol and Drugs, Barre VT, Community: Customs and Social Life, Death and Disaster, Ethnicity and Collective Identity, Family, Folklore, Forestry, Gender and Sexuality, Government and Politics, Illness, Labor History, Language and Linguistics, Manchester NH, Mills and Mill Work, New England, Nonfiction, Nonfiction -- History -- Labor and Social, Nonfiction -- Immigration, Old Town ME, Personal History: Biography and Oral History, Religion, Social History, Sports and Leisure, Stonecutting, Woonsocket RI -
Eight Hours for What We Will : Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920
Study of the off-hours lives of working-class people in the industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts. Workers' hobbies, their hangouts, and the impact of their leisure on the workplace and politics in the immigration era. A fresh social history of working-class people not confined to the work space. From Cambridge University Press: "In the first comprehensive study of American working-class recreation, Professor Rosenzweig takes us to the saloons, the ethnic and church picnics, the parks and playgrounds, the amusement parks, and the movie houses where industrial workers spent their leisure hours. Focusing on the city of Worcester, Massachusetts, he describes the profound changes that popular leisure underwent. Explaining what these pastimes and amusements tell us about the nature of working-class culture and class relations in this era, he demonstrates that in order fully to understand the working class experience it is necessary to explore the realm of leisure. For what workers did in the corner saloon, the neighborhood park, the fraternal lodge hall, the amusement park, and the nickelodeon had a good deal of bearing on what happened inside the factories, the union halls, and the voting booths of America's industrial communities." -
Nos histoires de l'Iêle : History and Memories of French Island, Old Town, Maine
A chronicling of French Island ("Treat and Webster Island"), Old Town, Maine, from 1800 to the late 20th century. Includes photos, selections from interviews and oral histories, historical synopses, and stories from the French Island community. A uniquely powerful piece from a section of Old Town in cultural transition. Compiled and written by a committee of persons representative of the Island at the end of the 20th century.Tags Acculturation and Assimilation, Alcohol and Drugs, Business and Economics, Community: Customs and Social Life, Education, Emigration and Immigration, Farming and Agriculture, French Island ME, Labor History, Milford ME, Mills and Mill Work, Nonfiction, Nonfiction -- History -- Documentary, Nonfiction -- History -- Local, Old Town ME, Orono ME, Penobscot River Valley, Religion, Sports and Leisure -
Qui perd sa langue perd sa foi, qui perd sa foi perd sa langue
Presentation made at St. John's Episcopal Church in Bangor, Maine, by a former Ph. D. candidate in Canadian-American history at the University of Maine, Orono, Maine. The presentation is, as the author calls it, a "spiritual autobiography," exploring the role of religion and spirituality in the author's life and how such things intertwined with her Franco American heritage, her alcoholism, and her sexuality. -
Une certaine Amérique aè lire : la beat generation et la littérature québécoise
Du texte: "Cette thièse porte sur l'inscription de la Beat Generation dans la littérature québécoise. J'y analyse non pas la réception de ce mouvement au Québec lors de son émergence dans les années 1950, mais bien sa réappropriation postérieure. II faut pour lire ce corpus québécois contemporain une connaissance sans faille de celui de la Beat Generation et des travaux sur le mouvement et ses écrivains. Dans cette optique, je trace d'entrée de jeu les grandes lignes de l'histoire personnelle et de l'approche littéraire des principaux auteurs de la Beat Generation, qui n'ont jamais rédige de manifeste. Par la suite, je prociède a une analyse du corpus québécois a partir de thièmes privilégies du mouvement, d'inscriptions textuelles, de citations et de références explicites ou masquées dans des noms de personnages ou de lieux. J'établis aussi les filiations entre les personnages d'un corpus et de l'autre. Il s'agit donc, toujours en restant prés des textes, d'analyser la présence « Beat» au sein du corpus québécois." -
An Exploration into the Health and Illness Beliefs of a Franco-American Community : The Description of a Clinical Reality
From the author: "The purpose of this thesis was to explore and describe the health and illness beliefs of a Franco-American community in Northern Maine. A major assumption of this study was that culture impacts all aspects of life and therefore determines how we define health and illness. The ethnographic inquiry provided an exhaustive description of health and illness experiences of selected members within the community and, through contextual analysis, allowed inductive identification of patterns within the group. Major themes emerged in the areas of health beliefs (functional and subjective health definitions), health behaviors (approach and avoidance behaviors), illness beliefs (susceptibilities and vulnerabilities), illness behaviors (home-care and cues to action) and clinical reality. The subsequent ethnographic record provided a rich description of the health and illness beliefs of a Franco-American community and allowed a glimpse into the clinical reality shared by its members."Tags Alcohol and Drugs, Canada, Community: Customs and Social Life, Death and Disaster, Ethnicity and Collective Identity, Folklore, Food, French Island ME, German Americans, Health and Wellness, Indian Island ME, Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Nonfiction, Nonfiction -- Science and Medicine, Nonfiction -- Social Sciences, Old Town ME, Pownal ME, Religion -
The Back Roads
Short story narrating Maxime's detours: from a rare West Coast business trip out of Maine to visit his sister and her partner in San Francisco; from routes of his present to certain back roads of memory. -
The Angel on the Roof
Collection of previously published and some uncollected short stories, from 1975 to 2000. From the New England-native author of several novels including "Cloudsplitter" and "Continental Drift." Accounts of breaking laws in Katonga, playing hockey in Catamount, moving furniture in Florida hotels, dodging family matters over the telephone, and accidental death. Many stories set in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. -
Floor Models
Short short fiction piece of a Lewiston, Maine grandmother, mother, and daughter; family stories whose narrator captures family maladies and how they extend across time. Published for the web on New England Review, NER Digital. -
Vandal Love
Novel tracing a century of Québec's Hervé family in the United States and Canada, and the genetic conditions that have turned its offspring "alternately [into] brutes or runts" (4). Jude the emigrant boxer in 1960s Georgia and Louisiana, and Isa, his abandoned daughter, into Virginia and Maine. Georgianne and the runt orphaned grandchild, François, from Québec across the Canadian provinces in the middle 20th century; Harvey, his son, and the parental separation that removes one from the other. Harvey's personal spiritual quest across the American Southwest. The tragedy and genealogical loops that unify the characters and their movements through time across North America. -
Woman in a Bar
Short story about a friend who, always when visiting the narrator, is eager to find a bar. From the author of the poetry collections, "Awake," "What We Carry," "Smoke," and "Facts About the Moon." Appears in the online literary magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly. -
Husbands and Lovers
Poem from a Lisbon, Maine writer and founder of poetry's BOA Editions. Dedicated to David Plante. Featured in the New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly published by Middlebury College. Republished posthumously in a collection of A. Poulin, Jr's works, "Selected Poems" (2001). -
The Tent in the Wind
Short story that finds James Briggs in London receiving a New York phone call in the nighttime from the mother of his ex-wife, Joanna, an expatriate in London, alerting him to Joanna's attempt at suicide across town. -
Fatherless and Dispossessed : Grace Metalious as a French‐Canadian Writer
Article profiling Manchester, New Hampshire native writer, Grace (de Repentigny) Metalious. Summary and analysis of her best-selling scandalous novel, "Peyton Place," her reportedly favorite novel, "The Tight White Collar," and her final work, "No Adam in Eden." The autobiographical turn of Metalious's writing and the elements of her personal and family lives that shaped her fiction. Featured in an edition of the Journal of Popular Culture entitled, "Canadian Women Writers." -
Letourneau's Used Auto Parts
The second in a collection of novels by this North Parsonsfield, Maine author. Set in the fictional, rural Maine town of Egypt. A series of vignettes centered around Big Lucien Letourneau, his family, and the other hardscrabble characters in their rural community. Letourneau's auto parts business and all the quirks, love, and violence between the people in his salvage yard/shantytown known as "Miracle City." -
Memory Babe : A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac
Biography of Lowell, Massachusetts native, poet, and author, Jack Kerouac, widely known as a founding participant in the 20th century USA literary culture that came to be called the "Beat Movement," or the "Beat Generation." Kerouac's life from birth to early death; from Lowell, to New York, to San Francisco, to Denver, to Tampa and St. Petersburg, and back again. The cultural, interpersonal, and geographic contexts for his poetry and writings of autobiographical fiction. Anecdotes and aspects of his public and private lives, and where these lives changed and converged. Well-known for the biographer's extensive use of archival materials and interviews with Kerouac's contemporaries. -
The Buried City
Short story that finds George returned to his family's New England home and to Hunter, his brother, as they struggle through the emotional aftermath of their mother's funeral. An early work from Providence, Rhode Island-native author of "The Country," "The Family," and the memoir, "American Ghosts." -
The Tent in the Wind
Short story that finds James Briggs in London receiving a New York phone call in the nighttime from the mother of his ex-wife, Joanna, an expatriate in London, alerting him to Joanna's attempt at suicide across town. -
Husbands and Lovers
Poem from a Lisbon, Maine writer and founder of poetry's BOA Editions. Dedicated to David Plante. Featured in the New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly published by Middlebury College. Republished posthumously in a collection of A. Poulin, Jr's works, "Selected Poems" (2001) -
Woman in a Bar
Short story about a friend who, always when visiting the narrator, is eager to find a bar. From the author of the poetry collections, "Awake," "What We Carry," "Smoke," and "Facts About the Moon." Appears in the online literary magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly. -
The Voice Is All : The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac
Biographical portrait of Jack Kerouac, with uniquely heavy emphasis on the suggested influence of his French Canadian heritage - and the French language - on the style and content of his creative works. Written by a Kerouac contemporary and former friend. Covers from Kerouac's early life and those of his parents, to 1951, shortly after the publication of his first novel, The Town and the City. -
Disobedient Ancestors
Personal and historical essay weaving a son's reflections on his Québec-born, rebellious, itinerant father through the changing shape of Catholicism in New France, Lower Canada, and Québec into the 21st century. The persistent grip of a longtime North American family's roots. His father's formative youth and later hatred of clergy, their tenuous relationship, the power of cultural narrative, and the shapes that one's departing quests from them can take. -
Vandal Love
Novel tracing a century of Québec's Hervé family in the United States and Canada, and the genetic conditions that have turned its offspring "alternately [into] brutes or runts" (4). Jude the emigrant boxer in 1960s Georgia and Louisiana, and Isa, his abandoned daughter, into Virginia and Maine. Georgianne and the runt orphaned grandchild, François, from Québec across the Canadian provinces in the middle 20th century; Harvey, his son, and the parental separation that removes one from the other. Harvey's personal spiritual quest across the American Southwest. The tragedy and genealogical loops that unify the characters and their movements through time across North America. -
Floor Models
Short short fiction piece of a Lewiston, Maine grandmother, mother, and daughter; family stories whose narrator captures family maladies and how they extend across time. Published for the web on New England Review, NER Digital. -
The Angel on the Roof
Collection of previously published and some uncollected short stories, from 1975 to 2000. From the New England-native author of several novels including "Cloudsplitter" and "Continental Drift." Accounts of breaking laws in Katonga, playing hockey in Catamount, moving furniture in Florida hotels, dodging family matters over the telephone, and accidental death. Many stories set in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. -
The Back Roads
Short story narrating Maxime's detours: from a rare West Coast business trip out of Maine to visit his sister and her partner in San Francisco; from routes of his present to certain back roads of memory.