Working Waterfront

Revisiting N. C. Wyeth

By Carl Little For a couple of months, the Portland Museum of Art is stealing some of the Farnsworth Art Museum’s Wyeth thunder. “N. C. Wyeth: New Perspectives” (through Jan. 12) offers 46 paintings and one drawing by the granddaddy who launched the family art dynasty at the turn of… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

New collection splits open from-away, native identities

North by Northeast: New Short Fiction by Writers from Maine and New England Agnes Bushell, editor/Littoral Books, Portland, 2019 Review by Dana Wilde In the 1980s, a minor civil war was waged in Maine’s literary subculture over who, exactly, was eligible for the label “Maine writer.” As I recall there… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Poems of perception and place

Quarry: The Collected Poems of Peter Kilgore -- North Country Press, 2019 Review by Carl Little Over the last half century or so a number of major American practitioners of innovative verse have found a home and/or muse in Maine. The list includes George Oppen, Donald Wellman, Sylvester Pollet, Denise Levertov, Theodore… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Pulling back Bar Harbor’s shingled curtain

Bar Harbor Babylon//Dan and Leslie Landrigan Review by Tom Walsh So, this summer's “beach book” wound up being a buzz kill? Sorry. You could have spiced up your summer in the sun with a copy of Bar Harbor Babylon, a historic anthology of killers, thieves, scammers, and seriously rich families involved in the… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Remembering the sedition trial of Scott Nearing

By Jacqueline Weaver Scott Nearing may be best known in coastal Maine as an inspiration in the back to the land movement. He and his wife Helen and their book Living the Good Life are cited by hundreds—if not thousands—who came to Maine in the early 1970s, seeking a more simple, rural… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

An eye that sees an island sharply, wryly

As the Crow Flies By Phil Crossman Review by Tina Cohen A new collection of essays by Vinalhaven’s Phil Crossman features on its cover a bird’s eye view of the island’s Carver’s Harbor, with a bird whose eye is appropriately airborne. That bird is a crow, and not incidentally, the nickname… SEE MORE

A glass creation that suggests algae and phytoplankton by Krisanne Baker

Working Waterfront

How art can make science understandable

By Stephanie Bouchard Ecological artist Krisanne Baker of Waldoboro focuses much of her art work on water, so she spends a lot of time in and around it, but one night a couple of years ago really blew her away. She’d been working in a hot glassblowing studio. When she… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Lobstering women: Heroic haulers of traps

By Carl Little The first painting in Susan Tobey White’s exhibition “Lobstering Women of Maine” at the Penobscot Marine Museum in Searsport is a tour-de-force: a woman wearing an orange Grundéns bib dumps a crate of herring into holding bins. The fish form a kind of wriggling waterfall as the red-haired… SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

On the record with… Ben Fowlie of the Camden International Film Festival

By Ari Snider Ben Fowlie is the executive and artistic director of the Points North Institute and the cofounder of the Camden International Film Festival (CIFF), which is entering its 15th year. He spoke with The Working Waterfront about the festival, documentary filmmaking, and how it fits into life in Midcoast Maine. … SEE MORE

Working Waterfront

Climate change drives writer from skeptic to alarmist

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming David Wallace-Wells; Tim Duggan Books, New York, 2019 Reviewed by Dana Wilde The question about climate change is not whether it’s happening, but how severe the catastrophe is going to be. This is the central theme of David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, a… SEE MORE