What inspired you to set the book on the midcoast of Maine?
Damariscotta is where I'm from, it's where I grew up, and it's a place that I was always ready to get away from when I was growing up. I sort of loved where I was from, and I had a good family and all that, but I was the only child on a dirt road with no cable television in this very small town. Damariscotta has if you include a town next to it, which we always do in the census. The population is like two thousand. It's really, really small, and I was looking to get away from it, so I never thought I wanted to get back to it, even in literature. However, I also felt like it was an interesting place to be from, and I always got the sense when I was out of the state that people were kind of intrigued. It's probably the same for people from Alaska. It's like, "Wow! You got out of the State" you know, I don't meet that many people from where you're from. They sort of wanted to know more about it and what it was really like after the summer people left. A lot of people have been to Maine, but only on vacation, and I found myself sort of explaining what it was like to be from there quite a bit.
One of the things that's interesting about it is that you do have people like my family that have moved from elsewhere for a kind of like a slower, more rustic pace of living, and you know. It's so beautiful, and they want to be there, and there's that attraction to the state. But then there are also the folks who have been there for generations and generations, the true Mainers, as they would think of themselves as I think of them too. A lot of them working class, having come from many generations of you know, might be lobsterman or doing other hard work and labor. But all of us went to school in the same place; it was kind of side by side. So not only is it a kind of beautiful rustic place, with some intrigue with the fog and all the nooks and crannies on the coast, you have all these class issues that I was really interested in writing about. You've got the kind of the summer folks, the year-rounders, but who are kind of from away, and then the really true Mainers, like the ones that have been there for a very long time.
What came first, the setting or the plot?
I probably say setting first, character second, plot, third which is often how I approach writing. I was like, I know I want to write something set here. It's hard for me to pull the characters away from the setting because the characters feel so specific to the midcoast where I'm from. So it all kind of came together at the same time. I had worked at this lobster pound, basically like a place where I unloaded lobster boats onto the docks, and I had worked with young people like myself who were on track to becoming a lobster man. I kind of just always wondered, nobody specifically, but what would someone like that have to do to kind of jump the track, not saying one track is better than the other, but I went off to college, and, you know, did all these things and traveled. I always thought, how would they try and make that leap in class? What would they have to do, starting late? So the idea of The Midcoast kind of came from that specific setting, but also the type of people that populate that setting.
Do you have any personal connections or experiences with some other places that you mentioned in The Midcoast?
Pretty much every place that I mentioned in the book is a place that I've been to or spent a fair amount of time in. Part of that comes from writing this story in New York, then Boston, but actually rarely in Maine. It meant just calling on what was familiar and what I knew really well. You could call that lazy or just call it writing what you know. In my case, you know I grew up on the Damariscotta River, close to Damariscotta, so it was very easy to imagine a house, not like mine, but kind of in the same location. I'd seen some of those houses from the river just like Andrew, the narrator, has. I have been to King Eider's a bunch of times. That's one of the places that we go to when I'm home, and it's been around for a long time at this point. The Schooner Landing, which I've sort of refashioned as The Schooner owned by the character Steph, but that's kind of the local hang, and it's actually sort of a case of life imitating art; it has new ownership. I don't know if it was ever sort of divey, but it's sort of modernized it in certain ways. That was always a place that if you wanted it, you'd see all walks of life because the one thing that everybody has in common is if they need a drink, they are going to the one place that's open at 10 pm, Thursday night or whatever it is. I sort of have the same relationship with Wiscasset that Steph has in a way which is like it's always the town you drive through, and you see the big, long line at Red's Eats, and you think, "Who are all these people? Where do they all come from to get in this line at Red's Eats."
One scene takes place at Bates College, which is a Lewiston, and I visited a friend there a long, long time ago. So that's one place where I actually did go do some research. I went back up there to make sure I had the layout right and could imagine what the lacrosse stadium looked like, what the campus looked like, and then what it looked like just off campus.
This is an interesting conversation about setting; I find I can imagine characters, I can imagine plot, just sort of conjure it out of nothing. It's very hard for me to write about a place that I've never been to. For example, I haven't spent a whole lot of time in Idaho. I would really struggle to make that world even in my mind, let alone the page, because I haven't been there. It's just helpful to write about these places that I've been to.
Is there one place you’d want a reader to visit in Damariscotta or the midcoast of Maine?
You know, I agree with Steph that Damariscotta is a little bit underrated, I guess, or off the beaten path. I think there are a few reasons for that. It is just off Route 1. One Route 1 goes right through a lot of towns in Maine, but it goes just around Damariscotta, so it'd be easy to miss. It also is a beautiful town, but it is not the most picturesque town. It's a very functional town, so functional that it has a parking lot right on the water. Maybe that could be seen as a drawback, but you have access to that whole peninsula. There's a lot of beauty when you look down the peninsula, everywhere from Damariscotta, south towards Pemaquid Point, where there are good lighthouses, and Pemaquid Beach, which is a beautiful little beach. You can also got South Bristol, where there's the swing bridge. You're not going to find a more scenic quarter mile of waterway than through all the fisheries in the South Bristol gut. The Damariscotta River is a beautiful place for people to cruise up and down. It's often that people don't make it all the way up there [Damariscotta], and they're more likely to go to our more famous neighbors like Camden, which is a great place. But it's going to feel a bit more touristy, a bit more crowded, a bit more expensive. Damariscotta is definitely doing its fair share of catering towards tourists now, but I still feel like it seems a little bit more like a working town than maybe some other more popular destinations in Maine.
Maine does have more coastline than California. It's got all of these nooks and crannies. It's got all these inlets and coves and islands, and they're all amazing. If you want something that's rustic and windswept but also has functional lobster fisheries and an artist haven, the island of Monhegan, which is south of Pemaquid, would be an amazing place to visit, that probably most people outside the state don't know about. The cover of The Midcoast is a house on Monhegan Island.
Do you have any favorite books that take place in Maine?
A classic, I would say Empire Falls by Richard Russo. That was a big deal book when that came out. I don't know if everybody has read it at this point. It takes place more in Central Maine as opposed to Coastal Maine. If somebody is looking for the same kind of working class, "this is the real Maine," that type of vibe you get from The Midcoast, that's a great book.
Night of the Living Rez, it's a collection of short stories by a young writer named Morgan Talty. He's a Penobscot. It's not all rez stories necessarily. They're just good short stories, but I highly recommend that one, too.
Another classic coastal Maine book is Olive Kitteridge. I feel like that is sort of required reading.