The Maine Thing
Little Stories of Life and Writing in Maine
As Steven Covey put it, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”
As an identity-based coach for driven women, I love this.
And as a fiction writer, I consider it my job, as well, to acknowledge all the layers, gray areas, and misperceptions that surround any experience. To capture the whole extent of the messiness of life so that my characters and their stories feel really real.
Here you’ll find insights into how I go about doing this and what inspires me. You’ll find occasional tips on craft, book recommendations, and little stories of life in Maine.
You’ll also find insights into how I use my understanding of character and story to transform my clients’ lives—and what it takes and what it means to create a purpose-fueled, intention-based life, one story, one page, one ordinary day at a time.
AUTHOR Q&A - THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON
Where did you get the idea for this novel?
As a person who’s lived all my life in small towns, I started wondering whether it would be possible to keep a significant secret across a long lifetime, and then what the consequences would be once that secret came out.
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON - THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK
Would it be possible to live for decades in a small town while keeping the secrets and stories of your past hidden? And what would happen once those secrets came out? THE HIDDEN LIFE OF CECILY LARSON began in my mind with these questions.
I GAVE MY HEART TO KNOW THIS - THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK
When I moved to the Lake Superior port city of Superior, Wisconsin, in 2002, after having lived most of my life in landlocked sections of the upper Midwest, I found myself captivated by the landscape of the harbor, the massive docks and ships that continue their work amid ghostly remnants of a more prosperous past. Even as thousand-foot “lakers” and slightly smaller “salties” (oceangoing vessels) bring and pick up cargoes from the ore, coal, grain, and other docks in Superior and her neighboring city of Duluth, Minnesota, around the rusted old grain elevators, warehouses, and docks hovers a sense of opportunities lost, of dust and decay, loneliness and desolation.
KEEPING THE HOUSE - THE STORY BEHIND THE BOOK
The first seeds of KEEPING THE HOUSE were planted when I was a junior in college and I got a summer internship at a local historical society in Ephraim, Wisconsin, a stunningly beautiful little town on the shores of Green Bay in Door County. There, I began to write a novel, the story of a family called the Mickelsons who had lost a son in World War I. It was 1919, and the Mickelsons came to their summer home in “Stone Harbor, Wisconsin” for the first summer after the war and tried to pretend nothing had happened. I was interested in the process of grieving a violent death, as well as in the workings of denial.