A thin note hangs in the air as the three members of the DaPonte String Quartet lower their bows. In an instant, they take to debating, passionately, how to perform a passage in a Beethoven trio they have already presented twice and will play twice more in the weeks to come. The musicians, among Maine’s most heralded performers of chamber music, are seated in the sanctuary of Freeport’s First Baptist Church, dappled by light falling through stained glass. It’s a familiar space where they have rehearsed for years, a constant during a time when much has felt unfamiliar.

It has been a trying few years for the quartet, whose original members settled in Maine in the mid-’90s after forming in Philadelphia, in 1991. Like all performing ensembles, DaPonte abruptly shut down its concert season when the pandemic arrived. Two years later, just as audiences began returning to live performances, founding member and violinist Ferdinand “Dino” Liva developed severe neuropathy in his hands and feet, leaving him, at least temporarily, unable to hold his instrument, let alone play it. Then, just as the quartet planned a drastically revised season, an even more unexpected blow fell: the ensemble’s nonprofit affiliate, Friends of the DaPonte String Quartet, announced it was terminating its relationship with the four players.

The stunning news was perhaps best conveyed in a letter to the editor by longtime fan and patron David Shipman, of China, published in the Kennebec Journal and Waterville’s Morning Sentinel, in May of 2022. The FDSQ’s executive director had recently emailed donors, Shipman wrote, promising “exciting news” about the DaPonte String Quartet’s 30th-anniversary celebration to be announced in the spring.

“Well, spring is here,” the letter went on, “and the exciting news is that FDSQ is celebrating the quartet’s 30th anniversary by firing them, changing the name of the organization to Chamber Music Maine, and taking the money that the supporters of the quartet donated . . . and proposing to use that money in ways that the donors did not intend.”

Rather than continuing to pay the four musicians their $40,000 salaries, the FDSQ board wanted instead to fund individual performances by a wider range of musicians. The quartet’s players were stunned. When the Portland Press Herald ran a story about their dismissal, it went viral among classical-music devotees. “Within two hours, we were the talk of the Juilliard faculty,” says Myles Jordan, DaPonte’s cellist and other remaining founding member. “By evening, the story was being translated into Hungarian and Japanese.”

In short order, the quartet heard from some top-flight lawyers, two of whom agreed to represent them pro bono. Brief, intense negotiations with the board followed. Two months later, the FDSQ’s entire board and executive director resigned, and the $300,000 treasury (“or almost all of it,” Jordan says) was transferred to the newly formed DaPonte String Quartet Foundation, with Shipman as chair. 

Then, just as the quartet was getting its feet back under itself, the cruelest stroke fell. Shortly after the players’ reinstatement, Liva told the group that he would be unable to return as a performer. He’d had heart surgery, and afterward, his neuropathy did not improve — there seemed no hope, he told his fellow musicians, for him to ever play at a concert level. Heading into 2023, the group’s future had never felt less certain. 

In Philadelphia, where the original DaPonte members gathered at Temple University, Liva remembers the players practicing “six or seven hours a day, every day.” The young ensemble looked up to icons like the Guarneri Quartet, which helped popularize chamber quartets in the 1960s, and the Emerson String Quartet, which formed at Juilliard, in 1976, and had multiple Grammy awards by the early ’90s. “We liked to say, ‘If you want to sound like the Emerson, you have to put in the hours they do,’” Liva recalls. “If you want to sound better, you have to put in more hours.”

The quartet took its name from Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, whose name derives from the Italian word for “bridge.” Its first concerts in Philadelphia wowed critics, earning DaPonte favorable comparisons to the long-established quartets they admired. They were too hot for the city to hold them, Jordan jokes. In 1995, they headed to Maine on a three-year residency, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, that involved playing concerts in all 16 counties, often in surprisingly humble venues. A New York Times critic, after hearing the group play in a Newcastle retirement home, wrote that it was “the equivalent of, say, the Boston Celtics playing in the high school gym.” When the residency was over, the group decided to resettle in Maine permanently. 

They’ve been delighting modest but exceptionally loyal audiences ever since. Prior to the pandemic, DaPonte averaged 30 to 35 performances a year, four different seasonal programs, in venues across the state, though primarily along the midcoast. In the early years, they played concerts and festivals outside of Maine, even touring Europe — among the more notable outings was a residency at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and Music, in Glasgow, Scotland. Until the pandemic, the quartet hosted what they called the DaPonte Institute in the summer, working intensively with newly formed, college-age ensembles, without charging tuition. Over three decades, few other classical-music organizations in Maine have had as consistent and respected a presence.

That’s why so many were shocked at their brief, turbulent dismissal moment in 2022. Confidentiality agreements prevent all parties from discussing details of the settlement or of conflicts among individuals — as Kirsten Monke, DaPonte’s violist since 2008, repeatedly reminds an animated Jordan when I interview the group at Freeport’s First Baptist. But the experience, they all agree, was traumatic. 

Violinist Lydia Forbes remembers their perplexity at the Friends of DaPonte’s stated desire to expand “its” programming. “There’s a tremendous variety of chamber groups in Maine already,” she says. “It’s not as if there’s a niche there needing to be filled.” The former board, she says, took advantage of a moment when, facing the prolonged absence of Liva, they were particularly vulnerable. For Forbes, who joined the quartet in 2005, “the fact that it went ’round the world and touched a nerve” suggests that the clash was about more than just music. “It’s about the individual and the survival of small things. Things that were meant to be small. It can’t be, ‘Bigger is better, and may your quartet grow into a symphony orchestra.’”

In their dismissal letters, according to Jordan, the members were chastised for their limited repertory, the implication being that DaPonte wasn’t playing enough contemporary music. Jordan says the former executive director told them their concerts didn’t include enough works by women and people of color. The message, he says, was, “No one wants to listen to Beethoven and Schubert anymore,” and that the group needed to broaden its focus beyond the “dead, white, European males” at the foundation of the classical repertory.

But the players defend their track record of new works: Last year, DaPonte was scheduled to record a piece it had premiered in 2018, by Grammy-winning composer Richard Danielpour, evoking a poem by the late Amy Clampitt and commissioned by Shipman, the new foundation chair. (Liva’s disability forced cancellation of the session.) A 2016 commission showcased a quartet by Dutch American composer Rocco Havelaar, a Mainer and Forbes’s ex-husband. In its Maine Bicentennial program, DaPonte included a rare transcription and arrangement of a Mi’kmaq composition, “Songs of Chief Membertou.”

Moreover, the DaPonte musicians say their former board’s criticism missed the point of why audiences continue to turn out for chamber concerts. Sure, Liva acknowledges, many programs continue to rely on 18th- and 19th-century compositions, but it doesn’t mean they’re not relevant today. Beethoven, he offers, was a politically subversive composer, tweaking the noses of the very aristocrats who commissioned his works. “He was the guy who invented the scherzo, which means ‘joke,’ that now takes the place of minuets,” Liva says. What that meant? “Royalty, the kings and dukes, no longer had something they could dance to.”

The quartet tries to offer similar nuggets of historical context and social relevance for every piece it plays — often presented in idiosyncratic program notes that Jordan riffs from during live introductions. “Something in the world has caused the composer to write that exact piece,” Liva says. “It gives a reason for why we play what we play. It’s not just a bunch of notes that sound pretty — there’s a meaning behind it.”

One might see a mild riposte to the old board in the program that the quartet-minus-one chose for this year’s spring concerts: big chamber works by dead white men Beethoven and Brahms, a string trio and a piano quartet, the latter performed with University of Southern Maine professor Laura Kargul. DaPonte played both pieces shortly after the Freeport church rehearsal, just down the street, at Meetinghouse Arts. Some 120 concertgoers turned out, exceeding, Liva says, the size of pre-pandemic, pre-dismissal audiences.

Liva’s departure, after three decades, is an emotional one.

“That beautiful sound, we’ll miss it, and his presence,” Forbes says. “Dino is a measured person, with a big heart and an understanding about people that’s very valuable in an ensemble like this one.” She and Liva have alternated first- and second-violin parts for 17 years. “Quartets are not just as good as the players’ performances,” she says. “There’s a lot more a member brings to the group.” 

“The relationship between members of a string quartet, of any quartet, is something very difficult to verbalize about,” Jordan says, “because there’s so little verbalization in the process of becoming as one with your colleagues. It comes almost as a surprise that you’ve become part of one another in a very fundamental way.” Jordan and Liva met as Temple University students, and he can feel his friend’s absence as the group plays now. “It’s almost like losing your husband or wife,” he says. “Something’s been amputated.”

More than a year since making his decision, Liva is matter-of-fact about being able to perform again. “Chances are I’ll never be able to return,” he says. He will continue to teach and conduct (among other roles, he is a USM adjunct faculty member and conducts the Portland Youth Junior Orchestra). He draws strength, he says, from the example of his wife, Gia Comolli, a composer who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1987 and continues to work at the keyboard, despite the disease’s effects.

He hasn’t left the quartet entirely, however. After creating the DaPonte String Quartet Foundation, the group decided it needed an administrator, and Liva readily accepted the role. His first major task is overseeing the selection of his own successor. Concerts this year have been devoted, in part, to auditioning violinists, one of whom will join a group whose personnel had been unchanged for 15 years. There’s been plenty of interest, some 30 serious inquiries. Several aspirants have joined a month’s worth of rehearsals, followed by performances, and Liva says a decision is expected by year’s end. 

It’s not a job for everyone. The modest pay means members generally have other incomes, and those with families may have to stretch further. The quartet practices 10 or more hours per week, and rehearsals involve seemingly endless repetition, as well as each member giving candid critiques of one-another’s playing. (Chamber quartets are notorious for spectacular breakups, and DaPonte has not been without its own moments of interpersonal drama — a few years after Forbes joined the group, both she and Jordan divorced their spouses and became romantic partners, as they remain today.)

Once DaPonte is a quartet again, there’s talk of returning to European touring and of playing with guest soloists in new venues. Liva would like to bring back the DaPonte Institute, which he sees as having a unique role in mentoring new talent. “There are plenty of other programs for young string players,” he says, “but most of them are very expensive.”

In general, the prospect of a “new” ensemble has the current members pondering the future in ways they otherwise may not have. “It’s caused me to think about the quartet beyond any of our own involvement,” Forbes says. “The DaPonte Quartet is valuable regardless of who’s in it. It’s special because of its longevity, and also because it’s independent” — that is, unaffiliated with any school or institution.

Jordan, now the group’s last remaining founding member, says he can envision a day when he too steps away. Thirty-two years is time for a lot of changes, which he hears when he listens back to the quartet’s early recordings. “It’s almost sterile in its technical focus,” he says. “Now, it’s exactly the opposite. It’s all about personal expression.” What hasn’t changed, though, going back to the days of playing retirement homes, is DaPonte’s relationship with audiences. “There’s this intimacy that really appeals to people at our concerts,” Forbes says. “They can be so close that everybody feels like they know us. It’s almost a friendship.” 

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The homemade signs taped above Jon Wallace’s computer suggest he’s prone to obsession: Learn When to Quit! and Avoid Pain!!! Get Off the Computer NOW! Wallace, however, doesn’t seem to have learned much about quitting. A retired high-school science teacher and a self-proclaimed “science nerd,” his latest preoccupation has him tracking down flecks of space dust that perpetually and imperceptibly filter down from the heavens. “See that little black dot on the white piece of paper?” he asks, sitting in his basement workshop, in Durham, which he keeps at a balmy temperature for the sake of his bug zoo (occasionally, in one of his many terrariums, something rustles or chirps). The dot he’s pointing at is about the size of a sewing pin’s head. “This,” Wallace says, “is a really big micrometeorite.”

Our solar system is full of hunks of mineral and metal, whirling around the sun like hell-bent race-car drivers circling a track. When the orbits of those small, craggy rocks intersect with a planet, they crash through the atmosphere at speeds between 25,000 and 150,000 miles per hour, burning up along the way, becoming what we call a meteor or, more commonly, a shooting star. Many meteors completely melt before they reach the ground, but the ones that make it, reduced in size from the heat, are known as meteorites. 

Meteors can be quite large — scientists have suggested that one seen blazing across Maine in 2016, its bright light visible as far away as Pennsylvania and parts of Canada, may have been five feet across when it hit the atmosphere (although even with a $20,000 reward offered by Bethel’s Maine Mineral & Gem Museum, nobody has found any part of it). Micrometeorites are meteors’ tiniest progeny, maybe the width of a few human hairs, and they’re everywhere. Tens of thousands of tons of them hit Earth every year, carrying discrete bits of information about the composition of the solar system, but hardly anyone is looking for them.

Wallace’s best guess is that, worldwide, a little more than 100 people are similarly dedicated to seeking micrometeorites. In his case, a 2017 book, In Search of Stardust, by Norwegian citizen-scientist Jon Larsen, got him hooked. Wallace made his first find in 2018, in the gutters on his home — gutters, as well as flat roofs, have become some of his favorite hunting grounds. He sorted and dried what he found, then used sieves and magnets (since space dust is heavy on metals) to further refine his piles. After that, he took pictures of his findings using microscopic photography. Still learning the ropes, he emailed the images to Larsen. “The first couple were like no, no, no, no, that’s not it,” Wallace recalls. It took him 70 hours of peering through the microscope until Larsen finally confirmed one micrometeorite. 

Since then, Wallace has swept up piles of grime from the roof of a middle school, a college athletic complex, and a Portland coffee shop, among other sites. He took out an insurance policy to cover any potential injury from his searching, mostly to assuage building owners’ concerns over liability. He’s also given talks to astronomy groups around the region, and he’s trained a handful of other Mainers to look for micrometeorites, although none of them have been overly inclined to stick with it. This fall, a display at the Maine Mineral & Gem Museum will include some of his specimens.

Recently, Wallace’s collection of micrometeorites hit 200 specimens. Under his microscope, bits of nondescript grit transform into otherworldly gemstones — shiny, opaque, deeply textured. “Every one is different,” he says. “It’s like a snowflake. Every time you find one, it’s something nobody’s ever seen before, from out there.” 

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Portland’s new Museum of Beadwork houses millions of tiny beads, but the museum’s focus, cofounder Heather Kahn says, is on the bigger picture: how people have used the colorful little adornments across time and across cultures. Since 2019, Kahn, who co-owns Caravan Beads, next door, has been working to open the museum with archaeologist and head curator Kristina Skillin, who studies modern and historic beads. They’ve assembled a collection that includes sculptures, tapestries, clothing, jewelry, and more, made by historic and contemporary bead workers from around the world. “We hope visitors will realize that bead work is not merely a craft,” Kahn says, “but an art form.”

From left: A beaded urn. Photo by Howell, Ltd. for Caravan Beads; A grasshopper by Melanie Chouinard. Photo by Jeff Witkavitch

The Museum of Beadwork is open Fridays and Saturdays. Tickets cost $15 for adults, $10 for children and seniors. 915 Forest Ave., Portland. 207-370-7457.

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A couple years ago, Alison Hildreth was standing on a stepladder in her Portland studio, working on the top portion of an enormous painting, when she miscalculated which step she was on. When she landed, the back of her head smacked against the floor. Now 89, she remembers lying there a while, seeing stars and thinking about the effectiveness of her Apple Watch, which asked her if she was okay but offered no solutions when she replied that she didn’t know. Eventually, she got up and walked to the studio space next door, where her neighbor happened to have a bag of frozen peas. “I put the peas on my head, put on a hat to keep it there,” Hildreth says, “and I got back to work.” Did the incident deter her from using stepladders? She laughs, then tells me it did not.

Hildreth has been making art for as long as she can remember. When she was nine, during the Second World War, her parents moved to Falmouth, and she set up a studio in her bedroom closet, where she made tiny oil paintings and poured molten lead into molds for toy soldiers, building miniature armies. It was a time, she remembers, when she felt surrounded by evidence of the war: nets across Casco Bay to keep out enemy submarines, 16-foot battleship guns on Peaks Island, nighttime drivers blacking out the tops of their headlights so they couldn’t be seen by aircraft. “How do you process all of this?” she asked me this summer. She was sitting, in a rare moment of stillness, on a bench behind a gallery in downtown Vinalhaven, where she’s been coming with her family since the 1960s. “It’s a scary world,” she said, “and we are lucky to be artists, because it’s a way of understanding things.” 

This has, more or less, been her trajectory since her toy-soldier days: processing the world around her — in all its beauty and danger, micro and macro — through art. She devours books, magazines, and news of all kinds. She was late picking me up from the ferry because her head was buried in the latest Sally Rooney novel. Her Vinalhaven studio is cluttered with volumes on nature and astronomy, along with books of maps. The drawings pinned to the walls — alongside notes from her granddaughter, addressed to “Wooly,” which is what friends and family call her — are sparse on color and influenced by cartography, elegant patterns of lines and cells that thread the needle between representation and abstraction. They evoke, in Hildreth’s unpretentious telling, the movement of migrants, fortified cities, the destruction of ancient libraries, rivers turning black with ink from the pages of discarded books, bee-communication techniques, and patterns of trails formed by networks of ants.  

After a long phase during which she depicted almost nothing but bats — etchings, paintings, and blown-glass sculptures of the creatures that used to fly from her Vinalhaven barn in huge swarms — she more recently turned her attention to the cosmos. Her giant astronomical paintings, inspired by images from NASA’s Webb telescope, are on display this fall at Rockland’s Center for Maine Contemporary Art. It’s one of three contemporaneous solo shows, which also include an exhibition of her drawings at Vinalhaven’s New Era Gallery and a retrospective at Portland’s Speedwell Projects. 

It has all felt “overwhelming and terrifying,” she said, like putting your child out into the world to be judged. And it is happening, she cracked, “because I’m so ancient.” But as Hildreth and I careened down bumpy dirt roads in her beat-up Subaru Outback, she seemed anything but. As we passed by one of Vinalhaven’s quarries, she waved at it and said, “My family swims there. Wimps that they are. I’m the only one who still swims in the ocean.” 

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It’s no spoiler to say that 2020 was tough on everyone, including Maine governor Janet Mills, the central figure in a new history, In Other Words, Leadership: How a Young Mother’s Weekly Letters to Her Governor Helped Both Women Brave the First Pandemic Year (Steerforth Press). The subtitle doesn’t quite capture what author Shannon Mullen produced, which is an exhaustive account of the impact of the pandemic on public and private life in Maine. And it’s an exhausting ride, revisiting that roller-coaster year — from the malcontent Bethel brewpub owner giving out the governor’s private phone number live on Fox News to the rule-flouting Millinocket wedding that made national headlines for spurring a deadly outbreak, among so many other peculiar, painful episodes. 

For the book, Mills gave Mullen access to her diary and to her correspondence with a prolific letter writer, Ashirah Knapp, from Temple. Knapp’s notes to the governor, about how her family was muddling through, appear intermittently, a sort of proxy for the tribulations of so many private citizens. From Mills’s diary, meanwhile, it’s her still moments amid the political tumult that really stick: swimming off a dock one night as a meteor shower streaked through the sky, or intently studying a Jamie Wyeth painting as, just outside, protesters rallied. Feeling pressure to reopen more businesses, she wrote in her diary, “Sheesh, who knew all these folks were so essential. In Italy, meanwhile, 10,000 people have died. Surreal.” Looking back on that year, is there any better word? 

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The new mural in the lobby stairwell at Curtis Memorial Public Library, in Brunswick, depicts a bear ambling through a blueberry barren, a small cub close in tow. Against the white wall, neat brushstrokes by muralist Pat Corrigan are a deep purple that looks nearly black, a shade of late-evening shadows. The scene, though an original, is meant to feel pulled from the pages of Blueberries for Sal, author and illustrator Robert McCloskey’s beloved 1948 picture book about two mothers, one human and one ursine, taking their offspring to pick wild blueberries. 

The mural was occasioned by Robert McCloskey: The Art of Wonder, an exhibition, co-produced by Portland’s Illustration Institute, of sketches and paintings that McCloskey made for his books. The library isn’t the most orthodox space for mounting a significant art show, but the mural has a sort of unifying effect, leading visitors between the ad-hoc gallery spaces that span the building’s two floors. Plus, where better to glean a fresh appreciation for McCloskey’s talent than a place you can take out copies of his books?

Downstairs is a display of preparatory sketches for McCloskey’s most well-known story, 1941’s Make Way for Ducklings, about a family of ducks trying to find a home in Boston. The sketches, on thin and increasingly fragile tracing paper, are out on loan for the final time — archivists at Kansas’s Emporia State University, where McCloskey’s editor reposited all of the works in the show, decided the Ducklings drawings couldn’t endure another trip after this one. They present, consequently, an especially rare chance to examine up close the loose, lively feel of McCloskey’s lines — the seemingly energetic way he went about making his ideas real. 

Upstairs, images from McCloskey’s Maine books decorate the walls. In 1946, the author bought a small island off Stonington, and the coast — and his young family’s life there — quickly turned into his greatest inspiration. Along one wall, Blueberries for Sal plays out through spreads of McCloskey’s playful, deep-blue line drawings. (There’s no text, but how many readers are, right now, reciting to themselves the lines “kuplink, kuplank, kuplunk”?) Seeing them this way, framed and hung, there’s no page to turn or written narrative to follow, just artwork to appreciate. It’s interesting, too, to notice how, in McCloskey’s next project, 1952’s One Morning in Maine, a slice of life that features his two daughters, Sal and Jane, his lines become a bit more flowy, his vision more expressly focused on the beauty of a place and a lifestyle.

Then, from 1957’s Time of Wonder and 1963’s Burt Dow Deep-Water Man, the exhibition offers a series of McCloskey’s paintings. None of the watercolor landscapes for Time of Wonder, about a family vacation on Penobscot Bay, would look out of place in a contemporary Maine gallery today — the distant view of a lobsterboat skirting an island at dusk, its wake glinting in the fading light, is especially memorable. Then, with Burt Dow, McCloskey seemed to find a whole other voice. Like the biblical Jonah, Dow, a fisherman with a leaky old boat, gets swallowed by a whale. To escape, he splatters paint all around the whale’s gut, a la Jackson Pollock. Indeed, many of the splashy, vibrant illustrations contain notes of abstract expressionism. And when Dow finally gets spit back out, he lands among a trippy pod of multicolor whales. 

Are we seeing the evolution of the artist or, rather, an artist attuned to how different approaches suit different stories? A little bit of both, probably, which makes it all the more surprising that McCloskey gave up creating books after Burt Dow, even though he was only in his late 40s at the time and would live another four decades. His work certainly hasn’t gone unappreciated over the years — he won two Caldecott Medals and was thrice a runner-up, and his fans, old and young, are still legion. But after visiting the exhibition in Brunswick, even his most loyal readers will surely think that his artistry deserves another look. 

On view through October 15. 23 Pleasant St., Brunswick. 207-725-5242.

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Misty Lane got used to being on the receiving end of glowering looks from passersby while running her Hillbilly Furniture and Furs stand at run-of-the-mill craft fairs. She sells animal furs, skulls, bones, and diaphonized critters — a niche that shoppers expecting pottery or needlework didn’t seem to vibe with, she says. So when Jessica Stetson, the owner of Old Soul Collective vintage shop, in Waterville, suggested last year that they start Maine’s Odd and Unusual Show, a craft fair that would only feature makers who specialize in uncommon or abnormal crafts, she jumped on board. Now, Lane, who lives in Richmond, organizes the show with her husband, Christopher Bishop. The third running of their biannual show happens on Labor Day weekend, at the Augusta Civic Center, and will host 100 vendors. “Now, instead of giving dirty looks, everyone who comes to this show is excited to see what we have,” Lane says.

Photo courtesy of Muk.Kaa.Bruh

The participating makers sell everything from crystals to Ouija boards to coffin-shaped wallets. Entertainers come too — like belly dancers and a sword swallower — and Farmington Fright Fest haunted-house designers turn a hallway in the civic center into a spooky passage. Many of the vendors, who travel from all over the country to take part, have been rejected from regular craft fairs in the past for hawking items too bizarre, Lane says. Now, she vets craftspeople who want to take part in Odd and Unusual to make sure that their specialties are weird enough. “This show lets us meet like-minded people in a comfortable setting,” Lane says. “We’re a big family — a merry band of weirdos.”

Maine’s Odd and Unusual Show takes place every Labor Day and Memorial Day weekend at the Augusta Civic Center. The next show is September 2–3. $10–$20. 76 Community Dr., Augusta.

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Pete and Alice in Maine

by Caitlin Shetterly
$29, hardcover, Harper

In the first, uneasy weeks of the COVID pandemic, the titular New Yorkers of Shetterly’s debut novel flee the city with their daughters and their cat, headed for their still-winterized summer place on the Maine coast. Alice is an angsty NPR liberal and lapsed playwright. Pete is a rakish finance bro. Just days before the virus shut down their world, Alice discovered Pete’s affair with a co-worker, and suffice to say it is a deeply lousy time for this well-to-do family to be confined together, even in their pretty house overlooking Eggemoggin Reach.

Lots of the plot points are, as they say, ripped from the headlines, beginning with the ones made in March of 2020, when a few vigilante Vinalhavenites felled a tree across the driveway of some out-of-state neighbors in order to encourage quarantine compliance. That’s how Pete and Alice are welcomed by some of the locals — with whom their relationships have mostly been clientelistic — and that pretty well sets the tone for their engagement with Mainers throughout the rest of the book. 

Pete and Alice are the sort of people who take month-long Italian vacations and speak earnestly about their portfolios. That the book wants us to empathize with them or feel any investment in their twig-brittle marriage is a big old ask. But there’s something poignant — and universally recognizable — in watching Alice grapple with the fragility of The Way Life Should Be. In an author’s note, Shetterly writes that humanizing these dismissible “privileged white people” helped her work through some of her own tricky feelings about “who gets to find sanctuary” in her home state, but one of this thoughtful, patient novel’s takeaways is that sanctuary — in Maine, New York, or elsewhere — is only ever fleeting. — B.K.

Happy Place

by Emily Henry
$27, hardcover, Berkley

Thanks to a new wave of millennial writers like Emily Henry, today’s beachy romance novels feature fewer distressed damsels finding their way into the arms of their Fabios and more brainy heroines learning to navigate their feelings and uncertain romantic circumstances. Happy Place’s protagonist, Harriet, is figuring out what happens when a couple within a circle of friends calls it quits. She’s a surgical resident happily flying solo, heading to the fictional town of Knott’s Harbor, in midcoast Maine, where her college coterie reconvenes each summer for the annual lobster festival. But she arrives to find her ex-fiancé, aspiring carpenter Wyn, has also RSVP’d. The pair never shared news of their breakup, so of course, they opt to keep up the charade of their engagement, while the internal politics of their friend group play out around them. 

During Acadia day trips, lighthouse cruises, and other Maine-y excursions, Harriet and her friends reflect on the challenges of moving from their carefree post-college years into proper adulthood and all that comes with it: career changes, ailing parents, depression, and the realization that even the best of friends can eventually grow apart. The book relies a lot on quirky miscommunication tropes — and on the allure of pine trees, gray-shingled buildings, blueberries, and the like, which may not thrill Maine readers, to whom they’re less exotic. But it’s fun to piece together the story of a thorny relationship through flashbacks, as the couple rethinks whether they have a future. Henry is praised as the queen of the rom-com novel, and happily-ever-after endings are her specialty, but this one keeps readers wondering whether Harriet and Wyn’s love is meant to be. — B. M. B.

The Way Life Should Be

by William Dameron
$29, hardcover / $17, paperback, Little A

“The goal is that we will not want to kill each other following this glorious summer of family togetherness in Maine.” So reads the intro to the house rules that Matt and Thomas post at their cottage in coastal New Guernsey, a stand-in for Wells. It’s a placid, peculiar little town, in William Dameron’s rendering, an in-between sort of place for his in-between protagonists, middle-aged and married these last five years after each coming out late in life. “They are not the dual-income gays without children who live three miles to the south in Ogunquit, and they are not the wealthy political families who summer three miles north in Kennebunkport.” 

They are also not without secrets, dramas, and insecurities. Nor is anyone else in their family, which becomes clear — sometimes hilariously and sometimes heartbreakingly — as their mixed and multigenerational clan converges for a tumultuous summer in New Guernsey. Both Matt and Thomas left marriages to women, and both have grown kids still nursing wounds from childhoods full of hurt. When they turn up, along with Matt’s declining parents, listless sister, and influencer nephew, the couple leans into a family mantra: “We make a place for everyone.” 

Loosely autobiographical (Dameron’s last book was a much-praised memoir of his own coming out), The Way Life Should Be is a sprawling, occasionally ribald, often moving meditation on how people who love each other can overcome uncertainty and shame — and on how the consistency of the places we love, like funky Maine beach towns, can set the stage for healing. As Dameron writes, “Maine — with all of her craggy, windswept cliffs, crooked pines, and rocky beaches — remains steadfast, impervious to all this human foolishness.” — B.K.

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In 1973, itinerant sailor, writer, and photographer David Lyman persuaded 150 of his fellow shutterbugs to meet at Union Hall, overlooking Rockport Harbor, for the first of what he called the Maine Photographic Workshops. Several years earlier, Lyman had been in Vietnam, documenting the work of a construction battalion for the Navy. After that, he lived in Vermont, working for a small-town paper and a ski magazine. The choice of Rockport for his new project was a bit of happenstance — he wanted to create an experience like he’d recently had at a photo workshop in Aspen, Colorado, and scouted around Camden until a local contact suggested he check out Rockport instead, describing it as “practically a ghost town.” 

That first year, Lyman worked connections to bring in a lineup of instructors that included photographers from National Geographic and Life, a New York fashion photographer, some photography professors, and one of the country’s foremost landscape photographers. His big-tent approach encouraged attendees to blur artistic boundaries in ways that are now getting a fresh look in Drawn to the Light, an exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art. “It was a really unique place, where things separated by museums and by editors could coexist,” says Anjuli Lebowitz, the museum’s associate curator of photography. “It made for lots of cross-pollination.”

Although photography had become a popular phenomenon by the mid-1800s, art critics and curators were slow to treat it as a truly creative form, rather than just a mechanical process. By the time Lyman held his inaugural workshops, though, photography had at least a few decades of serious consideration under its belt — photos were finally “something to be looked at and talked about,” says Elizabeth Greenberg, who co-curated the PMA show. She heads up academic programming at Maine Media Workshops + College, as Lyman’s Rockport project is known today. In 1979, the workshops acquired a small campus half a mile up the road from the harbor, and over the years, the curriculum expanded to include cinematography, broadcast journalism, and writing. Certificate and master’s-degree programs in visual storytelling and filmmaking joined the offerings too. In 2007, Lyman, now a longtime midcoast resident, turned everything over to the nonprofit Maine Media, which had formed to operate the school for the long run. 

At the PMA, the focus stays squarely on photographers who have made their mark over the workshops’ 50-year history. Students have come from more than 100 different countries and gone on to work as photojournalists and fine-art photographers around the world, but Greenberg and Lebowitz decided to focus specifically on faculty members who have influenced the broader field. Many of the works are pulled from the PMA’s Ernst Haas Memorial Collection, founded in 1998 in honor of an Austrian-American photojournalist and workshop instructor whose work hangs in the show. Mary Ellen Mark’s black-and-white portrait of an unhoused Los Angeles family expresses what Lebowitz describes as “incredible intimacy . . . and also duress.” Jay Maisel’s vibrant, textural “Blue Wall with Doves” evidences fresh experimentation with composition in color photography. A silvery reflection of woods in a stream is by Paul Caponigro, who taught at those very first sessions in Rockport and to this day still welcomes participants to his studio, in Cushing. 

The impressive records of so many of the instructors made selecting works a tall order. “There’s no way to have included everyone,” Greenberg says, “but I think the show really reflects the voices that have been in the conversation.” Lyman rightfully makes an appearance too, with a wintery black-and-white of Rockport Harbor. It’s a lovely image: the docks, dories, and shoreline dusted with snow, a steep bank of clouds building on the horizon. But Lyman’s greatest contribution to the field, it’s probably fair to say, was his vision to turn a little nook on the Maine coast into a hotbed of photographic creativity. 

The show runs through September 10. 7 Congress Sq., Portland. 207-775-6148.

MARK (1940–2015), GELATIN SILVER PRINT, 10 3/16 X 10 1/4 IN. PMA, MAINE. GIFT OF THE ARTIST FOR THE ERNST HAAS MEMORIAL COLLECTION, 1998.74. IMAGE COURTESY THE MARY ELLEN MARK FOUNDATION; SMITH (1947–2016), GELATIN SILVER PRINT, 10 9/16 X 13 INCHES. PMA, MAINE. GIFT OF LESLIE SMOLAN, 2022.19.1. IMAGE COURTESY LUC DEMERS. OPALENIK (1947-), GELATIN SILVER PRINT, 13 5/8 X 10 1/2 INCHES. PMA, MAINE. GIFT OF THE ARTIST IN MEMORY OF JEAN-PIERRE SUDRE FOR THE ERNST HAAS MEMORIAL COLLECTION, 1998.54.2. IMAGE COURTESY LUC DEMERS; MAISEL, (1931-), DYE TRANSFER PRINT, 14 5/8 X 21 7/8 INCHES. PMA, MAINE. GIFT OF THE ARTIST FOR THE ERNST HAAS MEMORIAL COLLECTION, 1998.73. IMAGE COURTESY LUC DEMERS.

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Once upon a time, dozens of young women wished every year to wear the Sea Goddess crown, conferred on the first night of the Maine Lobster Festival, in Rockland. Then, time wore on, and fewer and fewer sought the lobster-claw throne. Wondering whether to even continue with future coronations, organizers surveyed local high schoolers, trying to understand the waning interest. “We heard plenty of young women say, oh, that’s for the popular girls, not for me,” festival codirector Shannon Kinney says. “To them, it looked like a beauty pageant or a popularity contest. So we realized we had to make it more relevant.” This year, at the festival’s 76th running, the role of Sea Goddess is being retired, replaced by the new position of Maine Lobster Festival Delegate. Community service and knowledge of the lobstering industry remain prerequisites for contestants, who still have to answer questions for a panel of judges at a pre-festival banquet. The winner will again sit on the throne, wear a crown, and later represent the lobster fest at other regional events. No longer, though, do contestants (all in their late teens or early 20s) have to don matching dresses or be escorted by a Coast Guard or Navy man. Nor need they be women, since organizers dropped the gender requirement. Even if the new title lacks the mythic panache of Sea Goddess, it does seem to hold broader appeal: last year, the pool of contestants had dwindled to four, but in just the first few weeks of this year’s three-month application window, more aspiring Festival Delegates had already stepped forward. 

This year’s festival runs August 2 to 6. Admission is free.

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Born to a teenage single mother, Melissa Crowe lived with her grandfather and four uncles in a two-bedroom house on the edge of Presque Isle, by an abandoned airport. Winters were long, and she slept in her snowsuit on nights when the oil tank went dry. From a young age, she saw the spiraling relationship between poverty, alcoholism, and other chemical dependencies in her community. But she also found a great deal of comfort in that community: devouring red snappers at cookouts, swimming in Echo Lake, whiling away days fishing with her uncles. Today, Crowe teaches creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, but she’s often back in Maine to visit family and friends, and her Aroostook County upbringing looms large in Lo, her new book of poetry, which won the University of Iowa Press’s 2022 Iowa Poetry Prize. Crowe’s gentle lyricism takes in the landscape and the people of her youth with a mix of nostalgia and unflinching honesty, a clear-eyed homage to her roots. In one of the collection’s first poems, she writes: “Maybe home is what gets on you and can’t / be shaken loose.” 

What’s it like for you to write about Maine from afar? 

I think it becomes more mythic to me. The images of the place stay archetypal, and they repeat: snow, fish, trees, water, the woods. There’s an almost fairy-tale quality to the way I’m engaging with the landscape. But as much as the physical place is present in my work, I maybe even think of Maine as more present in the people that I write about. Every time I write about the people I grew up around, I’m writing a love poem. I’m not always saying things that other people would find complimentary, but telling the truth about people and the ways that they’re complicated, to me, feels like a kind of love — like an honoring of lives that might not otherwise wind up on the page or be understood in much detail. 

Did you work from particular childhood memories?

Rather than thinking, “These are the memories I have of Maine,” it’s like, if I’m hungry, I look in the refrigerator and try to figure out how to make a meal out of whatever’s there. So when I open the refrigerator, what’s there is the landscape of my childhood and the things that happened to me. Those things are just available to me when I’m trying to say something about the world. I’m a person who lives an almost paralyzingly reflective life. And I do think about wanting people to understand something real. I come from a different Maine than lots of people are familiar with. It’s not where the Bushes have a house. I’m interested in the way that poems like these can convey a richness or complexity about the place that otherwise people may not encounter. 

You write that, now, traveling home feels like traveling through time.

When I go back, one thing I always wind up writing about is how long it takes to get there. In one poem, “Little Deprivation in the Big North Woods,” this idea that there’s no more highway, no more Target, no more Starbucks — so many of the markers of civilization are dropping off. I always kind of feel like I’m driving backward. There’s a little bit of alarm in that when you’ve become accustomed to this other kind of life, but also a tremendous sense of relief. In Maine, I think I turn into a different person physically. I think I breathe differently. I’m somewhere that makes sense to me on a really deep level. 

And yet your formative years weren’t always easy. 

In “I Want to Tell You What Poverty Gave Me,” for instance, I insist on the real impacts of inequitably distributed resources in this culture, but the poem also says that there’s something beautiful about being able to operate in certain ways outside of capitalist imperatives, even if you don’t have a choice. What I wanted to be very careful about was never to romanticize that thing. I don’t live in poverty now. I hope I don’t ever live in poverty again, but I don’t want to unlive it. I don’t want to be a person who didn’t grow up in the way I grew up, because it lets me see things. Other people’s suffering is never hypothetical to me. If you’ve experienced violence or poverty, you generally don’t have to be convinced when other people talk about their own pain, grief, or trauma. I’m hoping I can make it, through the power of art, less hypothetical, even to people who haven’t experienced it. 

Lo ($20, University of Iowa Press) landed on bookshelves in May.

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As the 19th century came to a close, Maine was on the cusp — or precipice, depending on perspective — of becoming Vacationland. From Kennebunkport to Moosehead Lake to Bar Harbor, rail service had opened the state to travelers to an unprecedented degree. Small, sleepy Ogunquit, however, remained largely untouched. The nearest train station was at York Beach, and from there, Ogunquit was a bumpy ride — seven miles over dirt roads, via horse-drawn carriage. Perkins Cove, a mile outside town, was especially rustic: cow pasture, fallow fields, a handful of fish shacks. When the painter Charles Herbert Woodbury first laid eyes on the cove, in 1889, he pronounced it an “artist’s paradise.”

Several years later, Woodbury bought five acres on the cove’s southern shore for $400. A highly regarded artist and art teacher in Boston, he opened the Ogunquit Summer School of Drawing and Painting in 1898. As many as a hundred students would arrive every summer, for a six-week course that cost all of $40 (not counting housing, which started at $8 a week), kicking off Ogunquit’s days as a hotbed of the arts. Under Woodbury’s tutelage, the prevailing sensibility was traditional. His students focused on landscapes, painting en plein air, in the representational mode of the great impressionists. He was wary of the avant-garde. “You can’t expect the public to understand your arbitrary symbols,” he preached.

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that the founding father of the Ogunquit colony would clash with Hamilton Easter Field, who first arrived at Perkins Cove one day in 1902, stepping from a carriage right across the road from where Woodbury’s students were working at their easels. Field, a staunch proponent of individual expressiveness and experimentalism, was an influential art critic in New York. He ran with vanguard modernists like John Marin, Marguerite and William Zorach, and Alfred Stieglitz, and he was no slouch as an artist himself. His great talent, though, was his eye for talent, and thanks to a family fortune from the manufacture of chinaware, he could support up-and-comers. On Perkins Cove, Field moved into a house in plain sight of Woodbury’s school, and, in 1911, opened the Summer School of Graphic Arts.

“All of a sudden, Hamilton Easter Field comes in, buys up all this property, and starts bringing up a bunch of Brooklynites,” Ogunquit Museum of American Art associate curator Devon Zimmerman says. “It’s such a Shakespearean thing in a funny way — these two camps of different ideologies, different dispositions, clustered around this small tidal basin.”

Woodbury’s students skewed female, many coming from well-heeled Boston families. They were known locally as the “Virginal Wayfarers,” a play on Marginal Way, the path from the cove into town. They mostly hewed to their teacher’s approach. Field’s students were livelier, louder, more willing to push artistic boundaries. They took their cues from diverse influences: American folk art, Cezanne, the Fauves, cubists. Edward Hopper, George Bellows, and Marsden Hartley paid visits. The same fissures running through the New York art world had stretched all the way to Ogunquit.

Woodbury was an apt representative of the old guard. A slight, angular man, he possessed an aura of Yankee propriety. Field was an obvious contrast. He had a high-pitched voice, he stuttered, and he was gay. They didn’t hit it off. “When you say ‘relationship,’ I don’t know if I’d say they had one,” Ogunquit Heritage Museum curator Charlotte Tragard says. “I’ve never seen anything about the two of them breaking bread and opening a bottle of wine and talking about brush strokes. They couldn’t have been more polar.”

The record is light on specifics about interactions between Woodbury and Field, although one particular provocation is recounted in a history of the Ogunquit art colony, A Century of Color: 1886–1896, by Louise Tragard (Charlotte’s sister). One summer, a nude model from Field’s school wrapped herself in a kimono, darted across a footbridge to Woodbury’s property, and sunbathed au naturel on the steps to his studio. Woodbury reportedly failed to find humor in the situation.

Over time, across the country, Field’s cohort proved the ascendant one, and many of his students — Niles Spencer, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and Bernard Karfiol, among others — played important parts in the modernist movement. Another student, Lloyd Goodrich, went on to direct the Whitney Museum, in New York. But in Ogunquit, the art colony peaked and faded. Woodbury died in 1940, and his school closed. Field died in 1922, and his heir, the sculptor Robert Laurent, kept the school going until 1962. By then, artists were getting priced out of Ogunquit. Nowadays, the legacy of the art colony is well represented in the collection of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art. Fittingly, the museum, perched over the mouth of Perkins Cove, was founded by Henry Strater, a student of Hamilton Easter Field’s, on land that had belonged to Charles Woodbury.

HAMILTON EASTER FIELD (UNITED STATES, 1873–1922), SELF-PORTRAIT, CIRCA 1898, OIL ON PANEL, 24 X 18 INCHES. PORTLAND MUSEUM OF ART, MAINE. HAMILTON EASTER FIELD ART FOUNDATION COLLECTION, GIFT OF BARN GALLERY ASSOCIATES, INC., OGUNQUIT, MAINE, 1979.13.15.; HERMANN MURPHY, PORTRAIT OF CHARLES WOODBURY, 1906, OIL ON CANVAS, GIFT OF THE ROWE COLLECTION, 2021.6.1

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