Why Portland, Maine?

We usually expect to get some high-profile press coverage about where to eat and drink in Portland in time for the summer folk, but hey, this is December! Yesterday, GQ published chef Rob Evans’ list of 10 culinary destinations all within walking distance of his Hugo’s/Duckfat empire. And just the day before, The Boston Globe came out with a piece by Johnathan Levitt on Maine’s New Drinking Culture.

True, it has been uncommonly mild. Maybe it’s global warming, or maybe Portland is just not as cold as people think it is. Whatever the reason, we’ve certainly become a year-round destination for foodies and these two articles do add a few new spots to the map.

Evans calls out Petite Jacqueline, Boda Thai, Otto Pizza and Emilitsa on Congress Street. Then he hangs a right and goes down Fore Street for the new Miyake, Gorgeous Gelato and, of course, Fore Street. Finally, he heads north for a nightcap at Novare Res Bier Café, dessert at Bresca and after-hours Jell-O shots at Sangillo’s.

Photographer and gastronome Johnathan Levitt decided to forgo the food and go right for the beverages. He has cocktails and conversations with the mix masters at The Grill Room, Hugo’s and Blue Spoon and samples the cider and mead at the Urban Farm Fermentory. Levitt then drives north to Freeport for the Cold River vodka and gin at Maine Distilleries before venturing to the midcoast for Oxbow Brewery in Newcastle and Three Tides Bar in Belfast.

The best quote is from John Myers of The Grill Room in The Globe, “When I told a friend of mine in D.C. that I was heading up here [in 2002], he told me that Maine was the perfect place to be when the world ends. ‘Everything happens in Maine,’ he said. ‘It just takes five years to get there.’ The cocktail revolution is right on schedule.’’

Photo of cocktail at Hugo’s by Johnathan Levitt

On Monday afternoon, El-Fadel Arbab sorts through vivid, homemade signs like those pictured above, painted with slogans (“Humanity before Politics,” or “Be the Voice for Those Who Cannot Be Heard”) which he will take to this Saturday’s Peace in Sudan Rally in Washington, D.C. Schoolchildren from Portland, Maine, and our surrounding communities crafted the posters after hearing Arbab’s story.

“If you’re looking for people to help you and they don’t know anything about you, how can they help you?” Arbab asks. Since arriving in Portland from Darfur in 2004, Arbab has dedicated himself to telling the story of his childhood and his people – how the Sudanese military and Janjaweed mercenaries came when he was 12 years old and burned down his village in Darfur, a western region of Sudan, killing most of its inhabitants and separating him from family and community. He made his way to Egypt after four years, where he reunited with his mother, some of his siblings, and members of his extended family before they earned visas to come to the U.S.

Arbab’s story is remarkable, but perhaps just as surprising is how many people with stories like his live in Portland. Our metropolitan area is home to one of the largest organized Darfuri refugee populations in the United States. The Fur Cultural Revival, a non-profit organization headquartered at the Meg Perry Center in Portland, works to spread awareness about the Darfur genocide in the U.S. and ease the transition process for Darfuri refugees in the area. Through FCR, Arbab has organized a rally on the 23 of each month at Monument Square in remembrance of July 23, 2004, when the U.S. Congress declared genocide in Darfur. He sees it as another way of raising awareness.

Arbab is almost halfway toward his goal of telling his story in all 50 states.

“For the rest of my life, I will be sharing this story. I have been enslaved by the government of Sudan, burned alive, lost so many members of my family,” he says. “My story is one example, and it’s not just about Sudan. It’s about breaking the cycle of genocide.”

His preferred audience is students. “The distance between the United States and Sudan that leaders feel doesn’t exist for students. They see the human side of the conflict,” explains Arbab. “Kids want to learn and change the world.” Currently, schools across the country must sign up on a waiting list, booking Arbab a year in advance.

This Friday, FCR will bus Portlanders down to D.C. for the rally, organized by the Enough Project, Save Darfur Coalition/ Genocide Intervention Network, the FCR, and more. Arbab will speak alongside other internationally recognized human rights advocates at the event. Before the rally, Darfuris against genocide are holding a global hunger strike, which will begin at noon on Friday and end at noon on Saturday.

While Arbab’s work increasingly takes him to new parts of the country, he remains dedicated to building relationships among native and new Mainers. “When I go to a different state, Maine is on my mind – the streets, restaurants, stores, views,” Arbab says. “When I come back to Portland and see the view of the ocean, I feel so relaxed, like I am home again.”

Pictured above: Arbab with signs made by Portland’s youth.

We make community for our pleasure and our comfort, but ultimately for our safety and security. In this increasingly volatile world we need to establish trust and communication about everyday things so that as those things change and become more challenging, we have people to work out solutions with. The arts play a key role in building these casual communities based on shared pleasures and aesthetic affinities. It is often true that people who like the same bands or books share politics as well. So it should not be surprising that Johnathan Cook, a young poster designer that we have profiled before on these pages, is exposing the community that he has helped to build at Mayo Street Arts Center to his thoughts and concerns about that most everyday of things—trash.

Voroism, the title of the show by Johnathan that opens this Friday, May 6th (5-8pm), is an original coinage. My best guess is that it either refers to the Vestibulo-Ocular Reflex or a 1958 novel, VOR, by James Blish (best known for his Star Trek books). That range from science to science-fiction is fitting for Cook, a student of both art and political science. The work in the show has the look, perhaps, of abstract expressionist paintings until you realize that the surface is composed solely of melted plastic shopping bags. They are both beautiful and questioning—they give pleasure but also require a response. I asked Johnathan to talk a bit about the back story of these pieces:

People in Portland are mainly familiar with your work through the great posters you have been doing for Mayo Street Arts Center, how does the work in this show relate (or not) to your graphic work?
The work in this show is a departure from my graphic work in that there won’t be a single print in the bunch, however it is steeped in the same concerns I hold as an artist. The primary function of my posters is to promote grassroots events, so my goal is a broad one; to win the battle of information in our visual environment. That is, to combat corporate advertising in order to lure people out of their homes and into the community proper. In contrast, the pieces I’ll be exhibiting at MSA are more to the point—to convey an idea directly to the viewer.

Is the work a metaphor for how people can make use of the waste stream or a forced confrontation with our own excess as a materialist culture? Or both? Do you worry that you might be aestheticizing garbage for some viewers?
My aim with this series is in part to force a confrontation between people and the discarded remnants of their consumption. I am in a sense pulling society’s malaise out of the gutter where it is ignored, and putting it on the wall where it demands recognition. My sincere hope is that people don’t walk away from the show thinking of novel new uses for their crap. This would constitute a failure on my part as such notions would serve to justify one’s materialism, hindering any chance of introspection. I worry about aestheticizing garbage for the same reason, but I understand it to be an inevitability that some viewers won’t comprehend the ugliness of what the images represent. After all, there’s not a piece of art in existence that speaks to everyone the same way.

By making art out of ephemera, you’re working in the shadow of some art historical heavy hitters: Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauchenberg, to name the two most immediate. What are your historical reference points for the work?
I am well aware of the artistic giants who waded through the landfill decades before me. Rauchenberg in particular has been a constant reference in my rolodex of inspirational figures. Many of these artists made brilliant use of ephemera, so much so that their work spawned a new breed of art restorer to preserve materials made to deteriorate. Much of the material I’ve been working with, while being deposable, is anything but ephemeral. Plastic, for example will haunt the earth until an organism eventually evolves to break it down. Most of all, however, I endeavored to create objects that were, to borrow a term from the contemporary photographic artist Chris Jordan, “intolerably beautiful.”

And where do you get your trash, anyway?
Believe it or not, trash is not hard to find. Over the course of history every culture has used whatever materials were abundantly available to them to make art; the Greeks had marble and we have styrofoam. All I had to do was ask a few people and I soon had more than I could handle. And yes, some of it was mine. We all play a role in the madness of capitalism.

Where would you like to go with your work and is living and working in Portland helping you get there?
I’m not exactly sure where I’d like to go with my work, I usually go where it takes me. I do know that if I had a budget and a crew, I would have made some of my pieces monumental. Perhaps installation work will be my next step. Wherever I’m heading, the artistic community in Portland is helping me get there. I just received a scholarship to Peregrine Press, so I’ll have access to printmaking equipment for the next twelve months. This will facilitate future design work and allow me to experiment with new techniques. There are a lot of opportunities here for young artists and I’m doing my best to seize every one of them.

I encourage everyone to seize the opportunity and go see Johnathan’s work in the (pertochemical) flesh.

Today, poetry’s relationship with the public feels complicated. Its roots in English and American cultural history are massive and continue to sprout new offshoots, but poetry’s presence in our public literary consciousness over the past thirtyish years has sunk below the waves of prose. I find this state of affairs less depressing than exciting and fascinating. The imperative to revive poetry in the public eye gives us a chance to harness creativity and social technology in ways that will change poems for good. Both the city of Portland and the state of Maine are about to take a major step in this direction.

Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance (MWPA) is a Portland-based nonprofit that works to “enrich the cultural life of Maine by supporting writers and the literary arts.” This past month, MWPA teamed up with Maine’s new poet laureate, Wesley McNair, to introduce “Take Heart: A Conversation in Poetry.” The initiative will give Mainers frequent opportunities to read poems written by the people who live here: a series of poems to be published weekly in newspapers across the state. You’ll find the first poem, “April,” by Stuart Kestenbaum, the first week of May in over twenty-four papers that range from The Portland Sunday Telegram to the Aroostook Republican, which extends the project’s radius almost 300 miles toward the northeast Canadian border. As a poet who often hears people sigh, “I just don’t get poetry,” I felt deeply encouraged when I heard about Take Heart. If you’re not writing your own poems or earning a college degree in literature, chances are you have limited contact with poetry written today. Sneaking poems under the noses of average readers will begin to break an amplified silence that has made poetry feel so alien to our daily rhythms.

MWPA’s crucial support for McNair’s project represents a unique collaboration in the history of Maine’s laureateship, which was legislated in 1995. Until now, laureates received no financial support or capacity to launch new poetry initiatives. Oddly enough, Augusta just didn’t write those details into law. Joshua Bodwell, Executive Director of MWPA, said he “wanted to fill that void.” Portland is the MWPA’s headquarters, but the nonprofit is a statewide literary organization and so decided to offer an unofficial home-base for McNair during his five-year term. Bodwell has allotted him the space, funding, and grant-writing capacities of nonprofits and has established the post of “Special Assistant to the Poet Laureate,” a young poet’s dream job, now enjoyed by David Turner. McNair and Turner are building a library of poetry written by the poets of Maine, located in Portland, from which the Take Heart series will be curated. In its readiness to make McNair’s vision a reality, MWPA represents an understanding that our creative community will blossom further when Portland-based organizations recognize and connect with the broader region that influences the city.

With MWPA as the project’s support system, McNair will choose poems of the highest quality crafted by Maine citizens. Quality, in this instance, means remaining accessible to a broad readership without sacrificing the complexities of life that poetry must illuminate. What I find most exciting about Take Heart’s selection is the sheer range from free verse to metered, rhymed, and received forms; from Maine’s classic poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to remarkable contemporary poets who you’ve never heard of; and from visions of our very own Casco Bay to mindstreams that escape the borders of geography. McNair wants the “diversity and regions of the state to be reflected” in the project, yet he also realizes that limiting the entire subject matter of the series to Maine content “would limit the true richness of our poems.” Instead of poems that beat lobsters and blueberries and Baxter St. Park to death, we’re going to find works loosely arranged around a diverse yet Maine-centered psyche. “If a poem about a region is good,” says McNair, “it’s not only about that place… it’s about all places.” Most of all, the poems will lead us to honor our “emotional and intuitive self,” which McNair beautifully argues is “the deepest self that we have.”

Thanks to MWPA, you can read McNair’s galvanizing and eloquent speech about Take Heart from the April 20, 2011 poetry celebration at the Blaine House in Augusta. It’s available for download here.

Photos by Irvin Serrano and Dan Habib.
Pictured above (left to right): Joshua Bodwell, Wesley McNair, and David Turner.

Glitterati, the glitter-themed literary ball that took place last week at The Port City Music Hall in downtown Portland, Maine, offered guests a chance to wine and dine with some of the city’s major authors. As a young writer who moved here just last summer, I was amped to mingle with Portland’s literary greats, and I deeply enjoyed witnessing how friendly and approachable they turned out to be. One author I spoke with was Melissa Coleman, whose memoir about growing up on her family’s farm at the front of Maine’s back-to-the-land movement, This Life Is In Your Hands (Harper 2011), was released on April 12 to a fanfare in the New York Times Book Review, among other major reviews.

I remember first meeting Coleman last fall, but I was oblivious to her forthcoming publication with one of the country’s top publishers. We had a stimulating conversation about web design, author websites, and the exciting frontier of online book marketing. When This Life Is In Your Hands came out and I saw Coleman’s picture on the book jacket, I was humbled to realize that such a talented author had engaged with me as a peer. This down-to-earth attitude toward fellow writers pervaded Glitterati, where guests had the opportunity to speak with many acclaimed Portland writers such as Michael Paterniti, Sara Corbett, Susan Conley, Lily King, and Monica Wood.

Coleman lives nearby in Freeport, and she says Portland’s “artistic vibrancy” plays a key role in her career. She writes columns for Portland-based Maine Magazine and Maine Home & Design. She also serves as a board member for The Telling Room, a local creative writing center for youth that was cofounded by Conley, Corbett, and Paterniti, all previously featured on this site (Conley, Corbett, Paterniti). The city’s limited distractions and peaceful absence of sensory overload allow her to “hunker down and get her work done.” But on the flip side, “Writing is a lonely thing,” Coleman said. “When I go into town I can always go into one of those offices and have a water-cooler conversation—which you don’t often get as a writer.”

The best writing requires hours of alone time. For writers seeking an environment that actually encourages people to carve such time out of the daily grind, Portland’s attainable personal space and friendly literary community offer an ideal balance. “That’s why so many writers live in Maine,” said Coleman.

You can read an excerpt from This Life Is In Your Hands in O, The Oprah Magazine.

Photo by Corey Michael.
Pictured above (left to right): writers Lily King, Sara Corbett, Melissa Coleman and Monica Wood, at the Glitterati Ball.

What do you get when glitter and literature collide?

“Glitterati – A Sparkling Literary Ball,” Portland Maine’s first festivity of its glamorous kind.

Tomorrow evening at The Port City Music Hall local writers and readers will celebrate the region’s vibrant literary scene in glitter-smeared high heels, LED flashing bowties, or whatever pizazz the partygoers can muster. The event is in support of The Telling Room, a nonprofit creative writing center that undergirds Portland’s literary culture.

Glitterati offers the community a chance to mingle with Maine’s foremost authors. The bar and buffet will feature Portland’s world-renowned restaurant fare. Entertainment includes a poetry performance by Munye Mohamad and tunes by songstress Emelia Dahlin. Silent and live auctions will give guests the opportunity to support The Telling Room’s free writing workshops taught by local writers for youth, immigrants, and refugees. Amongst the glitzy garb and blinding disco balls, Pandora LaCasse’s installation piece of glimmering, buoyant orbs will set the mood.

Pandora is well-known around these parts for her enigmatic public art installations commissioned by the Portland Downtown District, a not-for-profit facilitator of Portland’s economic vitality. Each winter, using LED lights, stainless steel and spring wire frames, and a creative sense of place, Pandora bedecks various sections of the city with floating shapes of colorful lights that look to me like fireworks in mid-explosion. They dangle in park trees, illuminate the streets, and cascade down building facades. At night, the festive dreamscapes seem to hover like jellyfish or shards of my imagination. Maine College of Art recently created this video about Pandora’s Maine-based career.

At Glitterati, Pandora’s installation will be the first thing you see upon entry—a forest of six or so red and white glowing orbs set high on stakes. They will linger on a shadowy platform above the bar. Other sparkling Pandora globes may dot different corners of the dancehall, depending on how she reacts to the space when setting up the piece tomorrow morning. Pandora’s dynamic relationship with place, and specifically with Portland, informs all aspects her career.

She says Portland is a unique bastion of the arts. While it’s “a small enough place to find your niche,” the community is deeply interested in creative work. Pandora regularly receives personal praise via letters and conversations around town. “It’s great to live and work in a community that supports you,” she continued. “I have had people say they’ve moved to Portland because of my work… because it shows that the city is engaged with art.” Since working within Portland’s support system, Pandora now receives offers from around the country.

Portland’s proximity to amazing natural landscapes is a major perk for Pandora. Working in tones of “mystery and humor,” she draws inspiration from the spatial elements of the Maine coastline and inland wilderness. Blueberry fields or a gold root next to a gray stone, for example, cultivate a visual vocabulary that she translates into abstract visual experience.

Now you can party with Portland’s most “glitterary” crowd in the midst of Pandora’s newest installation. Be there tomorrow, Thursday April 7, from 6 pm to 10 pm. The details you need are here.

The creative economy is more about ideas than stuff. In many cases it’s about ideas about stuff. Whatever the case, one of the main factories for the creative idea is  conversation. And coming up in the next week, Portland will be filled with the kind of discussions and disputations that fuel our creative industry. Unsurprisingly, most of this talking happens at SPACE Gallery and some just down the block at the ICA, and all the events but one are free. Tonight, Thursday, March 10, at SPACE is the sixth annual Slow Food Portland Writers Night. Timed to coincide with Maine Restaurant Week “to further the Maine culinary experience. Writers Night is an evening filled with delicious local foods and engaging readings from authors near and far.” (Doors open at 6:00 pm, starts at 6:30 pm, $25, $20 for Slow Food members, All Ages) Tomorrow night, Friday, March 11, MECA Visiting Artist Ellen Driscoll will give a free pubic lecture at 6pm in the ICA at MECA. “Driscoll’s sculptures, drawings, and installations explore resource consumption and material lineage. Her latest multi-part, multi-year project, FASTFORWARDFOSSIL highlights the relationship between water and oil consumption” She is currently the head of the sculpture department at Rhode Island School of Design. Next week, on Tuesday, March 15, at SPACE, will be the first Creative Conversation of the Spring season. Sponsored by Portland Arts & Cultural Alliance and SPACE, Creative Conversations are “mediated discussions about the Arts from a personal, local, and regional perspective.” Part 1 – Rethinking the Gallery in the Digital Age, asks the questions, “Are galleries still relevant in the age of Etsy, Facebook, and other digital ways to connect artists with collectors? Does the experience of art have the same impact when mediated by a screen? And what about galleries as an intermediary between private studios and large institutions like museums? This discussion will examine the changing nature of the white cube as well as the commodofication of art.” Panelists will include Dan Kany, Bridget McAlonan and Andy Verzosa. (doors open at 6:30 PM, starts at 7:00 PM, Free, All Ages). And two days later at SPACE, on Thursday, March 17, there will be “A Conversation in Writing” between Portland writers Susan Conley and Lily King. “Portland-based writer Susan Conley celebrates the publication of her new memoir, The Foremost Good Fortune, in conversation with award-winning Maine novelist Lily King. The authors will trace their writing process as they share notes on their new books and their friendship and the things they can’t stop writing about. Join us and The Telling Room and the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance as we fete these two talented members of our local creative community.” (Doors open at 7:00 pm, starts at 7:30 pm, free, All Ages) My head is bursting just thinking about it all.

Photo by Dennis Stein/SPACE Gallery

Last week, the Obama administration announced a new initiative called Startup America. In a clever video, White House policy wonk  Austan Goolsbee described how this program will help entrepreneurs build a bridge over “the valley of death” that foils the success of many new businesses. And through a miracle of coincidental timing (you think?) the following week is National Entrepreneurship Week, sponsored by the Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education, whose motto is, “The Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow… Are in Our Schools Today!” Maine Entrepreneurship Week is in full swing with programs that address meeting the needs of all kinds of startup businesses. Today’s events focus on the creative economy and on supporting and inspiring our young entrepreneurs. The Maine Center for Creativity is hosting a networking event for creative entrepreneurs at Angela Adams, 273 Congress Street, from 5-6:30 pm. Maine entrepreneur Kerem Durdag and the USM College of Science, Technology and Health are holding an event at USM’s Gorham Campus tonight at 6:30 for young entrepreneurs called CreateMaine (more info on their Facebook page). Presenters include Portland creative entrepreneurs Becky McKinnell of iBecCreative, William Sulinski of AccelGolf, Jeff Shaw of Maine Academy of Modern Music and Jason Cianchette of Liquid Wireless. They didn’t wait for the White House, though. They already leaped the valley.

What better way to celebrate a landmark year for the creative economy in Portland than to dance your booty off at SPACE Gallery’s 2nd annual ICING New Year’s Bash. SPACE and The VIA Group have put their heads (and their extensive mailing lists) together for what promises to be a memorable evening. (Not that you’ll be able to remember anything the following morning!) The host committee is a lengthy list of creative luminaries befitting of Longfellow: Allison and Adam Ayan, Christopher Campbell and Lisa Pixley, Kate Carey and Charlie Hewitt , Linda and John Coleman, Noah and Chelsea H.B. DeLorme, Moira Driscoll and David Pence, Andy Graham and Anne Riesenberg, Patty and Cyrus Hagge,  Alison and Horace Hildreth, Bree LaCasse and Chris Moore, Annie Leahy and Mike Carey, Winky Lewis and Alex Millspaugh, Nat May, John Naylor and Molly Thompson, Pat Nick, Mike Paterniti and Sara Corbett, Alex Rheault and Michael Barry, Jessica Tomlinson and Henry Wolyniec, Joanna Tourangeau, Don and Louise Tuski. Aiding and abetting SPACE and Via, ICING is sponsored by The Portland Phoenix, Elliotsville Plantation, Aurora Provisions, Coffee By Design,Rosemont Market & Bakery, Browne Trading, Jill McGowan, Joseph’s, Chantal and Eli Phant. Along with a “cash bar, champagne toast at midnight, heavy hors d’oeuvres, and an array of local desserts,” there will be art installations and performances by Lady Zen, Dylan Blanchard and friends, Blue Moon Tribe, Over A Cardboard Sea and Dirty Dishes Burlesque Review. According to the event announcement, “Kate Cox and Matt Rock have something up their sleeve for when the ball drops and … Dj King Alberto [will] keep the soul and funk grooves spinning all night.” Sounds like a plan.

Portland is a paradox. It is at once a totally accessible and visitor friendly place with many appealing qualities at first glance, and also an insider’s treasure trove. What Portland shows to tourists on Commercial Street and the Old Port is on a par with many scenic New England towns—and the food is considerably better. But just below the surface, in neighborhoods all over Portland and its surrounding towns, people are hard at work making amazing stuff. And some of that stuff is as good as you will find anywhere and exerts a cultural influence wildly disproportionate to our scale as a metropolis. Case in point, writer Mike Paterniti. If you are familiar with this site you have seen his photo with his partner Sara Corbett on the slideshow of “People to Watch” on our home page, and you may have watched the audio slideshow about their life and work in Portland that it links to. You may have heard them mentioned in some posts as founders of The Telling Room. But, again, that’s just the surface. To get an idea of what kind of writer Mike really is—he is in fact a “writer’s writer—have a look at the two part interview on Neiman Storyboard about narrative voice and storytelling. [Neiman Storyboard is a project of the Neiman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard.] Although the overt purpose of the interview is to talk about how Mike immerses himself in his reporting and then through instinct and experiment finds the right narrative voice and storytelling devices that best suit each subject, some of the most revealing bits are told by Sara in an introduction about his idiosyncratic writing process: “He listens to music when he writes – really loud music, same song over and over again, usually one song per story. He drinks insane amounts of Starbucks iced tea while on deadline. He has a surfboard, and when he’s on deadline he loads his surfboard into our minivan – which basically means that nobody else in our family, which includes three kids and a dog, can fit in the minivan – and keeps it there, not because he’s going to actually manage to go surfing but it serves as some very oversized talisman that tells him someday he’ll get his story done and feel free again.” The range of his subjects is wide and strange, from driving cross-country with Einstein’s brain (which, as an article in Harper’s entitled, “Driving Mr. Albert,” won the National Magazine Award for feature writing and then became a book by the same name), to the book he is currently working on about his quest in Spain to taste the world’s most expensive cheese (and the amazing story and storyteller he discovered in the process.) What is most striking, though, is how deep his practice is. Most journalists are doing a good job if they get the facts right and get their copy in on time. Paterniti brings to his magazine articles the story telling craft of the novelist while retaining the veracity and atmosphere of his subjects. Yet as intense as his process is, he is also a father and the partner of a writer of equal accomplishment. What makes this more than another eccentric artist story is how he ends the interview, “My wife does the same work, so we switch off… The juggle day in and day out is so tricky. And it has to do with both of us learning, or beginning to learn, how to allow the other to do whatever he or she needs to. So there are times when that person needs to be off the clock to get that writing done, and they can’t be carrying the guilt of not being at home. You have to just take it off of them for the period that they’re out there, because they’ll be doing the same for you when you’re gone. It would be harder if she didn’t get what I do or if I didn’t get what she does.” People come to Portland seeking this kind of balance where the ease of life allows for the intensity of work. It’s no vacation, but it can be a pretty great life.

Fore Street Restaurant, photo by Vilseskogen/flickr.com