Conversations From the Pointed Firs

This month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs host Peter Neill sits down with Kristie Billings. A wearer of many hats, Kristie is a long-time DJ for ‘Daydream Nation’ on the WERU Community Radio in Orland, Maine. From small-town grocery clerk to working in a fish market, owning her own shoe store, being an Arts Educator at a local theater, a lobster fisher, and an antiques seller, Kristie has done it all. Kristie comes from a long line of lovers of the sea: fishermen, clamdiggers, and sardine packers. The ocean is home. She is a poet, a photographer, and a year-round swimmer. She is currently living in Ellsworth, Maine, and a native of Stonington, on Deer Isle in downeast Maine. A great lover of music, art, and life, Kristie is drawn to beauty, even in the ordinary, the mundane and the unnoticed. Her latest book, "Sea Witch: Photographs, Poems and Forget Me Nots from a Mainer Growing Up" (Seaport Books, Nov 2023) is filled with images and words of the sea, nature, folk art, dolls, loss, grief, love, acceptance, rage, music, and life. 

This month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs, host Peter Neill sits down with Gary Lawless, poet, bookstore owner, book editor, publisher, and educator. He has published many books of poetry and co-owns Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick and owns Blackberry Books Publishing in Nobleboro. He has run writing residencies in Newfoundland, Alaska, Italy, and Maine, and community writing workshops for adults with disabilities, unhoused, refugee and immigrant populations, and veterans groups.

Our guest this first month of 2024 on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is LAUREEN LABAR, recently retired curator at the Maine State Museum and author of "Maine Quilts: 250 Years of Comfort and Community", published in 2021 by Down East Books. She and Peter discuss quilts and quilting in Maine, as an example of unique craft, history, and social engagement invoking the spirit of Maine.

This month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs host Peter Neill sits down with Sarah Alexander, Executive Director of MOFGA (the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association.) Sarah has been in her position since, 2018, and has over 20 years of experience advocating for sustainable, local and fair food systems. This year MOFGA is celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding. Peter and Sarah discuss the historical moment of MOFGA's inception, the state of farming in Maine, and what MOFGA might become over the next 50 years. 

Conversations from the Pointed Firs is a monthly audio series with Maine-connected authors, artists and innovators discussing books, art and creative projects that invoke the spirit of Maine, its history, its ecology, its culture, and its contribution to community and quality of life. Online at pointedfirs.org

This month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs, host Peter Neill sits down with Joan (Jo) Radner, of Lovell, Maine, professor emerita of literature at American University, holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University, and is enjoying a second career as an oral historian, writer, and professional storyteller in her family’s home region of western Maine. Jo has been studying, teaching, telling, and collecting stories most of her life, and has performed from Maine to Hawaii to Finland. Past president of the American Folklore Society and the National Storytelling Network, she has published books and articles on subjects ranging from early Irish historiography and Anglo-Irish drama to women’s folklore, Deaf culture, and New England social history. Her new book (University of Massachusetts Press, 2023) is Wit and Wisdom: The Forgotten Literary Life of New England Villages. She has also published two award-winning CDs grounded in New England history, Yankee Ingenuity: Stories of Headstrong and Resourceful People and Burnt Into Memory: How Brownfield Faced the Fire 

This month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs host Peter Neill sits down with Steve Tatko, Vice President of the Appalachian Mountain Club. Steve is a lifelong Mainer, born in Monson, graduate of Colby College, shaped by the Maine woods, and now dedicated to its preservation for all of us to use and enjoy. In the past years, Steve and his colleagues have increased the AMC’s Maine Woods Initiative lands to 100,000 contiguous acres, and helped to advance the state’s 30×30 goal (a national project aiming to conserve 30 percent of each state’s natural resources by 2030). Steve and his colleagues have also determined to remove every barrier to pass of sea-run Atlantic salmon and eastern brook trout on AMC land and to work with partners to conserve the entirety of Maine’s One Hundred Mile Wilderness. In recognition of his work, the Maine Northeaster Loggers Association presented him its award for “Outstanding Management of Natural Resources” for 2022.

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is JOHN BUNKER, Homesteader, farmer, orchardist, author, apple historian, co-founder of FEDCO Trees, and founder of MOFGA's Maine Heritage Orchard, 10-acre preservation and educational orchard located in Unity Maine home to over 360 varies of apples and pears traditionally grown in all 16 counties of Maine dating back to 1630.

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is TOMMY CARBONE, author of both fiction and non-fiction, outdoorsman, photographer, publisher, and collector of Maine lore and the work of forgotten or over-looked authors who invoke the spirit of Maine. Tommy is a son of Brooklyn, New York but has found another life in northern Maine, exploring the trails, ponds, mountains, streams and bogs. He has also found many of the authors who preceded him, reissuing the books of Dr. Lucius Lee Hubbard, Thomas S. Steele, and Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, whose book "Exploring the Maine Woods", first published as articles in Field & Stream Magazine in 1891, has been edited and annotated by Tommy in a new edition by Burnt Jacket Publishing, Greenville, Maine.

Our guests this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs are Julia Lane and Fred Gosbee, musicians and musicologists, who for many years have been researching their personal heritage by exploring the traditional music connections between the Celtic lands, the Canadian Maritimes and Maine. In this Conversation from the Pointed Firs episode we explore the early music of Maine, and our cultural heritage through story and song. Through Castlebay, as their musical home, they have released more than two dozen recordings. Their new book, "Bygone Ballads of Maine-Songs of Ships and Sailors", contains many of their findings including lyrics, tunes and relevant lore.

This month we are rebroadcasting a July 2021 conversation with Rob McCall, who passed away in April. We, and many in Maine and beyond, are mourning the loss of this great man: minister, fiddler, writer and creator of the Awanadjo Almanack. Rob and Peter discuss the tradition of Nature writing in Maine, the characteristics of the genre, and the various methodologies and principles that underlie this special means by which to evoke and understand the natural world that surrounds us. 
 
 Conversations from the Pointed Firs is a monthly interview podcast where Peter Neill talks with authors and artists who live in Maine, work in Maine, or otherwise derive their creativity from the essence of Maine.

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Peter Beckford, Maine farmer and storyteller who will introduce the work of the late Holman F. Day, journalist, poet, and raconteur, whose accounts of neighbors and friends, often in dialect, are classic evocations of the spirit of Maine.

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Martha White, writer, editor and literary executor for the estate of her grandfather, E.B. White.  

In 2006, White edited the revised and updated Letters of E. B. White (HarperCollins) and, since then, she has compiled three more collections of E. B. White's work: In the Words of E. B. White: Quotations from America's Most Companionable of Writers (Cornell University Press, 2011) and E. B. White on Dogs (Tilbury House, Publishers, 2013). Her most editorial endeavor is Chickens, Gin, and a Maine Friendship, The Correspondence of E.B. White and Edmund Ware Smith (DownEast Books, 2020.) 

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Dean Lunt, Editor-in-Chief, Islandport Press on the writings of Ruth Moore.

DEAN LUNT is founder and the editor-in-chief at Islandport Press, an award-winning publisher of books and other media that strives to tell stories that are rooted in the sensibilities of Maine and New England. An eighth-generation native of downeast Maine, Dean Lunt was born and raised in the island fishing village of Frenchboro. His ancestors arrived on Mount Desert Island in the late 1700s and many of them moved across the bay to settle Long Island in the early 1800s. In 1999, Lunt founded Islandport Press, an award-winning independent book publishing company that produces books with New England themes. The company published its first book, Hauling by Hand: The Life and Times of a Maine Island, in the spring of 2000. Lunt has edited dozens of books as is the author of Here for Generations: The Story of a Maine Bank and its City. Later this year he will release an anthology of Ruth Moore’s work for which he is writing a lengthy forward describing the ways in which their lives intersected, and the encuring importance of Moore’s work. 

The guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Samaa Abdurraqib, Executive Director of the Maine Humanities Council, educator, poet, writer, advocate and justice organizer.  

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Stuart Kestenbaum, arts innovator and poet.

STUART KESTENBAUM is the author of six collections of poems, most recently Things Seem to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions 2021), and a collection of essays The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press).  He was the host of the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here and was the host/curator of the podcast Make/Time. He was the director of Haystack Mountain School of Crafts from 1988 until 2015. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he has designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts. Stuart Kestenbaum has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in numerous small press publications and magazines. 

 He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021.

CONVERSATIONS FROM THE POINTED FIRS is a monthly audio series with Maine-connected authors and artists discussing new books and creative projects that invoke the spirit of Maine, its history, its ecology, its culture, and its contribution to community and quality of life.

Learn more at pointedfirs.org

November's guests on Conversations from the Pointed Firs are David Greenham, Executive Director of the Maine Arts Commission, and David Hopkins, Chair. They and host Peter Neill discuss the arts in Maine, the creative economy, and the essential contribution and expression of the arts and the creative spirit of Maine. 

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Jefferson Navicky, author, poet, playwright, and archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection. He and host Peter Neill  discuss the long history of women writers in Maine, their work well-known and sometimes forgotten, representing an essential contribution and expression of the unique place and creative spirit of Maine.  

Conversations from the Pointed Firs is a monthly interview-style podcast wherein Peter Neill talks with authors and artists who live in Maine, work in Maine, or otherwise derive their creativity from the essence of Maine.

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, poet, fiction writer, teacher and non-profit leader. Gibson's first collection of poems, "Death of a Ventriloquist", won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers as one of a dozen debut collections to watch. His second book, "Deke Dangle Dive" was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. Gibson’s poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, Narrative, Poetry Northwest, and Orion, and his prose in Kenyon Review online, Portland Magazine, and Slice. He has taught writing at conferences, schools and universities including Fordham, Haystack, and University of Southern Maine, and helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks Artist Colony. He currently serves as the Executive Director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland with his family. 

Our guest for this month is Kerri Arsenault, author of “Milltown: Reckoning with What Remains”, published in 2020 by St. Martins Press.  Kerri is winner of many distinguished literary prizes such as the 2021 Rachel Carson Environmental Book Award and the Maine Literary Award for Non-Fiction. “Milltown” is a book of narrative non-fiction, investigative memoir and cultural criticism that illiminates the rise and collapse of  the working class, the hazards of loving and leaving home, and the ambiguous nature of toxins and disease with the central question: Who or what are we willing to sacrifice for our own survival?

Our guest this month on Conversations from the Pointed Firs is Julia Bouwsma, poet laureate of Maine and author of “Midden”, an award-winning collection of poems published by Fordham University Press in 2018, an intimate and raw set of poems addressing a dark and important piece of Maine history that transpired on Malaga Island in Casco Bay in 1912.