Transcription of Read & Relax #273
Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle, and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a writer and physician who practices family medicine and acupuncture in Brunswick, Maine. Show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com. Here are some highlights from this week’s program.
Josh Christie: You appreciate every author that comes in, all the work that went into the book. To me at least, it’s not just an object that has arrived on our shelves. I kind of understand the process behind it and the number of years that went into it and the number of people that had their hands in it.
James Harder: People were really supportive in a strange way. Not unlike Portland up there, no one had heard of floating. Even when we first moved down here, and we started to talking to people about it, maybe one in twenty people would have had any idea of what we were talking about.
Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show #273: Read and Relax, airing for the first time on Sunday, December 11, 2016. The holiday season can be a busy time, and because of this, it is important to engage in activities that keep us happy and rejuvenated. Today we speak with owners of two new Portland businesses that provide opportunities for rejuvenation, Josh Christie, co-owner of this city’s newest independent bookstore, Print: A Bookstore, and James and Amy Harder of Float Harder Relaxation Center. Thank you for joining us.
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Lisa Belisle: Today it is my great pleasure to have in the studio again with me Josh Christie. Josh is the co-owner of Print: A Book Store, a new independent book store in Portland on the East End. Josh is also an author of four books, most recently of Skiing Maine. A lifelong Mainer, Josh lives in Yarmouth with his wife, Katie. Thanks for coming back in again.
Josh Christie: Thanks so much for having me.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve had some exciting things happen to you since the last time we interviewed you a couple years ago.
Josh Christie: Yeah, yeah, it’s been two books since then. When I was on before, I was with my father, and we were talking about The Maine Outdoor Adventure Guide, which has since been published, and he and I wrote a second book together, Skiing Maine, which was just published this fall. Separate from all that I left my position at Sherman’s Books here in Portland to open my own independent bookstore.
Lisa Belisle: That’s a lot. How have you managed to kind of balance all those different things?
Josh Christie: Well, you’ve mentioned in my bio my wife, and having a supportive spouse helps a lot, and having just lots of energy, a thirst for trying new things and creative things has really helped drive me.
Lisa Belisle: This is something that … You’re in the middle of this interesting trend so first we had small independent bookstores, then we had these big box bookstores that came in and kind of gobbled up a lot of small independent bookstores, but you’ve been with Sherman’s, and Sherman’s and obviously had its own really important stake and claim in the marketplace, but you’ve gone beyond that. You’re bringing the small independent bookstore new, back again.
Josh Christie: Yeah, yeah. With Print, we’re the fourth independent bookstore in Portland along with Sherman’s, Longfellow, and LetterPress. If you want to include the greater Portland area, we have Bull Moose with books now, we have None Such Books in South Portland, we have The Book Review in Falmouth. There’s so many great small independent bookstores in the area, and it’s really part of a larger trend nationally. If you look at the number of stores since 2011, I believe there is more opening than closing every year. There’s a reaction after all the things you mentioned, the big box stores, and then Amazon and online book selling after that, which seem like they might be the death blow to independent bookstores. After the recession, bookstores really bounced back.
Lisa Belisle: Why? Why is that so?
Josh Christie: So many are really good at knowing their community, I think is a big part of it. You really are integrated in your town, and you act not just as a retail space but also as a community space. There are things like author events and programming with schools, galleries, and stuff like that that can’t be accomplished by an online enterprise. You have to have a stake in your community.
Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I like the most about the independent bookstores I go to is the recommendations. I like finding a person on the staff who seems to have kind of a similar interest and be like, “Oh, that person recommends this book, and I read that book, I like it, I’m going to choose this other one that this person recommends.” Is that a big part of what you would be offering?
Josh Christie: Yeah, that’s the same kind of stake that I was talking about. You really know that you can look at a large, either brick and mortar or a large online bookseller and they have everything or they can argue that they have everything, but there’s really not a great deal of curation. It’s just everything kind of at the same level or everything based on how much publishers are paying for advertising to lift their books up within the search algorithm or where they’re surfaced on a site or in a store, whereas in an independent bookstore, we’re really just driving sales by what our staff really likes. We hired a lot of readers, everyone we hired at Print and my partner and I both have years of experience, either in publishing or in bookstores and have a really diverse array of tastes, so we don’t all read the same things. We really build our stock based on what our staff likes and our response from the community, which is why if you have, like I said, four independent bookstores in Portland, we’ll all have different stock. There’ll be some crossovers, but each will be reflective of the people behind that store and the people that work at that store.
Lisa Belisle: You’re also the only bookstore on the East End.
Josh Christie: We are, yes. The only new bookstore. Carlson & Turner are the great antiquarian and used bookstore just up the block from us. We felt like that the growth going on in the East End, and Emily and I both have family that live up there, we felt like it was a community that would really support a bookstore and needed this kind of store and needed this kind of retail as the growth happened, before it all became… you know, God love ’em, but restaurants and condominiums and stuff like that. I think a strong retail base is really important there as well.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, it’s actually a fun neighborhood because they do have… they have Rosemont up there. They do have really wonderful restaurants, and it seems like even just down the block from where you are, there’s a number of retail establishments that are doing kind of interesting things.
Josh Christie: Yep, yep. There’s the knitting store, there’s a couple gift shops, there’s, again, Carlson & Turner. Just a lot of really cool spaces.
Lisa Belisle: If your bookstore has its own flavor based on who you have hired what would you describe that flavor to be? What’s the vibe you’re putting out?
Josh Christie: We are kind of unabashedly progressive at the store. That’s certainly reflective in our staff and in the stock we have at the store. We’re also very event driven. We want to be really supportive of local authors in all kinds of different ways by what we do for programming at the store. Those are the ways that are most reflective of the store. We’re also going to be very unpretentious. We want to be welcoming to people no matter what they read, we don’t want people to feel like there’s a certain type of book they should feel embarrassed to ask about at the store or something like that. We want people to come in and try everything, get whatever they want to get, and we’re also super supportive of small presses. We have a dedicated small press section in our store. That means small presses in Maine like Tilbury House and Islandport and places like that, but also on the national scale, Milkweed Editions and Melville House and some of the small presses from other parts of the country.
Lisa Belisle: What’s important about small presses?
Josh Christie: The same thing, I think, as independent bookstores. They’re publishing voices that aren’t necessarily as well known. They can take more chances because they’re doing smaller things. I think there’s the idea behind a lot of larger publishers, the same as in the movie business, that you need, or even the music business, you need a blockbuster, you need a sure thing, and that makes it much harder for them if they look at the P and L, look at that profit and loss sheet, for what they’re going to bring in for manuscripts. If something’s not a sure thing, it’s a much harder thing for them to take a chance on. So many small presses are driven more by what their mission statement is, whether it’s to publish poets or progressive work or people of color, whatever it is, they’re driven by that more than just the profit.
Lisa Belisle: How has it been, as somebody who has both worked with Sherman’s but also now owns his own bookstore, how has it been to see the increased number of people who are self-publishing, and how does that interact with the book store idea?
Josh Christie: It’s been interesting. There’s more books being published today than any time in history, and a big part of that is the self-publishing side of things. It’s been great as a democratizing force. Again, people that wouldn’t necessarily have their books published otherwise are able to create a book. It does put a lot of, I don’t want to say stress, but it does add a new dimension to buying for the store, because each self-published book is essentially their own publisher. If we’re working for a sales rep for say Penguin Random House, we look at their catalog of thousands of books that are coming that season, we put in one order for those, we work with them for the shipping and the billing and all of that whereas every self-published author for the most part has a book, so it’s an independent invoice, it’s independent shipping, it’s independent all of that stuff. It does add some complexity, and there is also a gatekeeping aspect that, again, adds another layer to our work because, again, pretty much anyone can self-publish a book, so there’s not necessarily an editorial process behind it. We need to look at it a little more closely to know if it will fit well with our stock.
On the other hand, there are things that are hyper local, books about Portland, books about Munjoy Hill, books about our neighborhood that there wouldn’t necessarily, with good reason, be a national market for, but it’s something that we could find we could do really well within our store.
Lisa Belisle: Because you have written and published yourself four books, you must have an interesting and unique perspective on the creation of books and the marketing and selling of books.
Josh Christie: Yeah, you get a real sense of you appreciate every author that comes in, all the work that went into the book. To me at least it’s not just an object that has arrived on our shelves. I kind of understand the process behind it and the number of years that went into it and the number of people that had their hands in it. This is especially true of traditionally published books, where you have the author but also copy editors and developmental editors and publicists and cover designers and all of that that work together to create this final product. It does make it harder to dismiss books when they come into the store or when we see them in a catalog. We kind of know what went into it.
Lisa Belisle: I love to read, so I read books of all different stripes, and one of the things I’ve noticed about self-published books is that there is not the same level of editing, which is interesting because I’m not sure that many of us think about the importance of an editorial staff. Not many of us think about the fact that it takes many hands to actually get a product from Point A to Point B.
Josh Christie: Yes. Yeah, it’s something for me, a topic that often comes up when I talk with people that are considering how they’re going ti publish their book, is they often bring up the fact that if they self-publish, they get x%, you know, 80% or something like that of the sale price of each book, whereas just to be totally frank, for most of the books I’ve had, they were all traditionally published and I get, you know, somewhere between 10 and 20%, if that, of each book sold, and having gone through the process it’s easy to understand that all that other percentage, it’s not going to some, you know, mustache twirling, cigar chomping editor that’s just collecting money, it’s going to all of these different people that had a hand in the book, and my books wouldn’t have sold as they did, they wouldn’t have looked as good as they did, they wouldn’t have been the product they were without all these hands in it. I appreciate wanting, looking at a book as a singular thing and thinking, “Well, I wrote this so I should get, you know, almost all of the profit that comes from it.” It really does come from a community that created a book.
Lisa Belisle: I have appreciated, I mean, I’ve read self-published books that were very good and that seemed okay and fine without the levels of editing that usually one has, and then I have read other self-published books that I’ve just been like, you know, there’s so much of this that was good, and I think that if they had just had a good, even a good copy editor. Maybe someone who could find those apostrophes that were misplaced, or if they had some sort of content editor who could just say, “Move those sentences around. The flow is going to improve if you do that.” I think it’s an interesting thing that artists, we like to believe that we’re all spontaneously creative and amazing in every part of this, but it’s not necessarily true.
Josh Christie: Yeah, and it’s certainly not to sound dismissive because, of course, there are traditionally published books that could use those same improvements that somehow made it through without having them made, and there are self-published books that are really excellent, and there’s all kinds of different levels of cooperative publishing and different levels of independent presses that are somewhere in between those two extremes that we’ve kind of created in this conversation here. Yeah, it’s just all kinds of different ways that a book can come to market now, and I think generally speaking that’s really good for the book market, it’s good for us because we have a greater number of books that we can pick from, and it does make our job harder because we have to be more selective in what we’re bringing in, but at Sherman’s and already at Print, some of our best-selling books were locally published books or self-published books. The list was always a nice mix of big presses, small presses, traditionally published, self-published. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: You have a book about skiing, you have the Maine outdoor adventure guide, and you also have one about the Maine beer trail? Is that …
Josh Christie: Well, I have the two books I wrote before those, one is a large book published by Cider Mill Press in Kennebunkport and distributed internationally about stouts and porters, so just specifically those two styles, and then my first book was called Maine Beer, and it’s a history of the brewing industry in Maine, a history of brewing here in the state from the earliest European settlers up through prohibition and modern day brewing and then a profile of every brew in the state at that time in 2013, which was, I think, 42 breweries, and now we’re up to 89, so in the space of three years. So it’s amazing how fast it’s grown.
Lisa Belisle: I was going to give you a ton of credit for being so prescient.
Josh Christie: Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: That you were out there writing about this stuff as it was happening, and now it’s like independent book stores, now it’s like the sweet spot.
Josh Christie: Yeah, it’s a book that came out at the right time. I was lucky that it came out when it did because it was just kind of on the cusp of this big explosion of growth in brewing in Maine because, again, it’s doubled in the space of three years from the number that had grown from when David Geary opened his brewery in the mid 80s until 2013. The same number have opened in the last three years as had opened in those 25.
Lisa Belisle: What is it that you think about yourself that has enabled you to tap into this greater something? You know, the fact that, “Oh, I’m going to write about beer. Oh my gosh, beer is like, now it’s so big,” and, “I’m going to have this independent book store,” and people are craving this. How are you, and what’s the gist of this here? What’s the magic Josh thing going on?
Josh Christie: Oh wow, I wish I knew. A lot of credit goes to my dad who worked in industries, again, doing the same kind of thing in his time when he was my age, which would have been the 60s and 70s. He was doing advertising and he owned Saddleback up in Rangeley, and he was the first person to partner with Hannaford Brothers to put coupons on the back of their receipts so that they could get a ski ticket, which now any supermarket you go to, you see coupons on the back of the receipts. It’s just this idea of looking at a need that isn’t being met or some cool creative idea that no one has had before. It’s hard to say what the nexus or where creativity comes from, but hopefully it was just being raised to question things and look at whether things are being done in the best way they could or see if this is something that I really think is cool and important and want to support, and probably more often than not you gave two examples of things that I was right about. I’m probably wrong far more often than I’m right but you get to get behind the things that you really like, and sometimes society follows you and sees the same thing.
Lisa Belisle: That’s a really important point, and you chose some things that you felt passionate about that you actually wanted to spend the time researching and learning about and writing about and getting behind to market. I think that that’s something that sometimes we’re not sure that we want to take the chance to do.
Josh Christie: Yeah, I mean it does take, you have to kind of banish fear from your mind. If you’re worried that something isn’t going to catch on, or if you’re worried that you’re wrong, it’s very easy to convince yourself not to pursue something, and people do that every day. They decide not to take the chance that they were going to take because it’s safer to keep doing what they’ve been doing, so you just have to take the leap sometimes.
Lisa Belisle: Sometimes, I think, we don’t know what we don’t know. We think, “Well, nobody’s ever put something out into the world so maybe there’s no, nobody wants it.”
Josh Christie: Right.
Lisa Belisle: If you don’t put it out there, you won’t know whether people really want it or not.
Josh Christie: Yeah, and someone else will figure out that they do, and they’ll put it out there.
Lisa Belisle: Ugh. That’s actually the worst, if you think, “Oh, I should really do this,” and then ten years later, you read, “That’s the book that I was going to write.”
Josh Christie: Exactly, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: I guess that’s sort of the lesson, is, you know, if you think that something is going to be important, you need to kind of get behind it.
Josh Christie: Absolutely. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: You’ve been spending a lot of time writing, working in bookstores, creating this bookstore. How are you going to continue to balance? I’m assuming that as a writer, you’re going to want to keep writing.
Josh Christie: Yeah, well it’s a benefit to me. All I’ve really written in the past, and all I really have any aspiration to do, is write non-fiction, which is easier for me to wrap my head around, and having done it for ten years now, I have a decent idea of how to outline and schedule my time and structure pieces and stuff like that. I can’t imagine how much energy it takes to write fiction and come up with these stories and edit and all of that, but, again, I think mostly comes down to the fact that these things that I thankfully was right about and am passionate about are avocations, you know, I would be skiing and reading and drinking local beer, whether I was writing about them or not. It’s in my spare time that I’m often pursuing these interests and then realize, “Oh, I could write about this,” or “Oh, I want to say this thing about this beer or this thing about this hike.” It’s that blessing of it not feeling like work, I guess.
Lisa Belisle: What is it that you currently are interested in that you’re kind of noodling around and spending time doing?
Josh Christie: Right now, well since the store opened the day before Thanksgiving and we’re headed into the holidays, that’s kind of where all my mental energy is right now. I’ll be writing ski columns for the Sunday Telegram all through the winter, and there’s a couple places like Black Mountain up in Rumford that I haven’t had a chance to visit in a couple years that I’d really like to write about, a cool, community-focused mountain that has a lot of side country and glade skiing, which are types of skiing that I really enjoy. Still planning on going up there, and then once we get through the holidays at Print and get a little more, hopefully, breathing room when we hit January, I’d really like to go back and look at either a revised edition or a second edition of my Maine Beer book just because the market has doubled in Maine since it came out, and it’s a story that was so fun to tell and people are still interested in but is getting sadly out of date.
Lisa Belisle: I guess that’s good. It seems like it would be kind of a fun thing to be able to look into the beer scene.
Josh Christie: Yeah, again, that’s the great thing is that it doesn’t feel like work. I want to do it because I want to do it, because I want to talk with these new brewers that have opened breweries or places that have expanded or places that have changed in the last three years and see what their stories are.
Lisa Belisle: I remember interviewing you and your father, and what a big personality he had. I know he passed away in May, and I actually kind of felt like, when I learned of this, it felt like a loss, even though I had only met him for this interview. How have you been doing with that?
Josh Christie: It’s been hard. It was unexpected. Although he was getting older, he didn’t have any serious or at least imminent feeling health problems. He ended up passing away from a rather large heart attack. It was totally unexpected. He was healthy and hiking and kayaking and all the stuff that he had done for years, for decades. It was a big shock, and luckily, not luckily, but by just coincidence, I had just about decided that we were going to open Print a couple days before he passed away, and I had gone up to visit my parents because it was Mother’s Day weekend, and I had told him about my plans for the store and stuff like that, and then he passed away the next day. I felt like I got to communicate this major change in my life to him, which has given me a kind of a sense of, you know, a sense of zen, a sense of calm around his passing. Of course, I wish he was still here, but in a lot of ways I feel like I got everything from him that he needed to give me or that he wanted to give me to live my life.
It’s cyclical, we’re in our first series of big, major family holidays now since he passed away with Thanksgiving and Christmas and the end of the year, so that will be tough. You know, he kind of lives on through my brother and I and our work and our mom, and yeah, there is something very cool about the fact that he built his career and built his name in the ski industry, and I’ve been lucky enough to do some work in skiing, but it’s almost always in the shadow of his name and his reputation here in the state of Maine, but I’ve built a reputation, at least in New England and the world of independent bookselling, that kind of mirrors what he was doing at the same time when he was my age in skiing, so that’s really a cool thing.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, that is interesting that you started, and you did a lot of collaboration kind of in his field, but, you’ve benefited from that, but then you also get to have your own thing, and he got to see a lot of this evolve.
Josh Christie: Right. Yeah. It is what it is, and as someone told me right after it happened, we all, everyone loses their parents eventually, it’s just, sometimes it’s sooner than others. It was always going to happen, and where we were in our lives and our relationship, it was… It’s never good, but better now than it could have been, I guess.
Lisa Belisle: Your wife Katie, you mentioned, is very supportive of all of the work that you do. What is her big passion in her life?
Josh Christie: She does a lot of dance. She’s a scientist for a company called EnviroLogix. That’s her day job, but she does a lot of dance and fitness instruction, she teaches Zumba and Buddhi yoga in Portland at a couple different places, and she’s deeply involved with Vivid Motion, which is the non-profit dance troupe here in Portland that does the Nutcracker Burlesque every year at the St. Lawrence Arts Center, which is kind of a tradition in the East End of Portland. Those are her big things right now.
Lisa Belisle: It sounds like both of you have this very kind of interesting creative side and this very interesting linear side. Both of you have that. It must be …
Josh Christie: Yeah, that might explain something about why we got together.
Lisa Belisle: Well, then, it probably explains something about why you’ve been able to support one another in your lives.
Josh Christie: Yeah, yeah. She and I have both been very understanding of each other’s very long hours. For her, it’s often early in the morning, either going into work or teaching early morning fitness classes, and when I’m working on stuff for the store, it tends to be very late in the evening that it’s keeping me there, but it’s a relationship that really works well. We both love to cook and are, don’t love to, but are fairly obsessed with keeping the house clean, so if one of us is home, we know we can do it and rely on the other one to do it when we aren’t there. It works really well.
Lisa Belisle: I know this is a very busy time for you, so I feel like I’m quite blessed that you were able to run down here and do this interview with us, and at the last minute.
Josh Christie: Of course, yeah.
Lisa Belisle: That’s even better. I love what you’re doing. Since you just opened, I haven’t had a chance to go up there, but I will very soon because I love bookstores, and I’ll be there. I’ll probably be haunting you guys. I’ve been speaking with Josh …
Josh Christie: Go out there.
Lisa Belisle: Yes, absolutely. I’ve been speaking with Josh Christie, who is the co-owner of Print: A Bookstore and also an author in his own right. He lives in Yarmouth with his wife, Katie. Thanks so much for coming in, and I encourage people to spend a little time in your bookstore.
Josh Christie: Thank you so much.
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Lisa Belisle: Today it is my pleasure to have with me in the studio Amy and James Harder, who opened Float Harder Relaxation Center, a three-tank float center in Portland earlier this year. They first learned about floating in sensory deprivation tanks while living in Colorado and realized its potential for improving well-being. Thanks so much for coming in.
James Harder: Thank you.
Amy Harder: Thank you.
Lisa Belisle: I know you’ve had to actually close your center just to come do this with us today, so I feel very special, like, that I’m depriving other people of relaxation out there. Hopefully this will spread the news, and it will make up for the relaxation that a few individual people wouldn’t have gotten for a couple hours.
Amy Harder: We’re happy to be a part of this, and it’ll help get the word out about floating.
Lisa Belisle: Let’s talk about floating. I had the opportunity to float yesterday, and it was really unlike anything that I have done before. I don’t know that many people who have had the opportunity to experience this.
James Harder: As word is getting out, we’re having more and more people come and experience floating, and people are loving it. Inside the float tanks, there’s ten inches of water with 1,000 pounds of Epsom salt dissolved into it, and the water and the air are heated to 93.5 degrees, which is the average temperature of the outer layer of skin, and that makes it to where after a while of laying there, you really have a hard time determining where your body ends and the water and air begin. Inside our tanks, there’s a nice colored light and also some speakers built in, so you can have a nice light, listen to some music, or if you choose to, you can turn it all off, and it’s completely dark, completely silence, and just a great way for your mind and your body to relax.
Amy Harder: It’s really just this unique environment. When do you ever get to lie peacefully suspended, almost weightless? You could have complete darkness, complete silence. It’s just like….
James Harder: Peace and quiet.
Amy Harder: Yeah. No place on Earth.
Lisa Belisle: It seems like this is something that we actually need more and more in this day and age and it’s really, some of it is that we’ve become really connected in a good way, and then also in a way like, “Okay, now we can’t turn it off.” You can’t be connected if you’re in the float tank. I mean, you’re connected, but you’re connected within yourself and your mind and the water, and that’s about it.
James Harder: Right here, a deep self-connection is so important, and like you said, we are so constantly bombarded with stimulation these days. You know, just having your phone in your hand so much of the day, so many people do it. Just putting someone in a float tank for 90 minutes, most people don’t go 90 waking minutes without checking their Facebook or their Instagram. Just that kind of separation from the rest of the world is really great for you.
Lisa Belisle: You were in Colorado when you first experienced floating.
Amy Harder: Yes. We were just looking for a place to have a massage, and we found a spot that had a couple of float tanks, and we thought, “What is this?” We did a little bit of Internet research and….
James Harder: It sounded great. We booked a couple sessions and went down to Denver and tried floating and fell in love with it, and then in 2013 we came back home to Maine to hike the Appalachian trail, and after we finished that we really wanted a place to float, and there was no commercial float center. There were a couple people who have float tanks in their homes that they would rent out when it was possible for them, and we wanted something to make it really accessible to everyone all the time. We started doing some research and worked really hard and saved every penny we could scrounge up and started a float center.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, your center is really, it’s really impressive. It’s very modern and clean and peaceful and up to date. I mean, I can tell that you’ve put a lot of thought and a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into this place.
Amy Harder: Thank you.
James Harder: A lot of sleepless nights.
Amy Harder: We put a lot of time into it. What we’re trying to do is make floating seem inviting. So many people are nervous to try floating. It’s really just the unknown, once they’re there and they’re in the experience, they’re very comfortable with it. We find that making this beautiful, inviting environment just kind of helps to calm the nerves, when people see the size of float tanks and how everything’s clean and tidy. I think it helps.
James Harder: Cleanliness is such an important factor. Other than people’s concerns about claustrophobia, cleanliness is the next question that we’re always asked. How are the tanks cleaned? Do you change out the water every time? Of course we don’t because there’s 1,000 pounds of Epsom salt in there, so in order to change out the water every time, it would cost a couple thousand dollars for a float, and we could only do three every two days because that’s how long it takes for the salt to melt. In between float sessions, the water does go through a really intense triple filtration process, goes through a UV light filter, an ozone infusion filter, and also a one micron carbon filter. In addition to that, it is treated with hydrogen peroxide for a constant anti-bacterial agent, and with 1,000 pounds of Epsom salt in there, it’s a really inhospitable environment for anything. We take cleaning very seriously. This morning we did our weekly deep clean where we closed down for four hours from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. once a week and scrubbed the walls, the insides of the float tanks, the outsides of the float tanks, every little bit of grout in between the tiles. We take cleaning real seriously there.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, I think that’s a really, it’s an interesting thing that you’re talking about, that we’re willing to go to the Y and go swimming in a swimming pool or willing to go where everybody else also swims, you know, we’re willing to go the lake where we have algae and fish and other people and the ocean, and yet if you’re going to be in a float tank all by yourself, you want it to be clean.
James Harder: Pristine.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah. You have people before they even go in, like when I went to float yesterday, in the nicest way possible, you made it very clear, people who go in the float tanks, they need to be clean. You ask people not to wear makeup or lotion or any sort of products themselves, and then you actually take a shower before you get in there, and you don’t put anything else on your skin, and once you get in there you’re as clean as you’re going to be. It sounds like it’s really probably the cleanest situation that any of us are actually going to be in anyway.
Amy Harder: Yeah, absolutely. I think that because floating is such a new concept to people, when they first hear about the idea, they don’t naturally relate it to pools or spas. I think the first thing they think of, because it involves Epsom salt, is taking a bath, and you don’t want to necessarily take a bath that somebody else has been in, and they are just unaware of the filtration and all the cleaning that, you know, all the measures that we do to make sure that the water is clean and safe. I think it’s just their initial reactions that it’s bath water.
Lisa Belisle: Epsom salts are really great for health. This is something that I think our grandparents knew about and great-grandparents, and on a regular basis, I tell my patients that they should be doing Epsom salts. I love the fact that if you go to your place, here it is. It’s all ready and you get the benefit of, it’s magnesium salt, and that’s so good for muscles and relaxation and for nerves and skin.
James Harder: Skin and joints.
Lisa Belisle: Exactly.
James Harder: Everything. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: It’s not just the floating in the water, it’s also the healing power of these salts.
James Harder: For sure. There’s three basic components to why floating is so good for you. The first one is just eliminating gravity. Without the stress of gravity on our bodies, we really have a chance to rest and recover. It helps with natural alignment of the spine, and we don’t realize how much energy our minds and our bodies spend just combating gravity every day. Just to walk around on two feet, you know, we’re constantly dealing with gravity. The next one is a sensory reduced environment. Again, if you turn off the lights and the music inside the tank, and it’s so completely dark, it’s a great way for your nervous system to get a chance to just slow down and not have the fight or flight idea going on. The third one is like you said, the magnesium and the Epsom salt there.
Lisa Belisle: We talked about cleanliness, and claustrophobia is obviously something that people are concerned about. I was able to be in a more of a float room, actually, and I chose that specifically because claustrophobia for me is a little bit of an issue. It’s not huge, but it’s nice that you have in addition to these pods which are basically like giant clam shells, which are somewhere around seven feet long?
Amy Harder: Yeah, the interior dimension’s seven feet by four feet.
Lisa Belisle: Those are already pretty big, but then you also have these rooms, which are like kind of like being in a big closet.
James Harder: Yeah, or kind of like a sauna. The interior dimensions of the float room, it’s eight feet long by four and a half feet wide and seven feet tall. It’s like stepping into a big cube. Yeah, plenty of room for very large people.
Lisa Belisle: I chose it more, I didn’t choose it because of my largeness, although I guess I’m tall enough, but what I liked was I didn’t, just in case I had this weird feeling that things are closing in on me, that I really wasn’t. Your ceiling on that particular room is very tall. I found that, actually, over time, I was able to kind of get used to. I chose darkness, and I was able to kind of get used to the darkness, and you provided, I think you have somewhere around six or eight different types of music that people can choose from or their own.
James Harder: Yep.
Amy Harder: Correct.
Lisa Belisle: I chose the concentration music because I have something I have to work on to write, so I found that that was really also interesting, that I’m still connected with the outside with this music that I’m listening to, but it’s also, there’s really, there’s just me and my thoughts. It must be interesting for you to see people when they go in versus when they come out.
James Harder: It’s really fun.
Amy Harder: It is really fun. People come in, and they’re nervous and curious, and they have lots of questions, and they’re sort of at the regular pace, which is go go go go go, and then they come out of their float, and whether they realize it or not, they almost appear sedated.
James Harder: Lightly sedated.
Amy Harder: Yeah, yeah. They’re just moving slower, they’re telling us about their float, and it’s in this really thoughtful, it’s just at a slower pace. We usually recommend that people sit in the lounge after and have a cup of tea, not just rush right back out into it, kind of reflect on how their body’s feeling after the float and how they’re feeling mentally.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah, and it definitely has that. It is a very kind of soothing environment even outside the float tanks. You have people come in, and they take off their shoes, and the way that you interact is very kind of calming, and you do have the nice homegrown tea….
James Harder: Which we heard about from your podcast.
Lisa Belisle: Which is excellent, which I love because I love tea, so, obviously, if you have the right kind of tea, it’s going to be even be more likely that I’m going to show up and do this again. Then, you also have some lovely books and some very comfortable furniture, and you also have it seemed like really nice people that come in and do this with you.
James Harder: We get so many really cool people. When we moved to Portland, we really didn’t know anyone. We knew a few family members in the area, but other than that, we didn’t know anyone, and we’ve gotten to meet so many friendly, fun people and really feel like part of a community here, and that’s been a lot of fun, walking down the street now and bumping into people that we know and just … It’s really, really great. Floating does attract a really thoughtful group of people. People who want to experienced altered states of consciousness or who want to just better themselves in one way or another, whether it’s physically or mentally. We have a lot of athletes that come and float with us. It’s a great way for recovering after a hard training session and just so many other reasons.
Amy Harder: Yeah, we find that the people that come to float, they really want to be there, so they’re really excited about the experience and it just ends up being a really nice feeling inside the float center. Everybody’s happy to be there.
Lisa Belisle: That’s actually really important, because how often do we get an injury and then feel like, “Oh no, now I have to go to the doctor, and I have to deal with this horrible thing.” You’re talking about, “Okay. Here’s the opportunity to relax and to be healed and to re-center, and I think that to make that conscious decision to give yourself that time is big and not something that everybody wants to do.
James Harder: Most everyone who comes through the door is excited to be there. Occasionally we get someone who may have been tricked or not told what they have been getting into. That’s really fun to watch play out. We’ve had some kind of burly, tough looking guys who have either been brought in by their wife or their daughter, and you can tell that they’re just not impressed to be there, but after their float, they come out and they say, “You know, that was actually really great.” It’s good to just give people an environment that is comfortable and is some place where you can just kind of drop the whole tough guy act and just take care of yourself and enjoy some peace and quiet. Even people who don’t know that they want to float end up realizing that there’s something for them to gain from it.
Amy Harder: We’ve had some people that were really apprehensive and would even look at their partner and say, “Are we here for you or for me?” because it was a birthday surprise or something. They come back on their own after.
James Harder: Those were really fun.
Lisa Belisle: Now you both have a Vassalboro connection. Amy, you grew up there.
Amy Harder: Yes.
Lisa Belisle: James, your grandparents lived next to Amy?
Amy Harder: Yeah, they lived around the corner.
Lisa Belisle: Yeah. So, that’s interesting. I wonder how many people in Vassalboro, when you say, “We created a float center,” I wonder how many people in Vassalboro are like, “Okay. That seems maybe a little less than mainstream, but we’re going to roll with it.” What have people’s responses been?
James Harder: People were really supportive in a strange way. Not unlike Portland, up there, no one had heard of floating. Even when we first moved down here, and we started talking to people about it, maybe one in twenty people would have had any idea what we were talking about, whereas, now, if we told people about floating, it’s usually like one in three or four. It goes, “Oh yeah, I’ve heard of that” or knew someone who’s tried it.
Amy Harder: When we first started talking about floating in Central Maine, the typical reaction was, “What? Why would you want to do that?” Or “Do you think that’s going to be a lucrative business?” They were open to the idea but cautiously so.
James Harder: Which, you know, is part of the reason why we came to do it here in Portland, where there’s a lot of people who are wellness minded. You know, people who are training for marathons and competing in Iron Mans and doing yoga and Pilates and just wanting to take care of themselves. There’s definitely people like that in Central Maine as well, but we kind of wanted to be around a larger population of people with that mindset.
Lisa Belisle: Maybe you can have the Float Harder II center, maybe in the Vassalboro area, once you have been a raging success down in the Portland area.
James Harder: That would be great.
Lisa Belisle: James, you have a background with the army, and, actually, your father was also in the military.
James Harder: Yep. My stepdad was in the army, and my father was in the Navy, and my sister was in the army, and my little brother’s going to enlist in the Navy. We’re a pretty military-minded family. I joined the army straight out of high school, actually finished my senior year of high school in Germany, and it was so much fun to be there, and I joined the army so that I could stay there. I came back to the States for basic training and AIT and then got stationed right back in Germany and did that for a few years and got out and continued traveling around and hiking out in Colorado and back here on the East Cost, just kind of wandering around. Yeah.
Lisa Belisle: When you were doing that, did you have any sense that opening a float center might be in your future?
James Harder: I had never even heard of floating. The biggest thing I thought about wanting to do when I got out of the army, one of my best friends gave me a book about hiking the Appalachian Trail. I read that, and that was what I wanted to do when I got out. I went to work out in Colorado for a while and save same money and then came back to the East Coast and just hiked little sections of it here and there and did some other hitchhiking and backpacking around and had a great summer and then re-met Amy that summer. We had known each other when we were kids but hadn’t seen each other in about a decade. Then we got back together, and then in 2013 we hiked the Appalachian Trail in its entirety together.
Lisa Belisle: What was that like Amy?
Amy Harder: Well, it was one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. I didn’t really even have an interest in doing it. When James and I got together about eight years ago, he was talking about the Appalachian Trail and how it was one of his dreams to complete the whole thing, and I was like, “All right, well, you go,” and then he started saving money for it, and the time was getting close, he was going to be leaving, and I thought, “Well, I want to go.” I mostly did it out of stubbornness, just, like, not wanting to quit. It was fantastic. It turned out to be one of the best summers of my life.
Lisa Belisle: You have a history, then, of doing difficult things together.
James Harder: We do.
Lisa Belisle: Which I think is great. A lot of couples, they don’t kind of test themselves the way that you have already tested yourselves with the Appalachian Trail and now opening this brand new business, which is very innovative. How’s it going so far?
James Harder: It’s great. I think it’s really important to test yourself and to accomplish goals together. We’ve gotten to do a lot of that.
Amy Harder: I think that we learn a lot about how to work with each other through these challenging circumstances that we put ourselves in.
James Harder: It definitely brings us closer. On the Appalachian Trail, we saw each other at the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. I got Lyme’s disease, Amy got a MRSA infection. Got a couple of different things that came down on us, but you know, we helped each other through it and recovered and just kept on going and completed our journey.
Amy Harder: When you see a problem in the future, you kind of look back on what you’ve tackled and it’s like, “We got this.”
James Harder: No big deal.
Amy Harder: Yeah.
James Harder: That said, starting a business was definitely another very trying adventure. It’s been difficult, but we’ve had the opportunity to work with some really great people along the way, like the lender we worked with from Bangor Savings, a score counselor from that organization. We’ve had a lot of support, and it’s been fantastic.
Lisa Belisle: Is it scary to do something that hasn’t been done on this scale in Maine?
James Harder: I think it was initially, but the response already is really positive, and I don’t know, we love it, and we get to float pretty regularly. That definitely helps with our own anxiety and our own stress.
Amy Harder: It was intimidating, but the way we looked at it is that we were just going to put our all into it, make it the nicest experience that we could for people, and give the best customer service possible and hope it works because, I mean, at that point you’re invested.
James Harder: Really, we kind of thought, you know, we were in our early 30s. If this doesn’t work out, we’ve got some time to bounce back from it.
Amy Harder: Yeah. We were pretty unhappy with what we were doing with our lives before, and we figured it could only end up back in that same situation.
Lisa Belisle: That’s a very interesting way to look at it, it can’t get worse, it could just stay the same. That’s a really interesting perspective.
Amy Harder: Although, I suppose it would be worse with the debt.
James Harder: We’d be paying up a mountain of debt.
Lisa Belisle: It’s not going to be worse because it’s going to be very successful, I can tell. Amy, what was your background? You weren’t military.
Amy Harder: No, I got a teaching degree in Connecticut, and then when we moved out west, I thought maybe I could find a teaching job up there, but it was just really challenging to break into that industry, and I ended up never using it, so I was bartending for the past seven or eight years, and it just wasn’t very fulfilling. It’s certainly fun, and it’s fast money. It leads to a flexible lifestyle, but it’s nothing that I wanted to do until I was 40.
Lisa Belisle: It probably helped you with your customer service skills, I would think, because it seems like that’s the type of thing that you have to be very good at if you’re going to be a bartender long-term.
Amy Harder: Yeah. I certainly did learn how to interact with people, and even in their altered states, and keep everything calm.
Lisa Belisle: That’s actually really interesting now that you used to deal with altered states as a result of alcohol, and now you deal with altered states as a result of the magnesium saltwater.
Amy Harder: This is much more pleasant, and it’s not ‘til 3 in the morning.
Lisa Belisle: Right, but you do, I was really impressed with, you have very long hours. What I love is, you can actually book online, so you can see what tanks are available, and you have hours that go, I think, as early as 6 in the morning and into the evening. How late are you open?
James Harder: The last float begins at 8 p.m. and the first one starts at 6. The reason for that is that people love floating at all different times of the day. Some people like to come float before they go to work to kind of start their day in a real centered, positive mindset, and then other people like it at the end of a hard day to just go home and relax after their float and drift off to sleep and everywhere in between.
Lisa Belisle: You’re actually open six days a week.
James Harder: Yep. We’re closed on Wednesdays but other than that, we’re ready to get you floating as much as possible.
Lisa Belisle: You also have, James, a Northern Maine connection. I understand that you were up in the Greenville area over Thanksgiving.
James Harder: We were, yeah. Just outside of Greenville in Shirley, Maine. My grandparents have a camp that they built when I was a kid, and my grandmother and my grandfather have been hunting up there since they built the place. He passed away a couple years ago, and now I get to go up there and go hunting with my grandmother and keep her company out in the woods. It’s been a magical place for me ever since I was a kid playing with wooden swords and amongst the trees to now just getting to spend time with family and relax by the fire. It’s just a great place to be. It’s one of my favorite places on the planet.
Amy Harder: It’s great because there’s very little cellphone reception, so even though we were just there for one day, it was nice to not be dealing with technology and just sit by the fire and kind of slow down a little. It’s funny, we’re offering this sensory deprivation service to the community, but running a business we were finding is so much overload, sensory overload and yeah.
Lisa Belisle: Especially in the early stage where you probably do a lot of the stuff yourself.
James Harder: We try to do as much as possible. Amy’s been doing a lot of the graphic design work, the web development work. We try to do most of the marketing ourselves or work with people, like here at this publication, just figuring it out as we go. Neither of us have any real background in business, so just kind of learning on the fly and having fun with it, but it’s really great to just always have something more to keep learning.
Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting when you describe nature and being in a place where you can sort of let go and relax, and Maine is really known for that. I mean, when you get out of the middle of the city, you really have access to, I wouldn’t say it’s sensory deprivation, but it’s definitely this expansiveness and it’s the same type of thing that you’re describing when you get inside a float tank. They’re sort of two opposite ways of providing them, in nature you have birds and grass and leaves and trees and things like that, and in your float tanks, you have, it’s just the water and the person and the tank itself. I think Maine is a place where people do actually come for this sort of thing.
James Harder: It’s a great way of looking at it. I never thought about it that way. People definitely do like to have the solitude and the relaxed state here in Maine. Yeah. I guess what we offer really goes hand in hand with what a lot of people are seeking.
Lisa Belisle: What are your hopes for the next year as a brand new business in putting something out there in the world? What do you want to see happen?
James Harder: I want to see as many people come in and float as possible, and not just for the financial compensation of it, but just to see the look on people’s faces, and another reason that people come and float with us is for chronic pain relief, and we’ve had people come out of the tank and tell us that right after their floating or during their float or for a couple weeks after is the first time that they’ve been without their pain, and to be able to see that in people is just so wonderful. It makes all the long hours so worth it. Yeah. I want to see a lot of people floating and spreading the word and enjoying it.
Lisa Belisle: Amy, do you think that the teaching background, and I understand that you didn’t use your teaching certificate or background, but do you think that this has had some positive impact on your ability to educate people about floating?
Amy Harder: I think so, in that my customer service skills, I feel like it takes a lot to get somebody through their first float. There is a lot of little details that can make your float much better. For example, just keeping the saltwater out of your eyes and mouth. It’s really not a pleasant experience. Yes, absolutely. We need to educate people on how to float and how to enjoy their float so that they’ll be interested in trying it again to experience the cumulative benefits of floating. Absolutely, my background has helped to shape how we run our business.
Lisa Belisle: If you have any idea that you might want to do this, then probably the best thing to do is to maybe look on the website, maybe give you a call …
James Harder: For sure.
Lisa Belisle: If there are some things that medically might disqualify you, then have that conversation with your health care provider, but it doesn’t sound like there’s too many different things that are going keep people from floating.
Amy Harder: No. Usually, what we tell them if they do have medical questions is that, talk to your doctor, you’re going to be lying in about 1,000 pounds of magnesium sulfate in warm water. We tell them the temperature, and then they can just discuss that with their health care provider and make an informed decision that way, because we’re just people that own float tanks.
Lisa Belisle: As a doctor, there aren’t too many different things that I can think of that would keep people from doing it because it seems like a pretty, even somebody asked me, “Well, what happens if you fall asleep? Will you drown?” I can’t see that happening because you’re so buoyant. It’s like floating in the dead sea. The salt content is so high, and your body would just wake you up anyway.
James Harder: Falling asleep is perfectly safe. Sometimes I get in there and sleep overnight in the float tanks which is really fun. I have crazy dreams, just it’s a great experience. Because you are so supported, if you do fall asleep, you won’t roll over, because there’s nothing to really push off of. You’d really have to try to roll over and if you did roll over, you’re going to get that saltwater in your nose and your eyes, and it’s going to wake you up pretty quick. Inside the tanks we do have a spray bottle full of fresh water for those inadvertent situations, but you can rinse your eyes with that, and you’re all set to go again.
Lisa Belisle: Very good. I hope that people will take advantage of floating and your Float Harder Relaxation Center. We have been speaking with Amy and James Harder, who opened Float Harder earlier this year in Portland. I really wish you all the best. I will be back again looking for those flashes of insight and maybe the chance to cross the country in my own Winnebago. Thank you for coming in and for providing this to us.
James Harder: Thank you.
Amy Harder: Thank you.
James Harder: Thanks for having us.
Lisa Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show #273, Read and Relax. Our guests have included Josh Christie and Amy and James Harder. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see my running, travel, food, and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We would love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed our Read and Relax show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of Berlin City Honda, The Rooms by Harding Lee Smith, Maine Magazine, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music have been provided by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Paul Koenig. Our assistant producer is Shelby Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas, Rebecca Falzano, and Lisa Belisle. For more information on our host production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com. Thank you for listening to Love Maine Radio. We hope you can join us for next week’s program.