Guests

Announcer: 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 physician and editor-in-chief of Maine and Home+Design, Old Port, Ageless, and Moxie Magazine. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 351, airing for the first time on Sunday, June 10, 2018. Today, we speak with Brian Andreas, a master storyteller and creator of Story People, and Fia Skye, a teaching artist and founder of A Hundred Ways North. We also speak with Kat Frati, owner of grownupgirl.com.

Thank you for joining us.

Announcer: Grownupgirl.com, where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life, free advice, workshops, and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area.

Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port, 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the works of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space, including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Brian Andreas is a master storyteller and creator of Story People, and Fia Skye is a teaching artist and founder of A Hundred Ways North.

Thanks for coming in today.

Brian Andreas: Yeah. Thanks for having us.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: You both come to Maine relatively recently, I believe.

Fia Skye: Yes. We had a workshop at the Telling Room last September in 2017, and we found a place to rent and we were here by October 1.

Brian Andreas: Yeah. Well, we’d been looking for two years. We’d been driving all over the country looking for a place to call home. We had such fun here, and it was such a gorgeous fall that we assumed that that’s what weather would be like all the time.

Fia Skye: Right.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Ah. That is really the joke’s on you.

Brian Andreas: I know.

Fia Skye: It worked out.

Brian Andreas: It was interesting. It was an interesting transition.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Why storytelling? What is it about that particular genre that has appealed to you?

Brian Andreas: You want to take that?

Fia Skye: Yeah. Well, for me, it’s very … I spent the last 20 years balancing life as a professional actor and then teaching in academia. I just recently left to go ahead and freelance and do all of that, take all of those skill sets that you use in performance about communication and story and body and voice and take it into daily life because it’s really useful. The thing that we focus on is this idea of how your story about things can actually move the tissues in your body because there’s no separation between your mind and body. The stories that you believe not only anchor your mind, but they actually affect the way you move, and they can age you or they can completely free you up in this, and so we look at story. That’s part of what we do is we look at story and how it affects your actual physiology.

Brian Andreas: Well, and then there’s that other aspect of storytelling, which is that once-upon-a-time thing that so often as adults we become, “Oh, this is real. Oh, this is how it is. This is the truth.” Everything that we know about brain science and everything that we know about storytelling is that it’s true when you say it’s true. Stories are incredibly powerful, and working with Fia and how it affects the body, I come at it more from the sheer lilt of being able to create on an ongoing basis. I’ve been telling stories for forever. Probably I grew up with a bunch of Lutherans who love to tell stories, so I come by it naturally.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Is it because they’re Lutheran that they like to tell stories? I didn’t realize there was a connection.

Brian Andreas: No. It’s funny. I’m not sure that it is. It’s just in my particular experience. I come out of a Norwegian Lutheran background, the whole Garrison Keillor kind of thing. I had a bunch of relatives who were inveterate … Well, I was about to say liars, but they’re really good storytellers. It was always something that thrilled me, to hear what … My Uncle August would tell me about the invention of blood or how to tame a rattlesnake, those things. We’d go, “Wow, that is … I don’t know if it’s true, but it’s really cool.”

Fia Skye: Yeah. It’s just stories are really powerful. They locate us and they guide us and they also, they keep us in a place too.

Brian Andreas: Yeah.

Fia Skye: In a way. They give you this protection and the security and we take a lot of stock in it, and that can hold you sometimes and you shift one element. It happens all the time. Your day’s going in a certain way, a piece of information’ll fly in at you, and it changes the entire context. That’s how story happens.

We look at it, and we think, okay, how can you not get so anchored in space by what you think is true and by these stories that you believe. Then, what are some really creative ways you can play with that so it doesn’t get into this really bogged down, self-help kind of thing that is never just really interesting. No.

Brian Andreas: Yeah. Yeah. The thing that I think we love to play with a lot is that stories are fluid, and yet, the things that, as Fia says, that hold us in containers, this is an intimate space that we live in. Lovely, but when we stop moving that, stop remembering that we can make a different story, we lose our own ability to function in the moment. That’s where we love to play with it is stories constantly being fluid and in response to what’s going on, like Fia is saying, a piece of information comes in. Suddenly, this person you’ve been having difficulties with for months, all of a sudden, you see them as the child they are and how that they’re really doing the best they can. You have a completely different story about them and you treat them differently because of it. It’s intriguing. We both love stories.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in this in large part because of all the time I spend as a doctor and knowing that people’s … What you’re saying is absolutely true, that people’s stories really impact their health, they really impact their bodies. When someone stays stuck in the way they frame something for maybe decades, it can negatively impact so much of their inner and outer lives and the people around them. It’s been really interesting to see when something shifts. They come in and all of a sudden, things are so much better for them. When you parse it out, it often is because either they’ve gotten a new piece of information, as you said, or they’ve reframed the way that they’ve dealt with it.

Fia Skye: Right, and it can happen quickly. That’s the exciting thing, is that you can do this today. It’s not as if this is a 12-step program, it’s going to cost you so much, blah, blah, blah, and this much time. It really is just like flipping a switch and saying, what if? What if this is also true? Or what are these ways that you can really basically get beyond your opinion of something and look at … We kind of play with it. Again, this comes from what … He’s been writing for years and drawing and an artist, and so he comes at story in this really beautifully, visual way. I come at it through words as a text coach. I look at it, and I think, well, what are the non-negotiables? Well, okay. Well, the day. Whatever day is, that’s non-negotiable.

Brian Andreas: I totally agree with you because how often do we just, as an example, how often do you go … You’ll be in a checkout line and you go, “What day is it? What day is it?” Someone will go, “It’s Thursday,” and you go, “Ah, I totally thought it was Tuesday.” No, the day isn’t negotiable. It’s what-

Fia Skye: Right, kind of story or we can say that, yes, we’re in Portland, Maine, so there is that. Then there’s that even when you get into a relationship and you say, “Well, this is my husband, and this means this,” is not true, really. You can say, “Okay, yes, they were married on this day and this is when whatever.” Then, beyond that, everything is really opinion, and it’s all shades of gray.

See, I think it’s fascinating too, because as soon as you get locked into this idea of what a habit is, which is just simply choosing the same thing over and over and then creating myelin, and then the body memory is something like that. When you introduce something new, it’s like a whole world opens up, and that can happen at any age, in any relationship, even with your job and everything. The thing that’s really fabulous about it is that it’s empowering because you’re the only one that can do it, because you’re the only one that can really … Because the mind and body are linked, as you well know, you can’t lie to yourself. You can have all the mantras you want all over your walls, but if you’re not actually behind it, your body knows it. There’s this chaos and this collapse.

Brian Andreas: Well, what’s the thing that you had said, that when you were first starting the Alexander work, going, “Oh, I had a different sense of muscle and skeletal relationships, and so my body was trying to do that even though it’s not possible.”

Fia Skye: Right.

Brian Andreas: You get a tension in there. When we have an idea of how things are and it’s not actually the reality of it, your body’s going to do its best to try and, to back you up, even if it’s not possible. You’re carrying tension in some weird ways because you’ve said, “Well, this is how I function best in the world.” That is not true.

Fia Skye: Right. There’s a balance between how the body actually works and then what you do in life.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Tell me about the Alexander work that you’re doing.

Fia Skye: I’m in the process of certifying in this particular technique. FM Alexander was an actor, Australian actor, at that time, and kept losing his voice onstage. He was trying to figure out why, and he went to doctors and he’d try all of these different things and it didn’t stop it. He went into this lifelong inquiry that basically the way you use your body affects the overall quality of function of living.

He looked specifically at the spine and skull relationship so that if there’s any sort of pressure, it impacts the whole rest of the body, and that affects the way that you function. Not just with grace and flexibility and adaptability, but because the mind is connected to it. I could have a thought that has tension that’s going to ripple all the way through my tissues. It’s really about not just ease and grace and moving the way that you are originally designed to move, but it’s also keeping a flexible space and flexible thought at the same time. It’s very much psychophysical work is what it is. A lot of people use it for performance, a lot of musicians, dancers. You get a dancer that says, “Oh, I should be able to move like this,” and you look at the actual structure of the body and think, your body’s not going to move that way you want it to. This is where it is.

Brian Andreas: But I have a vision. It’s like, yeah, mm-mm.

Fia Skye: Right, but what I love is when I’m walking up the stairs, and I think, well, how many times do I walk up this three-flight of stairs, this house we live right now? And I think over time, if I’m not doing that with my physiology in mind, that’s going to impact my joints, especially over years. We find that these daily moments are kind of like connected tissue in between the big, extraordinary events, but we don’t always think about these little moments between the hallway, between here and here or getting from work to home. Those in-between moments really make up the bulk of a life. If you can be in those with grace and awareness, it changes the way you are. When you’re more balanced, you feel good, you’re kinder.

Brian Andreas: Well, and-

Fia Skye: You can adapt more, and it’s a lot. I don’t know. I think it’s the secret to world peace.

Brian Andreas: I would also throw in the thing that you just said, that we, our stories tend to focus on the dramatic lightning-bolt moment, like … that’s now suddenly understand everything. Yet, the majority of our life is those quiet moments, so why wouldn’t we orient our stories around the beauty of those moments so that we’re actually in our story regularly as opposed to waiting for that moment at which our life really starts? How often do we get stuck in the, well, my real life is going to start when I do this, or when I do this, then I’m going to be able to do that? Right now, we’re sitting here where it’s lovely, simply sitting here, and you can just feel the being here. Why wouldn’t we have a story about that? That’s the intersection of some of the things we do.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Is there a story that the two of you could share with people who are listening now?

Brian Andreas: About … I’m not telling you my story.

Fia Skye: About …

Brian Andreas: You could use it against me.

Fia Skye: About what? About in …

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Just as a good example of the type of work that you do when you are doing a workshop, for example. Do you actually use a story and say, “Let’s pick this apart a little bit?”

Brian Andreas: Well, the thing that comes to mind isn’t actually something that, what we did in our workshop. I was at a meeting, a seminar, a while back and a woman got up and said, “I come from a family where I wasn’t loved. Everyone ignored me all the time, absolutely all the time. Now, my mother, after 20 years, has been contacting me, saying that she wants me to come to Christmas, and I’m not going to go to Christmas where they’re just going to simply ignore me and not love me just like they always did.”

We kind of walked through that, and so my friend said to her, “So, your mother is asking you to come, specifically to come so that she can see what you’re up to and she can tell you all the ways she loves you and misses you.” She said, “Yeah, but I’m not going to fall for that. I’m not going to fall for that at all.” He went through a little bit more, a little bit more, and finally he said, “So, what do you think?” Says, “I think my mom loves me and I haven’t seen it for a very long time.” You could see the change in her body, because instead of that compression of being, “I’m not loved and no one …” It’s like, phew, suddenly you’re not carrying that anymore. That’s a way that stories work.

Fia Skye: I would say in terms of a workshop, there are a lot of creativity workshops out there right now that work a lot with imagination, but what we also look at is how are you holding a pen and how are you sitting, and where is the actual flow in your body? Is your whole body writing? Because any time you breathe, your spine is moving, and if your whole body rather than I have to get my mind, my mind, and even when I do that, it scrunches my spine and I get a little close to my screen or I curl up.

And you think, wow, wow, what if you open all of this up and then start writing? What part of you physiologically actually needs to … Just really the tip needs to hit the page and create little scratches that then later we’ll look at as language and words and thoughts. How can we stop pressing in? We have this thing with our relationship with our cell phones that really closes us in and forward and down. You look at these habits when we’re creating things, when we’re cooking, when we’re having really important conversations with people we care about, and we’re actually physically making ourselves smaller.

One of the things we do in our workshop is we kind of pit you into that, actually. We pit you in your habit, and then we say, “Hey, what if … How else can this look? Can we physically offer some other possibilities in this moment that then you can choose from?”

Brian Andreas: She does something called ghosting, where she’ll move through the workshop while people are doing what they’re doing, will just touch them lightly and go, “Well, what about that?” It can be really irksome, too, because when I’m typing and I’m going … and pounding the keys, she’ll go, “You know you could simply just touch the key,” and it’s like, “Yeah, you don’t understand what I’m writing right now.”

Fia Skye: It changes what you write, I think. I think that it’s all connected, and I’m just curious. It’s like, oh, okay, wait. If I read that email, can I open up more? What happens? When the moment when I want to close, what happens if I just allow it to hold the whole thing to be in the space with me, and remember I’ve got three-dimensional space and all of that, so-

Brian Andreas: Someone

Fia Skye: It’s stuff you already know how to do. It’s just reminding you. That’s it.

Brian Andreas: It’s a practice. It’s the thing that we’ve been seeing is that you can get the information all you want, but if you don’t practice, it’s not doing you any good. We really do focus on let’s get you into a practice for you. Not, oh, do these five steps and your life will suddenly open up and there’ll be butterflies everywhere and bluebirds like a Disney film. No, it’s what’s a thing that you feel good right now when you do it and continue to do that and how do you remember that. So, pretty simple.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Is it also that telling the story in the first place has power that maybe people don’t recognize? Because there are times when I have been with people who have a story that’s locked so deeply inside of them, they don’t even recognize how much of an impact it’s having. When they start to write it down or when they start to talk about it, something really shifts in the way that they interact with the world.

Fia Skye: Yeah. That’s a great point. It is a great point, because I don’t know how many times we hear, “Oh, it’s just the way it is. It’s just the way it is.” You think, well, it’s going to continue to be that way as long as we say that. We’re speaking it. We are creating existence. We’re creating history with every choice we make, and then all of a sudden wondering why that’s our history.

Brian Andreas: But there’s-

Fia Skye: Absolutely, you hang the words in space and you can see them.

Brian Andreas: It also sounds like you were saying that sometimes people aren’t even addressing the fact that there’s a story, so they have to speak it first. There is no one size fits all on stories, but I think there is a being in relation to … How do you say that? Not overly abstract, but it’s being in the now of your life. If you’ve never spoken your story, a good place to start is speaking your story, but after you’ve spoken that story a few times, a good place to be is, is that story even true?

You can’t be at that place, is that story even true, if you’ve never, ever spoken the story. At the point where we’re at, I make up stories constantly just to try it out, because, oh, well, what if my story is I’m actually eight feet tall, but I’m in a 5’10” body? You can play with that. it’s not true. I know it’s not true, but I recognize stories are completely fluid, so I’m at a different place in story. I wouldn’t expect somebody who’s never, has had trauma or assault, who’s never, ever said anything, I wouldn’t expect them to be in the same place around story that I am.

Fia Skye: Right. Sometimes creating a little bit of distance, you take a universal story. You take someone else’s story and you say, well, let’s just look at this, and that extra bit of distance, there’s enough of a gap where someone can navigate their own space between. It just kind of depends on the workshop. As you know, it depends on who you’re working with, who comes into the room, about which doorway you take, but it’s all the same room basically.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: As we’ve been talking, I was thinking … I don’t know why this came up in my mind, but about watching specifically young women who are maybe asked to come up on a stage, to accept an award in a way that so many of them … I have two young daughters. Well, they’re not young anymore, I guess. One is 22 and one is 17, but I’ve watched them as young women.

Brian Andreas: Oh, that’s still pretty young.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Yes, exactly. But I watched them through their very young stage to their young woman stage, and I saw this over and over again, that young women tend to hunch down. They try to make themselves smaller, especially the tall women, tall girls. As a tall woman, I’ve done this myself, where you figure if you just hunch over that maybe you won’t take up so much space. What you’re saying about the way that we even arrange our bodies in the world is going to change the way that we interface with it and really change the way that other people interface with us.

Fia Skye: It’s remarkable. The other thing that happens, look how many photos there are with women with their head tilted, where they’re still making themselves smaller. It’s just to the side, a little bit to the side. You have what I think of as physical qualifiers in the same way that we say, well, I just … I was like … It’s just less direct, and it’s a bit of an apology and it makes you a little bit what you think is nicer or kinder, a little bit more able to be dealt with. But it’s not altogether true, and there’s a squish in the spine and a little bit of a tightening, and I think it is a filter, and I don’t think we need them. I don’t think we need them, because I think over time, the doctor you know. Over time, that patterning begins to grow, and it actually changes your bones, moving your bones.

You think, what if there’s another way? But, yeah, absolutely. I see that with young women all the time. I hear baby girl’s voices where I think, wow, do you know you’ve got a two-octave range naturally and just what if you use it every single day? What would that be like? How would that be different for you and what might that feel like, and how might you move through the world, and what kind of permission might that inspire in someone else?

I think it really, really matters, and this weirdness about gender identity right now, too, in terms of what strength looks like and what it sounds like. I think we’re in a really fabulous place to explore a whole new way of being, with all of this, a great striation of generations right now. It’s an incredible place of possibility.

Brian Andreas: From a young male standpoint, different things happen, but still the same thing. It’s like trying to … ways of being less direct about what’s going on. Young males tend to be more … What is it? Your third, your first [crosstalk 00:24:08]

Fia Skye: Well, there’s a sense of where women tend to cave. Young men, this is totally a gross generalization. It’s not true all the time, but sometimes there’s that puff-up, right? There’s that build-up of the pectoral muscles so that there’s almost like a shield. Right?

Brian Andreas: It is a shield from an experience of male. It is, it’s a way to shield.

Fia Skye: There’s a shield. Right? What that does physically is you’re physically less flexible. Again, the mind-body, if you’re physically less flexible, there’s a really good chance that you might emotionally or mentally be less flexible. What is this idea of being … Vulnerability is a scary word, but really, it’s just available to be influenced, being willing to be in the space in a place of equality.

Brian Andreas: Fia often talks about wanting to work with young women, though. Watching, we’ll see someone, or when we went to TED, and see the way young women will present, and it’s like … Because it is, in some ways it’s very simple. When you catch someone doing something with their body, you go, oh, we can unwind that thread. We can follow that and go where is that? Where’s the story you’re carrying about that, that that is a solution, because that’s one of the Alexander things. There’s nothing wrong. It’s all a solution to how you see the situation at the moment. You’re solving something. Are you solving what’s in the space, or are you solving something that you’re carrying from 10 years ago, though? That’s the question.

Fia Skye: Right.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: You have done a workshop with the Telling Room. What is next in your … What’s in your life plan?

Fia Skye: Well, he’s working on a couple of different books here, some in the genre of Story People, and also a novel, which you can talk about.

Brian Andreas: You can write that down. I’m not talking about it.

Fia Skye: You’re writing. You’re writing.

Brian Andreas: Yeah. I’ve been doing a lot of writing. I guess the easiest explanation is that I’m listening for where I’m headed, because I don’t know yet. It would be lovely. I’ve never been one of those people who have the idea and then go and execute it. The idea is an excuse to start figuring out what the real thing is. I’m in the middle of figuring out what that thing is. Then as far as workshops, we had been setting up some around the country, but then Fia decided that she was going to have her hip operated on.

Fia Skye: Yes. I’ve been having some … Yeah, yeah. But it’s great. I just spoke with a woman in Charlotte, and I’m setting up something down there in April that weaves together silent narratives and some of this work. Then we’re going to talk to Celine actually about offering something else in the Telling Room, perhaps here in the spring, a three-day workshop on story and body. We’re navigating that. Within the next, hopefully, two weeks, we’ll have those up on the site ready to go.

Brian Andreas: The thing that I would say, that even as we were driving over, we like to do the thing that is really intriguing to us. We’re not really all that good at going, “Well, now this is what we’re known for, so we should do 12 of those next year.” We’re not really all that interested in that. We’ll take what are we interested in, then let’s do something on that.

Fia Skye: There’s a bigger conversation about what’s happening in the world, so that’s one of the spaces. That’s one thing. I was speaking with this woman who was at a yoga studio, and we were just talking about who are the women that are coming into the room and what are the questions they’re having and what kind of classes are they signing up for and what seems to be in the space. You read the newspaper all over the country and say what are the dialogues that are happening and saying what kind of spaces do we need to hold that are-

Brian Andreas: And what are the conversations that aren’t happening, too.

Fia Skye: Yeah, that we want to have. We’re not trying to repair anything. We’re actually moving forward. There’s a lot of listening right now and saying what do we want to be talking about and what are the words we want to be using? And how do we want to be in space together and how can we facilitate a space where that can happen? It’s a little hard right now to get ahead, too far ahead, because every day there’s a big title in the newspaper that changes, piece of information flies in, and it just shifts things a little bit.

Brian Andreas: The short answer is we have no idea.

Fia Skye: Yeah. We’re in motion. We’re in motion. Exactly. We have them listed. We’ll have them listed on the site, though.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Brian Andreas, who is a master storyteller and creator of Story People, and with Fia Skye, who is a teaching artist and founder of A Hundred Ways North. I look forward to, I guess, seeing and hearing where your path takes you. I really appreciate this conversation today. Thank you for the work you’re doing.

Fia Skye: Thank you very much.

Announcer: Love Maine Radio is also brought to you by Aristelle, a lingerie boutique on Exchange Street in Portland’s Old Port, where everybody is seen as a work of art and beauty is celebrated from the inside out. Shop with us in person or online at aristelle.com.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Dr. Zach Mazone, D.O. created DaySpring lntegrative Wellness in Bath, Maine, with the belief that true health comes from building healthy relationships with your community, with your doctor, and with yourself. As a board-certified family and integrative medicine physician, Dr. Mazone and the whole staff at DaySpring are committed to supporting your wellness journey by providing integrative family medical care, osteopathic manipulation, herbal and lifestyle consultations, counseling, and Wave therapy.

DaySpring offers an innovative membership-based model of healthcare that gives you time together with Dr. Mazone to build a personalized wellness plan based on your health goals. Daily access for acute appointments is available, and you can even schedule a secure video conference call in the privacy of your own home. I know Dr. Zach and his family, and I believe strongly in the personalized, full-person approach to health that he provides. This is why I am encouraging you to find out more for yourself by visiting dayspringintegrativewellness.com, or by calling them directly at 207-751-4775. DaySpring, wellness the way it should be.

Kat Frati is the owner of grownupgirl.com, a blog dedicated to inspiring women of all ages to create sustainable happiness in their lives. She’s currently working on a new initiative of building an online resource of life skills lessons for young adults.

Thanks for coming in today.

Kat Frati: Thank you. Happy to be here.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: I was reading all the things that you have done and gone through, and it’s pretty amazing, actually. You have four kids, two stepchildren. You’re a cancer and open heart surgery survivor. You’re a musician, an athlete, an entrepreneur, a cribbage player, and you’re also a former computer engineer who designed air traffic control simulations for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Kat Frati: That’s me.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: That’s quite the background.

Kat Frati: Yeah, yeah. I also worked on Eartha up in DeLorme.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Oh.

Kat Frati: I designed that. Yeah, a lot of fun projects.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Wait. You designed that enormous …

Kat Frati: Yeah.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Wow.

Kat Frati: I know all the secrets. If you looked at it, it’s summer all over the globe. These are photos of there, and we picked the ones that were the greenest, so there’s only snow in the Alps.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Wow. I guess that makes sense. You’d want it to be as pretty as possible.

Kat Frati: Right. No clouds and no snow.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Right. Huh, that-

Kat Frati: Beautiful. It’s a gift to the state of Maine.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Yeah. Yeah. That’s right down the street from where I live, and every time I get on the highway, I look at it with fondness.

Kat Frati: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: All right, with all the things we just said, how did that get you to a place where you designed Eartha?

Kat Frati: Oh, I moved to Maine and I was a computer engineer. I didn’t really know anyone, so I actually taught computer science at Waynflete a little bit, and then eventually, I just needed a stable job and DeLorme was a fantastic company. They were actually in Freeport when I was there, and so the whole building in Yarmouth, which has now been bought by Garmin, didn’t exist. There was a pit, there was an idea, and I was the project manager for the software. David wanted to build that. I was kind of in charge of parts of it, the data part.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: You grew up in Minnesota.

Kat Frati: Minnesota and Boston.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: You came to Maine a mere 25 years ago.

Kat Frati: Right.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: What was the original connection to the state?

Kat Frati: Oh, it was my husband. We both went to Tufts, and we weren’t dating, but we both met each other later in D.C. where I was doing FAA work. We fell in love and got married and had our first child, and it was a tough time back then. It was Marion Barry was the mayor and caught on TV smoking crack. It was a little rough, and there were over 500 murders. I just got anxious as a new mom and decided to, let’s get out of here.

We looked at Minnesota, and he was from Augusta. At some point, he was in Augusta, so we chose Maine. Being a person who was kind of a gypsy, my father was an executive. We moved a lot when I was younger. I can’t believe I’ve been in Maine for 25 years. It’s just really the prettiest state, and you have the ocean, the mountains, just beautiful. Now, Portland has become an incredible city. I just love it. I like traveling and going to see other areas, but really, Maine is it for me.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: How did all of these different interests and background, how did this morph into what you are doing now so successfully with grownupgirl.com?

Kat Frati: Yeah. There was a point about 10 years ago and my first husband and I, we were together for 19 years and we ended up separating. I had four kids, and I really needed to reinvent myself. Actually, I was this computer engineer for 16 years, and then I had my third child and I was a stay-at-home mom for 16 years, hardest job in the world.

When I got divorced, I said, “Oh, no. I need to reinvent myself,” and I really just prayed and what do I need to do and listened. I put it out there and I listened, and very clearly this idea of helping young adults … my kids were still kind of young … helping them after they’ve left the nest. It came to me and there was a show called Gossip Girl that was really popular, and I was watching that. Then Grownup Girl came up, and I said, “Oh, my gosh, Gossip Girl. We need to make Grownup Girl. It was just so clear to me, and I just had to do it. I needed to do it.

I’ve been kind of dabbling just for probably eight years and learning the technology of getting back into programming slowly. Meanwhile I got remarried. My husband and I started a moving company called Integrity Movers, and we built that from nothing to a million-dollar company within two years. We’ve since sold the company, but it really taught me a lot of good business lessons and just gave me more food for thought to help guide this new generation who really wants to be entrepreneurs. These young adults, they all want to be entrepreneurs.

I have a lot to share, just a lot. And I have four kids who now they have left the nest, so they still need me. I’m not the only … They have friends who need advice, and you think that when you have a kid, you try your best to teach them everything you know, but life gets in the way and you don’t have time to teach them and sometimes they don’t listen or maybe you say it once, but they don’t really learn it. This just is very clear to me that this generation needs help. There’s no home ed classes anymore, so I’m just … I can do it. I know I have enough information and success in my life that it’s time for me to pay it forward and help them.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting that you’ve been through transitions yourself and reinvented yourself continually, and now you’re at a place where you are helping young women who are kind of in a fairly major transition into the next stage of their lives, into adults. Are there similarities between the types of transition that you went through and the types of transition that you see young women going through?

Kat Frati: Yeah. I think my 20s, and this is kind of where we’re at right now, 20-year-old, 18 to 29, 35, were rough. They were rough, and it wasn’t because I had a rough life or a rough childhood, but it was because my father worked constantly. We were definitely well off. I had a nice childhood, so it wasn’t a bad thing. We had nice houses and stuff, but my mom was more into social, so I really didn’t get any guidance from them. When I left on my own, I struggled to figure out money, to figure out … And I got in trouble in a couple of areas.

My father told me, he told me this. He got me into Tony Robbins just by a fluke. He just told me about that. This was back in 1980s, early 1980s, and so I listened to the first cassette of Tony Robbins and I was really hooked on self-growth. That is really what taught me, and over my next 30 years, self-growth and reading books and listening to tapes, I just do it constantly. It helps me to grow and it makes my life a lot better.

I didn’t know that. I learned that the hard way, but now my kids, I’m a resource for my kids, and I see with the Internet, there is a lot more information out there, which is great, but it’s not always good information, and I would like them to kind of figure things out earlier than I did because it just took me way too long. My whole 20s was just … It was fun and it was successful in many ways, but then I floundered in a lot of ways. But that’s okay. It’s okay.

I didn’t really have a good support system, but I am a support system for my kids and I think they’re doing better, but sometimes it’s a matter of pointing them to the right place to find the answers. There’s so much noise out there, so that’s kind of what I’m thinking my websites and my initiatives are a good place where you can go and get real wisdom, really good life lessons, examples, inspiration, encouragement. Yeah, hopefully, they’ll have a little better time than I did.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: What are some of the biggest questions that you find that young women have?

Kat Frati: Yeah. Money, certainly money issues, how do you … I just met with my daughter the other day. Went down to Boston and sat in a little café at 7:00 in the morning, and she said, “Mom, can you help me with my money?” I said, “What’s the problem?” “I don’t have any left at the end of the month,” and she likes to save money. We wrote everything out and kind of created a area where she can start recording her expenses to come up with a budget or at least understand how much she has for disposable income. Money is certainly another one.

Cooking, just eating healthy. A lot of people don’t know how to cook, so I am a type of person … I taught my kids, open up the refrigerator and what do you have in there? Now, they know how to throw something together that’s pretty good. My 16-year-old, she has a curry sauce that she figured out. You can do anything with curry. You can put rice, a little whatever, broccoli or vegetables we have, a little chicken. She makes the best dishes.

The other one is relationships, and I feel like I’ve learned. I’ve been divorced. My husband and I now, we really take time to learn about relationships and about communicating. We go to counseling just to … Not because we have a problem, but because we want to see how we can become better, and we’re really learning some great techniques that I’m able to share with my kids now who are in relationships. A little skill goes a long way. I can see that as something that the younger generation can benefit from that, from those things.

Then just general life skills, how to maintain your car, how to put air in your tire. How much pressure does your air need? Where do you find that information? How to maybe sew a button. Just life skills like that. How to fill out your taxes and stuff. I see those areas are really where I’m starting to concentrate on first.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: It is interesting that the things that you just described, many people just assume, “Oh, well, I should already know how to do that,” or, “I don’t necessarily need to learn that.” Really, what you’re talking about are skills, and how would you know them if you didn’t at least have them modeled for you in whatever family situation you come from or school situation you come from, but hopefully, had some sort of background. How would you otherwise learn them?

Kat Frati: Absolutely. Yeah. Some people don’t even know that they … They’re too afraid of asking. One of the programs that I want to have is called Ask the Expert in these areas where you can submit a question and me or people who are working with me on some, as experts will answer the question and publish it because if you have that problem, probably some other people have the problem. That is going to be an important part of this initiative, is to really address real problems that people have, kind of customize the information to their situation, but then share it because there are other people who have that problem. Good for you for asking and trying to figure it out.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: My youngest is a 17-year-old young woman. She’s a junior in high school, and she and I sat down the other day to help her re-register the car that she drives online. I sat and helped her through TurboTax and all these other things that are so practical and such a nice building block for being an adult. I was realizing this is not the kind of thing that you learn in school.

You really have to have somebody who sits there with you because there’s so many little things that I had forgotten were potentially confusing. Where do you find the numbers that you need to put in online to get this car re-registered, for example. Her question was, “I’m not getting any money back from the state of Maine. I’m getting $10.00. Why should I even file my taxes for the state of Maine?” I’m like, “Because that’s what you do.” It seems really basic as an adult, but in talking to a 17-year-old, it just makes sense that she would ask.

Kat Frati: Right.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Do you find this with your daughter?

Kat Frati: Yeah, I definitely do. I even need help because sometimes I don’t have the answer, so part of my initiative is to help parents as well. This will be good for parents to kind of guide them in teaching, if they want to, their child or their young adult to get the information, because I think it is hard for all of us. It is hard to keep everything together. I often say it’s a full-time job being me. Right? Especially with kids and businesses and stuff like that.

I wake up in my house, I wake up, and I’m like, “Oh, my gosh, I need to … So much to do,” and sometimes I don’t know the answers. Thank God for Google, but wouldn’t it be nice if there was a place where your path to growing up is … You can see where you are on the path and see what’s ahead, celebrate what’s behind, celebrate your successes, and there’s a place that parents and adults, young adults can go to just act as a resource and hopefully have a smoother journey, really.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: You have been a cancer survivor and an open heart surgery survivor. These are very big events. Either one of those is a very big event. Has this caused you to feel as if you have more of a mission that you are supposed to be trying to accomplish in your life?

Kat Frati: Well, yeah, it’s definitely a mission. Like I said, it’s come from some other source that this is … I listen to my thoughts and I listen to my guidance system, and that’s what it’s telling me. Why it’s telling me that, I don’t know, but coupled with my confidence and my achievements … I just had open heart surgery about three years ago, and I’m so proud of myself because I did, I Googled how do you stay calm during open heart surgery? For three weeks … A book came into my life and I read it and I did these meditations and so I was really shocked that that morning when I was in the waiting room of the operating area, that I was calm, generally calm because I trusted. I had anticipated a reward for me at the end for going through this trauma, and it worked. It really worked.

There are techniques. I’m living proof that you can get through major surgery, which was hard, and there’s a whole lesson after that of being in the hospital, being gluten-free, which I am, and not have anything to eat and being six feet tall and not having the bed long enough, to be my own advocate. There’s a whole journey, because I was in the hospital for 21 days, to stick up for myself. That’s a whole nother story. I’m really proud of what I personally have accomplished, but I’m not special. If I can do it, really anyone can do it. It’s really a matter of trusting. That’s what, I’m more of an encouragement for people. You go for it. Definitely you go for it. No judgment. Where you are, you start and just try to do better. That’s kind of what my mission is. That’s what I’m here for, I think, at this point.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: There’s a scale of stressors in people’s lives, and the major stressors are some of the things you’ve just described. Most people will have maybe one or two of these stressors, but you’ve had lots of them. The stressors that can kind of cause us to be ill or can really impact us negatively are things like divorce, moving, having major surgery, having cancer, going through an illness. You’ve had a lot of these, and somehow you are kind of sitting here in front of me almost better than before. Somehow you have been able to be resilient through this. Is this part of what has led to this message of confidence that you are trying to share with young women?

Kat Frati: Definitely. Definitely. How am I here? It’s not because I’m special. It’s because when I was down and got divorced, every night I would study Buddhism. I would learn how to meditate. I’d have my girlfriends over for a nice talk, chat. I did exercise. I got out in nature. I researched kind of for my own success what would help me in this situation. I prayed. I had some dark times. Really, I had some dark times, and I observed what happened when I prayed.

I just kind of developed this awareness around me and what would happen when I said, “Oh, gosh, I don’t know what to do. I prayed to the universe and I don’t know what to do. Tell me what to do.” Then I learned how to listen, and then all of a sudden, all of a sudden, a phone would ring and it would be my insurance company saying, “Hey, do you need some free counseling for being depressed?” What? Happens all the time. Happens all the time.

Once I started to become aware of that, then all of a sudden, my life starts getting easier because now I can ask for things and open my eyes and show up. I have a message of that, too, but I’m not going to preach that right away. That’s going to be by pointing out to these young adults, “Look what just happened to you. Do you see how this is more than you think it is?” Eventually, I’d like to get to that point where they’re realizing that they have everything they need inside them.

Then, you just need to do some tricks, tips, action, recover from failures, and you’ll be okay. Yeah. There’s a lot to this. I kind of say it’s easy, but there is great depth in this wisdom that I’ve gathered just through learning. Over time, it would be nice if these young adults would start going, “Oh, wow. That works for me,” and finding their own path, really, because what works for me might be something different, but there are universal truths that I have learned.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: What you’re saying I think is reminding me that many times, if you just decide, “I’m going to start here. I’m going to go out in nature one day a week,” whatever that is. If you stick with that and you have some success with that, then success builds on success. Rather than rearrange my whole life, I’m going to detox from everything that’s negative and then I’m going to start fresh, which is good for maybe the first day or two after you do that, and then after that, you kind of slide backwards. If you can just pick up a good, I don’t know, a good attitude, a good behavior, a good relationship, it doesn’t take as much sometimes to start as people think.

Kat Frati: Absolutely. Yeah. I say slow and steady wins the race. If you can adopt one new thing a day, and even I’m so busy. I have a couple consultants and I have a couple of things. Realistically, if I get one thing done a day, that adds up. You do consistently one thing for this business or one thing for my own self and my relationship and my kids, one thing adds up to 365 things in a year. That is totally a secret definitely to my success is to keep chipping away at it.

The other thing where I am is I’m 55 years old. My grandmother was 102, and she was very active. I ask myself, what if I live to 105, which is totally reasonable these days, even given my health issues? What do I need to do today to get to 105 feeling good? Wow, when you start looking at it like that, you make different choices today. You pace yourself. I’m now working with some degenerate … Not degenerate. I’m tight in my shoulders, so now I’m going to Cape Integrative over at Cape Elizabeth, and he looks at me and he says, “Oh, my gosh, your muscles in your chest are so tight, probably from the surgery.” I said, “Let’s get this fixed because I still have years, decades left and I want to be vibrant.

You make different choices when you look at that. When you’re 20 years old, sometimes you don’t think that way. You think you’re invincible. But maybe I can get them to think, “Well, hey, do you want to live to 70? What do you want to do? What do you have to do to pace yourself so you’re not burning out?” I had to learn that the hard way, because I burned out at 28 big time, burning the candles at both ends. I’ve had my share of learning that, but, yeah, that’s definitely a great point.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting to me that not only are you raising … Because I still think once our kids get to be older, we’re still sort of raising them. We’re not raising them to be adults, but we’re kind of co-existing, co-raising one another, I guess. But you have four children, and you also have two stepchildren. You introduced a whole new set of relationship, a whole set of dynamics into your life, and that can be very different than having the four kids.

Kat Frati: Yeah.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Through that.

Kat Frati: Yeah. What that taught me is allowing. It’s allowing different personalities, which they are. His kids have very different personalities than my kids and grew up totally different. Allowing how it is and not forcing it to be different and finding a way to love it as it is. For instance, his son, who’s older than my children, had his first child, so we’re a grandparent now. We’re grandparents. Wow. We just allow it. This is what we’re allowing, and my motto is love is the answer. I just love it.

Everything, every decision I make, if I make it with love, it’s always the right decision. If I make it out of fear, not the right decision. If I make it out of jealousy, out of control, anger, anything like that, not the right answer. I always say, okay, how can I, where can I find love in this situation? Building a blended family, it’s been very challenging, but if we focus on the love and find that little bit of, slice of love where we can really start honing in and connecting to, that kind of takes us further along to create continuity and build that connection and that everything you need to build that, keep us together. We’ve been doing that. But love is the answer, really, for me.

Dr.Lisa Belisle: Well, if I wasn’t convinced before, I’m definitely convinced now, and I encourage people to go to grownupgirl.com to learn some of your wisdom.

I’ve been speaking with Kat Frati, who is the owner of grownupgirl.com, a blog dedicated to inspiring women of all ages to create sustainable happiness in their lives. She’s currently working on a new initiative building an online resource of life skills lessons for young adults.

Thank you so much for coming in today. I really appreciate it.

Kat Frati: Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you.

Announcer: Grownupgirl.com, where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life, free advice, workshops, and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area.

Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port, 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the works of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space, including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

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Announcer: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 351. Our guests have included Brian Andreas, Fia Skye, and Kat Frati. 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 our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. 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 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. Thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.

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Guests

Dr. Owen Logue

Christy Gardner

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #350: Dr. Owen Logue and Christy Gardner

Speaker 1: … you are listening to Love Maine radio. Hosted by Doctor Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine in Portland. Doctor Lisa Belisle is a physician and editor in chief of Maine, Maine Home Design, Old Court, Ageless and Moxie Magazine.

Love Maine radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com

Dr. Lisa: This is Doctor Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio. Show number 350, airing for the first time on Sunday June 3rd, 2018. Today we speak with Owen Logue, the Executive Director of the Governor Baxter’s School for the Deaf, Maine Educational Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and Christy Gardner a retired Army veteran who is now co-captain of the US women’s para-ice hockey team. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1: Grownupgirl.com where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple, yet vibrant life through free advice, workshops and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area.

Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine radio. Portland Art Gallery is the cities largest and is located in the heard of the Old Port, 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the works of contemporary Maine artists and hosts monthly shows in its newly expanded space, including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy and Dave Allen. For complete show details please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

Dr. Lisa: Dr. Owen Logue is the Executive Director of the Governor Baxter’s School for the Deaf, Maine Educational Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing on Mackworth Island in Falmouth. He has over 30 years of experience working in education. Thanks for coming in today.

Owen Logue: Thank you. My pleasure.

Dr. Lisa: You’ve done a lot of work in the educational field. I mean, you have a Doctorate of Education from Vanderbilt. You have a Master’s in Education from the University of Maine and a Bachelor of Arts in the University of Southern Maine, but you’ve also done work in social welfare. You’ve done work in special education. What has driven that path for you?

Owen Logue: Well, I think my path was driven largely because of the influence of my family. I was born deaf in Maine and at that time my parents had to navigate a lot of educational opportunities for me because there was a choice made not to send me to a school for the deaf because at that time it was signing deaf, ASL deaf and they wanted me to some day be a spoken language deaf person. There was a lot of challenges around that because there were no such programs and public school didn’t have to take you because there was just no laws in place for that.

So, my parents had to create all these opportunities for me like, speech and hearing centers and Summer programs and eventually they got me into public school. It’s just an incredible effort. And I didn’t know any of this until I was about 21, until I asked my Mother one day and just really discovered the story of my life basically. And that redirected me completely to dedicate my life to making the lives of others better. And so, I started out in social work and it was really hard to do that work, residential work. And I got recruited for a program I teach called Teacher Core and it was a fully funded program to go back to school and I got my special education degree.

So, from there I became a teacher for deaf at Bangor High and that began the beginning of the journey of exploring myself as a deaf individual and to teach three young women in high school that eventually went on to college and then I went on to higher education and became a Director of Disability Services and eventually became an academic dean. Just an amazing journey for my life and I’m so humbled that I’ve had all these opportunities in my lifetime.

Dr. Lisa: So, as you were growing up you didn’t know that your parents were going to these extraordinary efforts for you?

Owen Logue: That’s right. I asked my Mother, I said, “well, why am I only knowing this now?” and my Mother’s response was, “I needed to know that you were okay and that you weren’t going to fall back and realize the true story of your life”. So, part of the story that I haven’t mentioned yes is at the age of six I still couldn’t talk. I only spoke 20 words. I didn’t have a vocabulary. I couldn’t speak sentences even though I had therapy every week and my mother became my therapist, all these things were not making me a speaker.

All of a sudden, at the age of six, my parents took me to Massachusetts Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital because they knew I was deaf but they couldn’t understand why I couldn’t at least speak some language and I was misdiagnosed at that time of expressive aphasia, which is another term for inability to speak due to brain damage. It just speaks so strongly to my parents faith that I would someday speak and it happened shortly after the age of six and it’s an amazing story. There’s a spiritual piece but my parents had a friend went to Rome and met Pope John XXIII and Pope John XXIII did a blessing of a medallion and it coincides with shortly after the blessing that I spoke for the first time. My mother was an amazing therapist and always made me look at her and I heard the cat meow and I turned to my mother and I said, “Mommy the cat meowed like you always said it did”. And I had never spoken a sentence before that so my friend came back from Rome and asked my mother if I was speaking and she said, “yes, why do you ask”. And so, I have this blessing, the medallion I wear every day of my life to try a little bit harder.

So, I’m strongly committed to my life and my life work I guess but it really comes from the work that my parents gave me. So, I asked my mother, “how did you know you made the right decision?”. They wanted me institutionalized at the age of six in Boston and she said, “I saw the twinkles in your eyes and I knew we had to do what we did”. So, my whole journey has been all about giving back, paying forward to my parents for what they gave to me with no regrets. It’s been an extremely rewarding and rich field always. I have friends who have made a lot of money in the business world and they all say that I’m the far richer man for my life work. And I agree with them.

Dr. Lisa: I’m struck by this possibility that at the age of six somebody might have said, ‘oh, this individual has expressive aphasia. This individual essentially is locked in’ and that you could have spent the rest of your life not being able to communicate but being active very active in your mind and what a huge difference that would have made to you.

Owen Logue: Of course. I spoke at a conference one time and this young women in the front row was crying through my speech and I apologized after my speech and she said, “no, you don’t understand, my brother was your age and he was diagnosed as expressive aphasia and he went to that school and twelve years later they apologized because they made a mistake. He never had expressive aphasia”. You’re right, I would have easily mimicked the behavior of all the other children I was around. I wouldn’t know … I certainly wouldn’t be speaking.

So, I know that and I’m so grateful.

Dr. Lisa: Why not do the American Sign Language? Why did your parents feel it was so important for you to speak?

Owen Logue: Very good question and I’m what they call bimodal, which is spoken language and ASL now. But at that time, there was a very divided camp that you were either spoken language, oral deaf or you’re ASL deaf and there was nothing in between. So, it was a very big divide for families. Families had to make a choice. I just didn’t know other deaf people until I was 21 years old. I’ll talk about that but it’s just great the work I’m doing now because children, at a very young age and families have joined together for the commonality of deafness and it doesn’t matter if you’re spoken language or ASL, it doesn’t matter. We all have the same experience.

Dr. Lisa: Has there been any change in the controversy over the technology that now enables people to hear because I know that it used to be that there was a big divide between people who were born deaf and chose to remain deaf and people who were born deaf and chose to have the technology necessary to be able to hear again. Where are we with that now?

Owen Logue: I think we’re just many years ahead. Just by virtue of me being an educational leader now, decades ago I wouldn’t have been considered the likely candidate to be the leader because of spoken language. Like I said, I embrace bimodal, which is the ASL and spoken language. And so, the biggest thing has really been the technology. The cochlear implant has really just dramatically changed the landscape of deaf education and deafness in general. We are able to … We have the newborn grant here in Maine now, the first day of a newborn’s life we know if a child’s born deaf and immediately we bring in our team, an ASL deaf person and a spoken language deaf person into the hospitals so families know what’s ahead of them and we stay with them all the way until they ask us not to be in the lives of the children.

So, that’s remarkable because I wasn’t diagnosed until I was eleven months and it’s not uncommon. I’ve met many adults like myself who didn’t know until they were five or six years old that they had any deafness or anything. So, the cochlear implant is huge. The technology … I brought my first hearing aid to show you later but it’s a body aid and it was one sound for everyone. Now, I have digital hearing aids, which is customized. Bluetooth is an amazing thing. I usually have a Bluetooth device that I wear for phone calls. So, anyone else who wouldn’t know that I’m listening and the sound goes directly to my hearing aids. Everything is just so amazing now. Technology, we can see closed captioning on TV’s. There’s a system called CART where you can have instant court reporting transcription that comes virtually online. It’s just unbelievable what is out there. So, that has made all the difference.

The challenge has been, and I see in this work, is children with significant special needs. They have other issues beyond deafness and that’s what we’re really challenged with now, how do we best meet the needs of the children who have deafness and other issues as well. We’re working very hard at that.

What you’re speaking to, there was a time when they talked about being deaf and ASL only. At one point, deaf marrying deaf was extremely high, like 90 percent deaf marrying deaf but one thing that a lot of people don’t realize is that there’s also 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents. It takes a long time for a lot of deaf individuals to have what I call the ‘deaf experience’. I mentioned that I was 21 before I had that and it was by chance that I discovered that the United States has a deaf Olympic team that competes in an international scene, 2,000 athletes in track and field, for example. I had a chance to represent the United States and that was the first time I had really been in a deaf environment and it was wonderful. I had a chance to qualify three times for the Olympic team and every time I just grew deeper and deeper in love with the culture and my identity as being deaf.

I grew up being almost ashamed of being deaf. I didn’t want people to know I was deaf. I used to wear my hair over my hearing aids and I just totally denied all help and it’s unfortunate. I don’t want that to happen to anyone else in their future.

Dr. Lisa: So, how would you describe the deaf experience?

Owen Logue: For me or in general? Well, the deaf experience is, like you said, before it is kind of a confusion one. They use a term that I like a lot, they call it deafhood and deafhood speaks to the commonality of all of us having the same experience of not hearing. It takes different shapes and forms, you know, we all take different paths along how we get there. The deaf experience, it’s a beautiful thing and when you’re in the company of hundreds of people who are deaf and just conversing and signing. In the Olympic the American Sign Language is only universal to the United States and Canada, so when you go to other countries it’s all hand motions and like a lot of trading. You trade uniforms and trade shoes and it’s just so exciting and just very electrifying.

I love the experience of being in the deaf community. The music, the signing of deaf events is very beautiful. I’m very proud of the staff I work with. I have over 80 staff members I work with and I have a very high percentage of deaf and hard of hearing adults to work with our team and the work their doing is just so electrifying, like I said, the best word I can use.

Dr. Lisa: When I was growing up there was significant sadness around the Governor Baxter School because there was abuse that happened on that island with the children. And this is now decades ago [crosstalk 00:15:30] but it certainly left a legacy that I believe would be difficult to overcome.

Owen Logue: Yes. I’m glad you mentioned that because that was my generation. There were 200 men that were molested by one individual and it is a very dark history and when I was interviewing for the job that came up and the point was made very clearly that we’ve moved on. We don’t want to dwell on that. That’s happened. I’ve worked extremely hard to welcome all deaf individuals to come back to the island. We host a lot of different events on the island, a lot of meetings. We have a deaf cultural week every week in the Fall and it’s just so fun to see a lot of people letting go and coming back and embracing their experience and we have a wonderful museum. Bill Nye the former science teacher has created this incredible museum, it’s one of the best. So, it’s fun to see deaf people from all over the country come to see the museum. And of course Mackworth Island is just incredibly gorgeous. Just the surrounding … Governor Baxter willed his hundred acre land and he gave his Summer mansion and it’s just so beautiful.

Dr. Lisa: So this is Bill Nye the Science Guy?

Owen Logue: No he’s not the … It’s funny he’s referred to as the deaf science guy but he’s not the famous Bill Nye the Science …

Dr. Lisa: So, it’s a different Bill Nye?

Owen Logue: Different Bill Nye.

Dr. Lisa: Different Bill Nye who is also a science guy.

Owen Logue: That’s right. But he’s also … Ironically, Bill Nye is in his 80s. He is a former science teacher, so that happens a lot.

Dr. Lisa: How many students do you have at your school now?

Owen Logue: We have a very vibrant preschool program on the island and that’s roughly 30 students and not all are deaf and hard of hearing, some are hearing. So some families are choosing their children to have that kind of total immersion experience and we want our children to have that experience. It’s gaining a lot of national and international attention for its approach. They have a room where it’s spoken language only and where the hearing teacher for deaf and then there’s also an ASL deaf only teacher who is teaching ASL only. So, when you walk into one room you sign only in one room and then you go to the other room and it’s spoken language only and it’s really gained a lot of attention all over the world. It’s very forward thinking, very innovative and it’s kind of the idea from Karen Hopkins, the Director of the whole preschool programming.

So, it just really embraces spoken language, ASL and it just takes away the challenge of families making the right choices because we document the developments of each child so we can show how quickly they’re learning ASL and how quickly they’re learning spoken language. There’s a movement to encourage children to learn ASL as their primary language from which they then build the spoken language. A lot of research proving that that is the better way to go, so we’ve seen children making great advances by being immersed and being fluent in ASL and then spoken language.

Dr. Lisa: What do you think of this cultural movement of introducing babies to sign language?

Owen Logue: Yeah. I think there’s a lot to … Like I said, the research is really supporting that kind of quickly … I think a lot of families, deaf or not, deaf children, being exposed to any kind of concept. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense if you want to express some basic desires like being thirsty or hungry, et cetera, your dog, your cats. I mean, it’s a beautiful language and it’s very expressive and easy to learn. So, yeah, I think you’re going to see a lot more of that.

Dr. Lisa: Tell me about some of the challenges that you have encountered over the years in education.

Owen Logue: Like I said before, the technology was extremely poor. At that time in Maine we had such few services available. There was only two speech and hearing therapists in the state of Maine at that time, one of them in Waterboro and one of them in Fortman. And there was some extreme financial hardship for families because they had to pay for everything, unless they went to an institution like Governor Baxter’s School for the Deaf or like Clarke School in North Hampton, which is an oral deaf school. If families committed to that institutional piece, the financial piece didn’t often come with that because they didn’t have to pay for all the service. Because my parents were kind of no mans land, so to speak, they had to create their services and pay for everything and it was really hard to do that.

So, the technology is really, really big because I can’t stress enough what it would sound like. If you think about digital hearing aids, it’s sort of like the Bose radio versus what used to be like a transistor radio, like a really cheap sound. So, the richness of sounds is … What we refer to as sound is so great especially with cochlear implants.

So, cochlear implants … Children who are born profoundly deaf and we’re seeing children being cochlear implant by one-year-old now and now which is … We can put hearing aids on two week old babies. So, this whole idea of a life of silence is very rare. There is a percentage of failure for cochlear implants, that’s not a guarantee but a five percent failure rate. So, we have seen children who have been unsuccessful with cochlear implants and that’s unfortunate because that now … You can’t regain that, you lose it and you don’t have it. But for those who can sound, we’re seeing a lot. There are a lot of challenges because language is so driven to the acquisition of spoken language, reading and writing is all based on what you hear.

And Helen Keller was once asked if she had a choice of being the deaf or blind. She said she would prefer to be blind over deafness and a lot of people don’t understand that. I understand that, not that I would want to be blind but the mastery of language and reading/writing, all that really is driven my what you hear. So, it makes a lot of sense to me when I think about Helen Keller’s choice.

Dr. Lisa: What are you hoping to see for the future? What direction do you hope that your students will go in?

Owen Logue: Well, I really like the direction that the organization is going. All across the country, schools for the deaf are not what they used to be. We used to have 200 children on Mackworth Island, that lived on campus and, you know, we don’t have that anymore. We’re now embedded in the Portland Public School System, East End Community School, we’re at Lyman Moore Middle School and then Portland High School and then the PATH Vocational School. So, that’s kind of the trend that we’re moving students into the main, but we have incredible support services for them to be successful in that.

Our biggest challenge here in Maine is that we don’t have enough teachers for deaf, sign language interpreters. I’m fortunate I have a good array of sign language interpreters but statewide we don’t. If you think about the county or down East or the Islands of Maine, it’s really a challenge. How do you get those services? We’re hoping to … We’re approaching an idea of regionalization, that we’re going to regionalize like we do for birth to five year olds. That we can go out and we can provide services kind of in a regional way, that we can provide greater assets to support services for our staff as well.

Dr. Lisa: You mentioned to me before we came on the air that you’re son is a film maker.

Owen Logue: That’s correct.

Dr. Lisa: What has your experience been as a parent who is deaf of a child who, presumably, is not deaf?

Owen Logue: That’s correct. None of mine … I have three children, none of them are deaf and ironically for me my oldest daughter is very gifted trombone player, went to Julliard and that was an amazing immersion for me to be exposed to music, classical music in a way that I could never fathom. I can’t distinguish, for example on a CD what’s the trombone, what’s french horn as hard as I try, I can’t really distinguish that but in a live performance I can see that. So, I’m thrilled that my children have this incredible immersion to the arts. And I credit my community of Southwest Harbor is incredibly culturally rich performing arts based programs. And so, as parents we just nurtured their interest and we can’t really take credit for their successes but yeah.

Dr. Lisa: Are there challenges that deaf parents have raising hearing children?

Owen Logue: Sure. Yeah, it’s not easy. My family has learned to kind of live with my deafness. You know, when you wear hearing aids they’re not always ones that you want to wear 24/7, you can’t really. You can’t sleep with them because they squeak if you sleep them and so frequently they’re off. Then it’s a challenge for my children and wife to communicate with me. They have ways of getting my attention and I’m a very good lip reader and then I usually if I know I’m going to engage in a conversation I’ll put hearing aids back on. So, yeah and I hope … We never really talked about it or seen anything from my children’s point of view of what they gained by the experience of having me as a deaf father but I think they seen incredible energy and persistence, I guess, in terms of just sticking with a goal and working myself through and they know that a lot of things I’ve done in my life have not been easy. And I think it’s made them challenge themselves to do that too, at least I hope so.

Dr. Lisa: You are, or at least at one point, you were a runner.

Owen Logue: That’s correct.

Dr. Lisa: You were a cross country star in college [crosstalk 00:27:18] and then you went on and participated in the deaf Olympics. You still run?

Owen Logue: Yes, I do. That’s me. So, I couldn’t find my niche in public school. Public school was rather hard and a lot of it because people didn’t know what to do. I was basically just given the right to go to public school but I didn’t have any support. I had nothing. My academic experience … I went on the college track because I wanted to go to college. I had two older sisters and I aspired to go to college. My parents went to college and just so hard for me to do what I had to do but I kept persisting that way. I didn’t have very good self-esteem because I felt really stupid and nothing could really master academic but I found that even though I had severe asthma, which in that time wasn’t really treatable. There was no exercise induced asthma, treatments or anything.

So, I found running. That I could run and get sick later and I didn’t really care about getting sick later. It was just so exciting to be part of a state championship team and to have great coaches. And I emerged as a leader and became the captain of a team and took that confidence to another level and became class president and found myself as a leader. And I’ve always had that leadership piece in my life but I attribute that because of the success I had in running.

So, then I had the chance to … So, I always wanted to run the Boston Marathon and I always remembered when I was a child I couldn’t run 40 yards, the width of a football field because I couldn’t do gym. I had to stand beside the gym teacher. So, I always remember that 40 yard, that I couldn’t run 40 yards, that I wanted to run the Boston Marathon. That became kind of a passion and I was driven to that goal. And then, once I experienced Boston, it wasn’t good enough that I ran Boston. Then I wanted to see how fast I could run Boston, so I had some really great years. I ran really fast. And I’m very humbled I was inducted into the Maine Running Hall of Fame.

I just met so many wonderful people along the way. But it also taught me a lot about goal setting and to do a marathon, it made my pursuit of a Doctorate that much easier because I just made everything a mile. You know, every class a mile. Every mile and everything so, it was very manageable and I saw it to the end.

Dr. Lisa: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Owen Logue who is the Executive Director of the Governor Baxter’s School for the Deaf, Maine Educational Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing on Mackworth Island in Falmouth. It’s been a pleasure to speak with you and I really have enjoyed hearing your story.

Owen Logue: Yeah, thank you very much.

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Dr. Lisa: Christy Gardner is a retired Army veteran who was injured overseas in 2006. After recovering from a brain injury she is now the co-captain of the US women’s para-ice hockey team. Thanks for coming in today.

Christy Gardner: You’re very welcome.

Dr. Lisa: And also thanks to Moxie who is your companion dog who is taking a little nap in the corner now.

Christy Gardner: Right, patiently waiting.

Dr. Lisa: Patiently waiting, yeah. Well, she was the star of the show a few minutes ago. Everybody here in the office was pretty excited to see her.

Christy Gardner: Yeah, they were joking about getting an office dog so I might have to bring a puppy next time.

Dr. Lisa: Yeah, you may have to. Do you find that that’s often the case? That she shows up on the scene and everybody just –

Christy Gardner: It’s very hit or miss. A lot of people love dogs and gravitate right to her and, you know, we went to visit my sister at college when she was a Freshman and the football players are the first floor in the dorm and you had to walk through their wing and you get like this 300 pound linebacker that comes out and they’re like, “oh my god, a puppy”. And I’m like “oh my god”, like you think these big macho guys but they still … everybody loves dogs.

Dr. Lisa: Do you ever encounter situations where people are a little concerned or?

Christy Gardner: I wouldn’t say concerned. Maybe some fearful, especially with the larger refugee population. Unfortunately, a lot of them the only dogs they’ve been exposed to were dirty or vicious, whether it’s guard dogs or refugee camps or just stray dogs and stuff like that.

Dr. Lisa: That’s interesting. I wasn’t expecting that answer. I was thinking about just like small children who are concerned about big dogs but that makes a lot of sense that people who have had negative experiences would be really, kind of, a little shy.

Christy Gardner: Yeah, that’s usually more the reaction we get, especially because I live in Lewiston. Some of the folks have been really good at adapting but some of them, you can’t blame them for being afraid.

Dr. Lisa: Now, you’re doing something very interesting with ice hockey. Is this something that you have played all your life?

Christy Gardner: Absolutely not. I’ve been an athlete all my life and I always wanted to play hockey but when I was growing up, like middle school age and stuff, my parents were really worried that I’d get hurt playing hockey. So, we kind of figure I’m kind of beyond that point so I might as well now.

Dr. Lisa: Well, I guess talk to me about that. You were injured in 2006. That really shifted your life dramatically.

Christy Gardner: Yeah, I was injured in the Summer of ’06 overseas and when I met with the polytrauma team at the hospital basically they said that there were so many things I would never do again. They labeled me 100 percent disabled and severely handicapped and from then on it was a battle for a number of years. I spent three years in physical therapy, three and a half years in speech therapy. I still talk with a lisp and stutter sometimes but it’s not bad as long as I’m not tired. You know, finding word choice and things like that is occasionally a struggle. Obviously, my balance is a struggle because I’m a bilateral amputee, so.

Dr. Lisa: I was reading about you and from what I’m understanding it’s not entirely clear what happened that caused this injury.

Christy Gardner: We know what happened but it’s not something I can openly talk about.

Dr. Lisa: Oh, okay.

Christy Gardner: It was overseas on a peace keeping mission.

Dr. Lisa: So, how did that impact you to be in the middle of something that you were voluntarily there for and then wake up and have your life completely changed?

Christy Gardner: I mean, we sign up. The military, the Army right now is a volunteer force so we all sort of know what we’re getting in to and what the risks are but for the most part you expect it not to happen to you. You know, it’s a slim chance that your life is going to be catastrophically changed. Unfortunately, that slim chance was mine.

I don’t think anybody else on our trip got particularly injured. I know a couple guys got like a broken wrist or a concussion here and there but you know, obviously, I think I was the most significantly injured on that adventure.

Dr. Lisa: So, how do you feel the services are for people who have had this type of traumatic injury? As a doctor I’ve worked with people who are part of the VA system and I believe that that has really dramatically improved over the years but I’m wondering, from your perspective as somebody who really heavily used these services for a number of years, how do you feel?

Christy Gardner: I still encourage people to join. One of my friends is almost done with her AIT right now in the Army and she’s going to be stationed with an Airborne division in Alaska that might deploy soon and like I said, we know the risks, we know what we’re getting into but it’s an amazing way of life. The camaraderie and brotherhood in the service is unreal. And then even after that, getting hurt, the support among other veterans is amazing. The support among a lot of our programs is fantastic. I mean, you’ll get, again, hit or miss. My primary care doc is amazing. Every time I’m like, “hey doc, I probably broke this” you know, “hey doc, what about this”. He’s like, “alright what else can we nip in the bud while you’re here that’s nagging or whatever or before it becomes nagging”. But then, of course, you get other people it’s like a battle to get an appointment and services are delayed or you’ve got to fight for what equipment you need.

So, it depends a lot on the people who are there who are passionate about their job. And I think you find that almost anywhere in life.

Dr. Lisa: And how about, I guess, the need for better services for people who have lost limbs. I mean, that’s such a dramatic change. How are we doing with that?

Christy Gardner: We’re doing okay. I think that it’s harder in Maine because we have such an older population or an older veteran population. There are very few veterans my age group with the VA. There are very few females my age group with the VA or females in general.

So, going up to physical therapy, coming off bilateral leg amputations, they basically had me walk back and forth for 20 minutes with a Thera-Band around my ankles and said, “okay, you’re good”. And I was like, “uh, you’re kidding right? I had to come all the way here for this”. I’m an athlete. I was in the Army and I met the male PT standards because I never wanted anybody to look at me and say you’re only here because you’re a girl or whatever. I always wanted to be the best I could. So, to come home and be injured, I still want to push those limits, you know. At least it doesn’t hurt now when I stub my toe, why can’t I jump around more?

Dr. Lisa: Why did you decide to join the military in the first place? And why be a military police officer?

Christy Gardner: I don’t know I guess I’ve always just been driven. I like to be outdoors and active and I really don’t sit still well at all, so an office job is not for me. But my Grandfather and my Uncles were in the Marines. I have a couple cousins that joined the Navy about the same time I joined the Army. So, it’s kind of a family thing, a lot of us have served. It just seemed like a great career option to me. I mean, they do take good care of us including apparel. You know, you get issued what you’re going to wear. You get issued a place to live. You get issued everything you need. So, there’s not really a whole lot to worry about other than to do your job.

Dr. Lisa: And what was it about being in the military police that appealed to you?

Christy Gardner: Just that outdoor active thing. The other offers they gave me were like nurse or admin or reception type jobs and sitting still like that is just not for me so I figured at least being a military police is similar to being regular police. You’re foot patrolling, checking buildings, clearing houses, responding to calls. So, it’s a much more active job.

Dr. Lisa: It also seems like it would require some certain amount of bravery? I mean, not only did you volunteer to show up for the military but you also went into a particularly dangerous part of the military.

Christy Gardner: Yeah, I’d say so. I mean, we never get calls to come to parties, that’s for sure. So, it’s more like if someone’s in crisis. If somebody’s life depends on you or a whole group of peoples lives. You know, if we’re manning a security checkpoint it’s for a reason. To make sure that all of our people come through stay safe and I wanted to be able to help ensure that. I never wanted to have to worry for people. I wanted them to be able to do their job safely while I had their back.

Dr. Lisa: How have your parents responded to this change in your life? I’m just thinking about my … I have brothers and sisters who have all been in the military and we had, at one time, three or four serving in the Middle East and when they all came back my mother breathed a huge sigh of relief and if that had been different, I know that that would have really impacted her significantly.

Christy Gardner: Yeah. I do believe it was harder on my parents than it was on me. I know that my Dad cried about it when I lost my legs and that really, really bothered him. I actually lost two fingers early in my career and that was a bigger deal to my Mom. Losing my pinkie was a really big deal to her she said “because her baby wasn’t whole anymore”. You know, as a parent you want to be there to protect your child and she couldn’t so it really, really bothered her a lot. I think now that I’m as active as I am it doesn’t bother her nearly as much. They had the opportunity, my Mom, and some family, to come out and watch me run last Summer, so I was able to sprint and set a couple records that way and just to excel athletically now. And so, for them, it’s been good to see my thrive again.

Dr. Lisa: Well, tell me about that. As somebody who has always been an athlete, how did you need to shift your mindset in order to continue to be an athlete?

Christy Gardner: It was really hard at first. The first few years after I met with the doctors they had gone through a three page list of stuff they’d said I’d never do again. You know, ride a bike, live alone, bathe alone. I wasn’t allowed to swim because if I had a seizure I’d drown, that kind of stuff. So, I was really limited and I kind of believed the doctors that those were my limitations and that was going to be my life now. And then, this other veteran kept bugging me at the hospital, it was an older gentleman with a service dog and we kind of met because of the dogs and he kept saying, “come to this thing with me”. And it was all these sports events and I was like, “they just told me I’d never do any of that again. I don’t want to come watch somebody else do it”. And finally I said, “if I come with you, will you shut up and stop bothering me” and of course he said “yes”.

So, I went and it turned out it was all these disabled veterans that were water skiing and kayaking and being active outdoors again and that was a major turning point for me. From then on it was kind of like we broke that limit, let’s challenge the rest of them and see where I end up. So, basically I’ve broken every barrier they set for me at the hospital. I’ll never wiggle my toes but it’s not really a big deal.

Dr. Lisa: What was the first thing that you embarked upon? Was it the running, was it the … What was the first athletic endeavor?

Christy Gardner: Water skiing. So, I’m not supposed to be in the water or be active and why not be active on the water. Yeah, I got up … They had a boom off the side of the boat and they had me hold on to that and right off the first try, up we went.

Dr. Lisa: Did you water ski before?

Christy Gardner: No. Never.

Dr. Lisa: So, you went from doing something that you had never done before to taking on this new activity with a body that had shifted in your life. That must have felt kind of weird?

Christy Gardner: Yeah it was pretty crazy. I mean, especially because the doctors and everyone had said you’ll never do this, you’ll never do that, you’ll never do this. And then right away, bam, success on the first try. So, it really kind of set the tone from there.

Dr. Lisa: So, why do you think that you, and I don’t know that you can even know this, but why do you think that you got this list in the first place? Where did this come from? Is this their experience based on other veterans who have gone through similar circumstances?

Christy Gardner: I’m not sure if it’s based on what they’ve seen in the results of others or if it’s based on their own assumptions because I’ve met so many people since then that said doctors told them they’d do this, that or the other thing as well and here they are doing it. I think it’s a big problem in our medical community that they assume that because it won’t be done exactly the same way that you can’t do it. I took a kid out and got him on the ice the other day. He had bone cancer in his leg and they told him he’ll never play hockey again. Granted, we put him in a sled but sled hockey is still hockey. It’s full contact and it’s a heck of a lot of fun.

So, why did you have to dash a kids dreams? You know? I wish people would think of that more when they talk to others.

Dr. Lisa: Well, as you’re talking about it I’m thinking about a story that I wrote about Maine Adaptive and Maine Adaptive not only gets people of all ages and all abilities up on skis but they’re out biking, they’re out paddling and they really are at the full gamut of activities.

Christy Gardner: And I applied to Maine Adaptive, and you needed a doctor’s note, and the doctor said, “no, it’s too dangerous” because at the time I had done limb salvage and I didn’t have full sensation in my feet and he was like, “well what if you’re feet get cold, what about this, what about that”. I’m like they do this stuff all the time, they probably know how to handle it. But everyone is so afraid of it that they don’t want to push the limit and see what’s possible.

I worked, I don’t know if you’ve heard of VAST, it’s the Veterans Adaptive Sports and Training at Pineland in New Gloucester. It’s an awesome program. It’s outdoors, as usual. Cross country skiing, snow shoeing, biathlon. They do cycling programs and stuff like that and I helped them with a biathlon camp. We brought wounded warriors up from Walter Reed and there was a gentleman in a sit ski, a younger guy, and he was going really fast and they were like, “dude, you need to slow down. You might crash”. Well, you might crash not you’re gonna, you might. And he’s like, “are you kidding, I’ve been blown up twice I don’t care if I fall over in the snow”.

From a sit ski, you’re literally like 12-18 inches off the floor for cross country. And everyone was so worked that he was going to fall and he’s like “are you kidding me right now, like if you’ve seen what I’ve been through this is so minor”. And I wish more people would take that perspective.

Dr. Lisa: So, why is our approach so delicate?

Christy Gardner: I have no idea. I think everyone’s afraid of stepping on anybody’s toes or if you’ve said, “yes, go do this thing” and then I got hurt and then you’d feel either guilty or liable. Everyone’s afraid of getting sued and stuff like that so they tell you don’t do it just to avoid the risk.

Dr. Lisa: What would you have liked to have heard?

Christy Gardner: Oh, god. Anything about adaptive sports. I didn’t even know they existed, and they basically just told me my life is over, I’ll never be active again, to an active person. That baffles me. How do people … I don’t know. I just don’t know. I interned as a rec therapist at the VA because I went back on my GI Bill and got certified for adaptive sports and I was working at the hospital and I had my credentials on once when I went to an appointment and the practitioner said, “oh, you work here now. What do you do?” And I said, “oh, I’m working in rec therapy” and they go, “oh what’s that?”. I’m like my god, you’re the people that are supposed to refer people to us.

So, I don’t even think that we need more support or we need more programs. We need more awareness because now that I’ve gotten into the field I found out there’s literally hundreds of adaptive sports out there for all ability levels, whether it’s cognitive, physical, anything. There’s so much out there to offer people that the world just doesn’t know about.

Dr. Lisa: But it seems strange to me that we don’t have a greater awareness about this because the Paralympics occur right after the Olympics. So, you have something that is international that’s going on, where would these people all come from I guess if there wasn’t already something set in place.

Christy Gardner: Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of funding and a lot of the adaptive sports are run by non-profits so there’s not a whole lot of marketing. There’s not a ton of money for marketing. It’s do we get another athlete involve or de we get an ad campaign?

So, a lot of time it goes prioritized for the people.

Dr. Lisa: So, if we were able to maybe shift some of the funding away from things that were keeping people in the mindset that their lives were over and towards the things that would put them in a mindset that said your life’s going to be different but there’s some hope here.

Christy Gardner: Yeah. The kid that I was working with, his doctor told him you’ll never be normal again. Like, seriously? He has and implant in his leg, in his femur but he can walk, he can ride a bike. I don’t understand why they had to tell him that. You know? Tell them your life’s going to be different, tell them your life’s going to be challenging. Don’t tell them it’s over.

Dr. Lisa: It is a delicate balance because I was just thinking about a conversation I had with a woman who works in hospice and she said, “on the flip side patients who have been told by their doctors that there’s hope, that they could live anywhere for up to five years and then they find themselves in hospice. They get angry about that piece”. So, it’s a funny line to have to walk. You want to give hope but you don’t want to give too much hope. It seems really situationally dependent and almost an art to that conversation.

Christy Gardner: I would imagine the doctors really have to kind of feel out the person or get to know the person and what drives them. Everyone said that my rehab was so successful because I’m so stubborn. So, pretty much when you tell me “no you’re not going to do that”, I’m going to be like “watch me”.

Dr. Lisa: And also, the fact that you were an athlete. So maybe not every person that comes in is going to want to participate in adaptive sports but for those who do then that’s going to really change the way you talk.

Christy Gardner: Well, and the other thing is that through rec therapy it’s not necessarily just adaptive sports. The rec therapy department at the VA has cooking, arts and crafts, a wood shop, like there’s so much to do to stay busy and they consider it therapeutic activities because you keep your mind engaged, keep your body engaged. Maybe if you had a stroke and you have an arm deficiency you can start working on some of those motor skills in the shop, programs like that. So, it’s really all encompassing in adapting life.

Dr. Lisa: Yeah. I think that is important, I mean, having been to physical therapy, if I was given something to do that seemed like it had a point to it then probably it would mean more to me.

Christy Gardner: Exactly. We could meet the same therapeutic goals through certain sports activities as you could sitting in the therapy room doing little baby exercises that you know you’re not going to do at home. They always give those home activities and I have yet to meet a person that actually does them.

Dr. Lisa: Tell me about your experience with service dogs. Moxie is still hanging out. We were here with Spencer, our audio producer, she looks pretty mellow. I’m wondering what kind of an impact she had on your life.

Christy Gardner: She’s been absolutely amazing for me. I love that she’s got to be touching him right now. She put her paw out on his foot just to hold on. She’s been very motivating as well. So, on the days when you’re supposed to get out and active and do those therapy things and you really don’t feel like it she’ll kind of give me that push like alright let’s go. She’s taking her ball and held it against my leg like get up, come play with me or get her walk, she’ll bounce back and forth and want her walk for the day. So, that gets my walk and my step count up.

She’s been a battle buddy everywhere I go, whether it’s through the PTSD or just knowing you have a friend with you. It’s a pretty big deal to have someone that can do that. And then, for my seizures and epilepsy, she’s able to alert before I have one. So, before I got her I actually had a seizure and face planted into a coffee table and rearranged my face pretty good and had to have surgery. So, to have her and to have that comfort to know that nothing bad is going to happen to me because she’s looking out for me. She’s a pretty awesome battle buddy.

Dr. Lisa: How did you first learn about the availability of service dogs like Moxie?

Christy Gardner: When I was on active duty still at the hospital rehabbing they suggested that a service dog would be beneficial to me and so we started looking into it and applied to a few agencies but they typically have about a 2 year wait, mostly because that’s how long it takes to train a dog.

Dr. Lisa: You also, when I saw you in the airport a few months ago and you and I didn’t meet but I met Louie, the dog that was with you at the time, you also are involved in training dogs yourself now?

Christy Gardner: Yep. I’ve seen how beneficial she’s been for me and how the service dogs that my friends have been hugely beneficial to them and so, I know what the power of a dog can do for your life or for the lives of others and I work for a Labrador breeder and I help with selection. So, I get to choose which litters and which puppies from those litters have the best aptitude to become a working dog and then work with local agencies or even national now, to get dogs into schools, proper training to become service or therapy dogs for different organizations.

Dr. Lisa: What types of things do you look for, as far as aptitude is concerned?

Christy Gardner: A lot of times basic temperament tests. Holding them up and holding them in different positions to see if they’re comfortable with you or obedient. You want the one that has a little bit of curiosity and energy but you don’t want the super headstrong one in the group and you obviously don’t want the most timid one. And then we’ve had a few bloodlines that have multiple dogs that are already certified so we tend to lean toward that line knowing that the genetics are very good.

Dr. Lisa: Tell me about the US women’s para ice hockey team.

Christy Gardner: Para ice hockey is the new name for sled hockey. It is a Paralympic sport, although the women side is not yet participating in the games. The men are over there right now getting ready, so hopefully they bring home another gold in a week or two. But for the women, we’re headed over to the Czech Republic in May for Worlds. We are the defending world champions, so hopefully we can take that back again, beat Canada.

Para ice hockey is basically seated, full checking ice hockey. Even the women’s side is full checking, so you get two short little sticks with spikes on the back end that you push like ski poles and then you flip down and puck handle with the other end where there’s a blade on it. We skate with two hockey skate blades, basically bolted underneath our butts, and you balance on that and that’s how you get around.

Dr. Lisa: How much time did it take to learn how to do that type of hockey?

Christy Gardner: Oh, I was probably awful my entire first year. I actually learned about the sport at a VA Winter sports clinic. The rec therapists in the area host a big event every year in New Hampshire for skiing and snowboarding and then evening after we’re done skiing they introduce new sports. So they did wheelchair basketball. We learned to kayak in the hotel pool and the one night was sled hockey. So, I tried it out and I was on the ice for like 20 minutes and I was terrible but it was fun. And the fact that it was high speed and full contact was really appealing to me for like that competitive, aggressive nature. And so, the group that ran the event loaned me equipment for about six months and I went down to a USA hockey jamboree that they do in Philly every June. It’s basically like a giant camp for the whole nation and anybody that’s interested in sled hockey can come to this week long camp.

And I went and I gave it a shot and the women’s national team’s coaches happen to have been there. So, I got invited on to the team from there. And the rest is history.

Dr. Lisa: How long have you been doing this now?

Christy Gardner: This is, I think, my sixth year.

Dr. Lisa: So you said you were terrible the first year. How long did it take before you actually felt like you had some proficiency?

Christy Gardner: Until about this year. No, I’ve usually been just a wing on the team and I work hard, I skate hard, I skate fast but I’ve never had really skill with the puck and then I started a team up here called the New England Warriors and it’s a sled hockey team for disabled veterans. We actually just won our league last weekend in New Hampshire, so that was a blast. But working with the guys and having to be a role model for them has helped my puck handling skills because I spend most of the game chasing the puck and feeding passes to them and then going and getting it back and trying again and things like that. And so, it’s really helped my confidence with my puck as far as passing and shooting and things like that. So, that’s helped me on the national team quite a bit.

Dr. Lisa: I’ve been speaking with Christy Gardner who is a retired Army veteran who was injured overseas in 2006. After recovering from a brain injury she is now the co-captain of the US women’s para ice hockey team and she’s here with her service dog Moxie.

I appreciate all the work that you’re doing and it’s really an inspiring thing that you’ve come here to talk about today. So, thank you.

Christy Gardner: You’re very welcome. Just try to be stubborn, it’s worked out in my favor.

Dr. Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine radio. Show number 350. Our guests have included Dr. Owen Logue and Christy Gardner. 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 our Love Maine radio photos on Instagram.

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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.

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Our Editorial Producer is Kate Gardner. Our Assistant Producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our Community Development Manager is Casey Lovejoy. And our Executive Producers are Andrea King and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today please visit as at lovemaineradio.com.

Guests

Matt Chappell

Ari Solotoff

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #349: Matt Chappell and Ari Solotoff

Announcer: 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 physician and editor-in-chief of Maine, Maine Home+Design, Old Port, Ageless, and Moxie Magazine. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.

Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 349, airing for the first time on May 27th 2018.

Today, we speak with Matt Chappell, the owner and operator of Gather Restaurant in Yarmouth, and Ari Solotoff, a lawyer with the Portland firm, Bernstein Shur, who has a background in non-profits and the music industry. Thank you for joining us.

Announcer: Grownupgirl.com, where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple, yet vibrant life with free advice, workshops, and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now, to learn about our available programs and classes, designed just for you in the Portland area.

Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest, and is located in the heart of the Old Port, 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the works of contemporary Maine artists, and hosts a series of solo shows in its newly expanded space, including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

Lisa Belisle: Matt Chappell owns and operates Gather Restaurant, a neighborhood eatery in the heart of Yarmouth’s Village. As a proud native Mainer, Chappell has intentionally pursued ways to make Maine the focus of his restaurant. Thanks for coming in today.

Matt Chappell: You’re welcome, glad to be here.

Lisa Belisle: Thank you also for all the food that you have served to me and my family over, how long have you been in business now?

Matt Chappell: We’re in our sixth year.

Lisa Belisle: That’s kind of crazy to think about.

Matt Chappell: Yeah, yeah, and I do see your face regularly. It’s nice to see you every week.

Lisa Belisle: That’s right. I think that during this winter’s snowstorms we’ve even been, maybe, sometimes the only ones there, or not that many other people around us, which goes to the point that you guys have really made this a gathering place in all sorts of weather.

Matt Chappell: Yes, well, that was the idea five, six years ago. I had been in Yarmouth for probably 15 years at that point and had been to a number of establishments, all good ones, but I felt like Yarmouth was ready for something a little bit different, a little more neighborhood-y food that was Maine-based food. We didn’t have that in town at the time.

Portland certainly had their share of it, but Yarmouth did not at the time, and the space was just calling for being a gathering place, a gathering spot. This old Masonic Hall had a history of being a community space. I’ve heard all the stories. Every month someone comes in and says, “I remember when …” It’s all the way from dance recitals to the candy shop that used to be there, the voting that happened back in probably I think the ’50s or ’60s, it was a place to vote.

I haven’t heard much history of the Masons. That’s perhaps a little more secretive, but all the other things that have happened, it’s a really cherished community space. Now it’s a restaurant, and it gets activity all day long.

Lisa Belisle: You also have a son who works there with you. He’s a senior in high school now?

Matt Chappell: Yeah. His name’s Silas, and he’s been there probably about two of the five years as a busser and now he serves once in a while, but also still buses, helps out in the kitchen. He seems to be drawn to the kitchen more and more these days. I think he likes the environment, the energy. A lot of young kids do. It’s, I think, oftentimes their first job and they’re surprised that work can be fun.

Lisa Belisle: Do you think that’s something that we put out there in this world, that work is work? Work is something that shouldn’t be enjoyable, that you’re allowed to go to school up to a certain point. Then you need to get a job and you need to work, and it’s supposed to be difficult for the rest of your life.

Matt Chappell: I’m not sure about that, but I do know that creating a work environment that people enjoy being at was not a mistake. I have heard people comment about other places they’d been that have not been enjoyable. Either they arrive at Gather, or they’ve been there long enough to realize that what we’re trying to create is an upbeat and positive environment, especially in the kitchen.

I’ve worked in a number of kitchens over my lifetime that often, are run by grumpy chefs that like to bark at everybody. I avoided those people as best I could, and didn’t enjoy working for them myself, so I assume other people didn’t either. I think what we’re doing, and I’ll paraphrase what my chef has used as a term, we’re creating a work family. That’s how he refers to it. He used that term the other day and I thought it was a really interesting term. I hadn’t thought about it that way, but that’s what we have, extended work family.

Lisa Belisle: Which is good and it’s also important, especially in your space, because it’s an open kitchen. If the people are sitting down below in the restaurant, and they’re looking up above, they’re going to see whether it’s happy or sad or angry people who are preparing the food that they’re going to be eating.

Matt Chappell: Yes, that and if your server is going to get barked at in the kitchen, they’re going to carry that all the way to your table and that’s going to influence the experience that you have as a customer. There are all kinds of reasons to create a more positive work environment.

Lisa Belisle: I haven’t noticed a lot of turnover at your restaurant. There are many of the same people who are working there and seem happy to be working there for, I don’t know, almost since the beginning?

Matt Chappell: I do have some originals. I have four that still work for me out of, I think I have 20, 22 employees at any given time. Yes, there are some people that have been there since the beginning, and some have left and come back, so that’s encouraging. Some have met their spouses and gotten married and had babies, so that’s exciting, although I make it a rule not to employ husbands and wives or spouses and girlfriends or boyfriends. It’s not a good choice. The relationship falls apart. I still need both of them.

Lisa Belisle: Yes, I think that’s probably fair. I would also think that, especially as people’s families mature, it could be that it would be hard to have people working in an evening shift if you end up with small children, for example.

Matt Chappell: Yeah, well the restaurant business, except for the kitchen, it’s often a part-time gig. A lot of the people I employ on the floor, servers, they have other pursuits in life and that’s what makes it interesting. I’ve got woodworkers, I’ve got people that make leather bags for a living, I’ve got photographers. Let’s see, there is always an interesting story that’s coming through the door from an employee. That’s just how you have to make it work. It’s a supplemental income, it’s not a career. They have other pursuits.

Lisa Belisle: Do you think that more people are getting into the food service industry and staying in it longer?

Matt Chappell: Actually, in the kitchen, we’re finding the opposite, that there are fewer people getting into the culinary arts, and it’s harder and harder to find the staff that you need. A lot of that is driven by the fact that there are so many restaurants and hotels competing for a small pool of staff that it’s just harder and harder. Back to my point about creating a positive environment, that is one way that we retain people.

It’s not just through salary and benefits and pay and all that. It’s, “Do I want to work here? Do I want to get up and come to work every day? Is this something I’m looking forward to, or am I dreading it?” We’ve all been there, right?

Lisa Belisle: Yes, I think anybody who’s spent any time in the work force probably has been right there. You’ve also made a conscious effort to create a space that is welcoming for families with small children.

Matt Chappell: Yes, right, which was really just like the restaurant, driven out of my own personal interest and need. I have two boys and remember going out to restaurants with them, and wanted to. The places that were welcoming I wanted to go back to, and the ones that gave you the sneer, you typically didn’t go back to. It’s challenging. You don’t want to create too much of a romper room scene for the other people that don’t have kids.

We’ve created a little corner that has a table with books and coloring and quiet toys, nothing loud that makes noises. Young parents like to come and sit at the tables nearby. They can have a conversation amongst themselves while the little ones play. Sometimes it can be too much, and you never know what that’s going to look like because you don’t often know who’s walking through the door.

Typically, it’s manageable, very manageable. I probably get more comments about that, that we’ve created a space for them to feel welcome, not just tolerated but welcome and comfortable, as much as the food and the service.

Lisa Belisle: When I am there I often notice the parent, grandparent, child dynamic and I think that’s nice, that you are bringing in small extended families, and they can all find their spot and enjoy an experience at a restaurant.

Matt Chappell: Right, and you’ll notice that there are no TVs on the wall either. Obviously people are going to bring in their own devices, and use them if they want, but I find if you put TVs on the wall, it’s just an instant draw to your eyes, and all of a sudden you’re not paying attention to the people you’ve come out to eat with.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I’m actually a fan of that. I know that people who maybe are following sports very closely would have a different view.

Matt Chappell: Some want the game on the wall.

Lisa Belisle: Yes, but I think that’s true. It’s not just paying attention to the people you’re with, but also the food that you’re eating, which we’re not always as good at, perhaps, as we might be. It tends to become, for some people, just a means to an end. “I’m hungry, put food in. I’m not hungry anymore.” You’re very careful, from what I can see, to provide some food that’s appealing. It’s comforting, but it’s also creative, it’s local. There are a lot of different things people get out of your menu, I think.

Matt Chappell: Yeah, it is a mix to appeal to a broad audience. You made the point earlier, it could be the five-year-old, grandmother and Mom at the table, and they all have different palates and interests, what’s on the menu for them. We do our best to have enough, but not too much. I don’t want a big, five-page menu. I don’t think customers do, either. You get overwhelmed with choice, but you have to have enough there to satisfy people.

We’ve been, I think, successful at balancing the things that you mentioned, comforting food but also creative and tasty. One thing I’m seeing lately a lot more of, is an interest in non-meat dishes. I say non-meat instead of vegetarian or vegan because it’s typically people that aren’t either one of those. They’re not vegetarians or vegans. They’re just people who’ve said, “I don’t want to have meat three meals a day, or even seven days a week. I want to take a break from that on any given day.”

We’ve been working on coming up with dishes that are non-meat dishes, that are creative and different and fun. I would say, and would admit when we first opened, we just did the typical pasta. We’re going to satisfy the vegetarians with that dish, and that’ll be fine and we’ll move on to all these other fun dishes. Now, we’re really thinking through what are some non-meat, whether it’s the lentil falafel that we do, or the tofu golden bowl that is flavored with nutritional yeast or brewer’s yeast.

I’m fortunate to have a great chef, Colin Kelly, who’s a meat eater himself, but has come around and realized that you can do some really fun, interesting things with a vegetarian dish. We’re working on more of that right now, because the demand is just growing.

Lisa Belisle: I appreciate that, as somebody who eats fish, a pescetarian. There are often more options available for me, but still not as many as if I ate lamb and duck and beef, and all the other options that people who do eat meat have. When I go to your restaurant, and you have a warm kale salad with falafel, which is something that I will sometimes get, or you will have really nicely done Brussels sprouts, it’s good because it doesn’t feel as if it’s the poor cousin to the meat dishes.

I mean, I buy just as much as somebody who likes a hamburger. I like to have things that are flavorful and filling and nutritious. I think it’s nice that we have gotten to this place in our food culture where this is happening.

Matt Chappell: Right, yeah, it’s not just about omission, not just removing the meat and saying, “Well, that’s a dish now that’s vegetarian.” You’re going into it saying, “All right, what are things we can use to make a really flavorful vegetarian dish?” It’s fun, it’s a new, exciting challenge. Of course, we’ve been at it for a little while now, but you have to keep it fresh.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about trying to stay with local purveyors of foods during the winter. How does that work?

Matt Chappell: Well, you’d be surprised, actually. Our commitment is to spend at least two thirds of our dollars on food based in the area, not just when we can or when the season lends itself to it, but two thirds. We really, right from the very beginning, stake in the ground, “All right, this is what we’re going to go after and we’re going to measure it every month and maintain it.”

Obviously some of the biggest things are your protein. Pork, beef, fish, all those things are available year round. We work with local farms and Harbor Fish to source those things. That’s a big part of that nut, if you will, and available year round. On the produce side, you’d be surprised at how effective farmers are at storing vegetables.

I’m still getting really good carrots. We just got our last delivery from Merrymeeting Farm in Bowdoinham, and David is very good at storing those kinds of vegetables so that they are perfectly good in November and then the same in February. There are those examples. There are also a lot of people that are growing things, as you’ve probably heard, in hoop houses or there are greens that are available.

I’m trying to think, lots of root vegetables coming down. We have a farmer from the county who makes deliveries weekly, potatoes and turnips come from down there. Of course, you’re more limited in the winter in what you can do, but there’s a lot more than you would think in the winter time.

Lisa Belisle: Yes, I think I’ve been eating a lot of really delicious beets lately in restaurants like yours and yours, that are interested in doing local food.

Matt Chappell: Yeah, yeah, people love beets.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah, which is funny because-

Matt Chappell: They store well.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah, and they’re very nutritious. It’s funny, because probably seven years ago, beets weren’t as popular, and Brussels sprouts weren’t as popular. We’re seeing foods that our grandmothers used to grow, maybe our mothers. I don’t think my mother-

Matt Chappell: Parsnips, celery root, there’s quite a bit. Sometimes those are intimidating vegetables when you’re in the supermarket. “Well, what am I going to do with that?” In the commercial kitchen, we just are able to do more with it, with the devices that we have, the equipment, whether that’s high-powered blenders, there’s just more that you can do with it and of course, more time put into it than go to the grocery store to make dinner.

Lisa Belisle: How about your community table? It seems like that was a very intentional choice, because it’s a long table and there are a lot of people. I’ve seen it in different delineations, where you sometimes know a big group of people that are meeting, sometimes it’ll be a little party, sometimes it’ll be one group at one end, one group at the other. Why did you decide to do that?

Matt Chappell: Well, similar to the intentional choice to not have TV, I was looking to encourage face to face interaction, and sometimes that was between people that hadn’t met before they even arrived at the restaurant. Now, we don’t sit people shoulder to shoulder and force you to have a conversation with the people next to you. We give you plenty of room, but if you decide to have a conversation it’s available to you.

It’s also a very versatile table, because I can have a big group of 20 or I can have three groups of four, but I’m not moving tables around, I’m just moving chairs around. It’s also a nice feature as you walk into the restaurant, and it says something about who we are. I can’t move it, though. It’s so big that I can’t really move it, which makes it challenging sometimes.

Lisa Belisle: You’ve been doing this particular thing in your life, you said, six years.

Matt Chappell: Yes, the restaurant.

Lisa Belisle: You’ve been in this industry since you were 14.

Matt Chappell: Well, I started as a dishwasher in Kennebunk at age 14, and stayed with the restaurant gig for, let’s see, probably 15 years, until my late twenties, I think 29. At that time I was interested in starting a family and I didn’t think it was the best job to be trying to do that because you’re working nights, you’re working … I wasn’t in the front of the house, I was in the kitchen, so I chose to get out at that point.

My interest and passion for food and all that never left, so coming back to it felt very natural and I was at a different place in my family makeup where I felt like doing it was something I could pull off, and it’s proved to work pretty well.

Lisa Belisle: What are some of the things that you’ve noticed in your evolution from dishwasher to kitchen to front of the house and owner?

Matt Chappell: Well, obviously in those early years I was an employee working for somebody else in only one side of the business. I think back then I really enjoyed working for people that were teachers, chefs that wanted to pass on their knowledge. I really like that, I learned a lot, things that I still use today. I still work in the kitchen at Gather, prepping during the day. It keeps me close to the food and the people that are in the kitchen. I like being around food.

As an owner you really had to see more than just what was happening in the kitchen. That was challenging, I think, that part of the evolution, understanding what was happening on the floor, the flow of customers and the impact on the kitchen. All those things were relatively new and important to understand. I had enough experience on the customer side of things, just understanding customer needs, that it wasn’t too far for me to understand what people needed walking in the door.

Lisa Belisle: Is this something that you hope that your own children will continue? Is this something that you see as a family business?

Matt Chappell: No, no, I don’t. I mean, if they choose to ever get into the food business, I would encourage them to pursue whatever they enjoyed, things that get them excited. If that happens to be restaurants and food, then sure, but I did not start this to create a family business to pass on or anything like that. That wasn’t how I was brought up, either. That wasn’t unfamiliar. Go out and try different things, find out what excites you and then go from there.

Lisa Belisle: Talk to me about the importance of music in your restaurant.

Matt Chappell: Well, let’s see, Maine being the focus of the restaurant, whether it’s the food or the vendors, the art that’s on the wall, it seemed logical to plug myself into the music community. I’m not a musician, but I like music and I plug myself into the very local music scene in Yarmouth or the area around Yarmouth. It seemed like a natural fit.

I just think atmosphere-wise, live music, as long as it’s done right, as long as it’s an atmosphere thing where you can still have a conversation with the people you came to eat with, it really just elevates the whole experience for me. I’ll tell you, even for the staff, they love to work on nights when we have live music, because it’s just a different feel, it’s a different energy. There’s a flow to how they’re moving around the floor and how they’re feeling. Hard to describe, I guess, but music is hard to describe.

Lisa Belisle: I notice sometimes, that when we’re there, I think it’s usually Wednesday nights that you have music?

Matt Chappell: Yes, we have a bluegrass brunch on Sundays, so we always have live bluegrass music on Sundays. Then once a month on Wednesday nights, we feature an acoustic act. Sometimes that’s one person, sometimes it’s two or three playing together. That’s from 6:00 to 8:00.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I appreciate your cooking for me, for my family, on the nights that I don’t want to cook and even nights I wouldn’t mind cooking, but I just want to go to a nice place with my friends and family. I’ve been speaking with Matt Chappell, who owns and operates Gather Restaurant, a neighborhood eatery in the heart of Yarmouth Village. Thanks so much for coming in today and I will see you back at Gather very soon.

Matt Chappell: Excellent. Thanks for having me.

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Ari Solotoff is a lawyer with the Portland firm Bernstein Shur, who has a background in non-profits and the music industry. Before becoming an attorney, he was the youngest executive director of the Portland Symphony Orchestra. Thanks for coming in today.

Ari Solotoff: Delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Lisa Belisle: Now, am I right in understanding that you came to Maine for the Portland Symphony Orchestra job?

Ari Solotoff: Yeah, that’s exactly right, in 2006. I interviewed and was recruited to come serve as the symphony’s next executive director. I was 26 at the time, and had only been to Maine once before, when I was here for a music camp in Weston, Vermont, when I was 10 years old at a camp called Encore/Coda, which still exists, and came back here to Maine, interviewed, and was offered the job, and was delighted to come.

Lisa Belisle: Where are you originally from?

Ari Solotoff: I grew up in New York on Long Island, in Great Neck. Then, when I was 15, I moved to California to Orange County, so from New York City to Surf City is what I usually say to folks, because I feel I can identify with both coasts in many respects.

Lisa Belisle: How does one, at the age of 26, become the executive director of a major symphony orchestra?

Ari Solotoff: Well, I became interested in music when I was about five. Both my parents are music teachers, so you could say that it was pretty much destined that I was going to have some connection to the music industry. I started out on the piano, and then started playing the oboe, a symphonic music instrument, when I was 10. Went on to play in a number of different youth orchestras, which was really … My community was the orchestra and symphonic setting.

It’s where I made so many of my great friends and connections through to today. When I was in college at UC Berkeley, I interned at the San Francisco Symphony in their public relations department, so I got started clipping articles about the San Francisco Symphony back before Google News existed. I had to clip out all the stories and paste them up and turn them into press packets that we then gave to the board and to the senior administration.

I had this amazing entry point into the other side of how music gets made, and that’s really the business side and the administration side. I found out that there was another way to be involved in music, and that was orchestra management. I went through an orchestra management fellowship program. There’s only one in the country that exists, that trains future executive directors of orchestras.

I was 22 at the time, and went to the Aspen Music Festival and the Pacific Symphony in Orange County, California, the Dayton Philharmonic in Dayton, Ohio, and then the Pittsburgh Symphony. All in one year I saw major symphony orchestras to small orchestras to summer music festivals. Then I landed my first job as Executive Director of the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra in Pensacola, Florida.

I was 23 at the time and the total budget for the orchestra was $752,000 a year. I’ll never forget that, because you could see every dollar come in and every dollar go out. It was amazing. We had a staff of two and a half, so I really learned firsthand what it takes to put on a string of and a series of concerts and to attend to an audience and to support musicians.

That really was a great start in the music industry, at least the classical music industry for me, so I grew from there. The way to move up in the symphonic music world is to move to a different city, because the larger the city, the larger the symphony orchestra, so you have more complex and interesting questions and challenges and a much larger artistic footprint, based on the size of the budget. That’s how I came to it. It was a unique experience, but really came about because of that internship at the San Francisco Symphony.

Lisa Belisle: Do you still play the oboe?

Ari Solotoff: No, I don’t play the oboe anymore. I’ve picked up the piano again. It was my original instrument. Oboe’s not one of those instruments that you have fun improv-ing around on. It’s so technical that if I were to pick it up today, I would probably be so frustrated with my capability that it wouldn’t be much fun, but I still stay connected to music in other ways and have since learned, gone back to the piano. I’m starting to get into electronic music production, which is really interesting to me, and of course, I go to as many concerts as I possibly can.

Lisa Belisle: Somewhere along the way, you decided to go to law school.

Ari Solotoff: Yeah, well, after Portland, I went on to become the Executive Vice-President of the Philadelphia Orchestra and went through an amazingly interesting, complex bankruptcy process with that organization. We really, to make a long story short, the orchestra kept operating and playing through a very complex legal process that kept the lights on.

I had the opportunity to work with an amazing group of attorneys who, I think, were absolutely central to keeping this $45 million, 120-year-old organization alive, and restructuring and using the law to really bring new life to the organization. I saw the power and the incredible role that a legal skill set can play in working with a creative industry and the music industry, and in that case, the orchestra.

I had been thinking about going back to law school for some time because it’s always been on my mind as I read through artist contracts and rental agreements and media deals. “There’s more to this story here, and I want to learn more about it.” I felt like the best way to dig into those curiosities was to go and get a law degree.

I came back to Maine. We wanted to come back here, we love it here, we wanted to raise our family here. Right after Philadelphia, my wife gave birth to our son, who’s now six. We wanted to raise William here, and at the same time this is a great place to go get a law degree at the University of Maine School of Law, knowing that this is a phenomenal legal community to root yourself in.

Went back and got my law degree, and then joined Bernstein Shur, where I’ve been able to focus on music and copyright law, and intellectual property. That’s been an amazing experience of putting together all of these threads, as we were saying, that pull your interests together and allow you to serve artists and creatives in a whole new way.

Lisa Belisle: I love what you’re talking about because we often don’t think about all the different pieces that enable music and the arts to exist and to thrive really. It’s not as simple as guy or girl gets a guitar, goes to a bar, plays music, people pay, it’s all good. I mean, there’s a lot of layers, and especially now with the widespread distribution and music in so many, different forms, trying to understand what all that means, and keep the artists functioning. That’s a much bigger deal than it ever once was, I think.

Ari Solotoff: It’s profoundly changing as we speak. Literally, the role that a musician, a graphic designer, a photographer, a writer can play, not only locally but on a national and an international level, because of the capabilities that exist from a technological perspective, it’s extraordinary. When you put that together, if you focus on the creativity, the fact that a musician is really … Their central and primary goal is to make great music, or a photographer to take great photography.

The question is, what’s the infrastructure that needs to be behind them so that they can do what they do best, but also earn a living while doing so, and hopefully have an impact on their audience, on their community? Why would you go through that process if you weren’t able to share your music or your art with your community and with your audience?

The question is, how do you build that infrastructure in a way that’s going to not only sustain you now, but also help provide monetary compensation down the road when it comes time to either licensing your work or entering into different types of arrangements that allow as many people as possible to see and hear your work?

Today, particularly with music, the fact that you can release your music from Portland, Maine, and have it heard around the world is extraordinary, whether it’s through SoundCloud or through Spotify or Apple Music, the distribution capabilities are incredible. Once you recognize that, it really changes the paradigm from what used to be really a label on top and really puts the artist on top and says, “Okay, who you want on your team?”

Well, a lawyer’s just one part of that team. There’s a manager. You might have a publicist, you might have a booking agent, you might have a marketing and PR component to it. Every conversation that I have with an existing or potential client in the creative space is, “Who’s on your team?” It starts there and from there we can really think through the strategy.

I mean, I think of a musician as a startup. You really are, you’re building a business, you’re building a brand, you’re building a distribution mechanism, you’re taking your product, and you want to get it out to as many people as possible. Looking at it as a business is what excites me about the work, and I think for me, particularly in today’s world, the possibilities are endless in that respect.

Lisa Belisle: I imagine it would be very helpful to have a background yourself as a musician, because I think there are different ways of thinking that often occur in different areas. If you are familiar with the musician’s way of thinking, and not all musicians are exactly the same, but there may be some patterns that you’re familiar with, then maybe you can help interpret things in a way that makes more sense.

Ari Solotoff: I think every project starts with a vision. What are you hoping to accomplish artistically? Then from there we can back into, “Well, what are the pieces you want to put in place? Who is this going to be delivered to as your audience? How do you hope that this is actually going to generate income for you?” It really starts with, “What are you trying to do artistically?”

That definitely comes from understanding, having played an instrument, having sat within an orchestra hall and thought through what it is to attract an audience to something that you’re doing creatively, so yeah, absolutely. I love that part of it. It’s the fun part, is the going to the concerts and seeing the end product, or seeing somebody’s work on the wall as a photographer, or writing in print. That creative output is what we’re working towards, and I definitely identify with it.

Lisa Belisle: It’s an interesting time to be creative, because there are so many ways that we can be creative and immediately put our work out there. What I have noticed is that sometimes it’s easy to believe that because it’s easy to put the work out there, it’s easy to be creative in the first place. I mean, I write for the magazines, and it’s a lot of work. I mean, to put 1,600 words on a page or pages, it’s an incredible amount of time spent, amount of creative energy.

I think it’s similar for musicians. I mean, what comes out is maybe 15 seconds from the beginning or the end of a radio show that actually took some effort, but because it’s so easy to have something put up on Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud, sometimes we are discounting that in a way that maybe we didn’t before. Would you agree?

Ari Solotoff: Yeah, there’s something of a value gap between the amount of time and work that goes into producing something that is artistically exciting, musically exciting, and then just something that anybody can produce in an amateur setting. How do you distinguish between those? I think it really is in the process and the being deliberate, and really digging into the details of your craft.

You notice it, you can see it when a musician or a photographer or a writer has really gotten to the bottom of that particular creative question that inspired them in the first place. I love reading stories, I love watching how musicians do their work. There was a great article in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about the life of an indie artist, and how are they succeeding today.

What you realize is that there’s an incredible amount of patience involved in this process, that you might take weeks and weeks or months to put together an album, but just because you’ve finished the album doesn’t mean it’s done. There’s so much more activity, mixing, mastering that goes into that finished product, before it’s actually been released.

I think there’s a definite relationship between the amount of discipline and dedication that you put into really refining your musical craft and the depth and the quality of the output on the other end. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more, that it seems so easy and yet there’s so much behind the scenes that goes into it. There’s a great book that I read about a year ago called The Song Machine, by John Seabrook. It really unpacked all of what goes into what we now know of as the pop music industry today.

You realize how many writers, how many producers, how many, different people are part of the process of hearing what we now think of as Top 40 music today. Not all of it’s necessarily great, but you see the work behind it and you realize, “Oh, my gosh, this is something that is worthwhile. It’s of merit and it has value.” If you put those three things together, I think that’s something that musicians have a lot to be proud of.

Lisa Belisle: I’m glad you put a word, a phrase, around value gap, because I think that, I mean, that really defines a lot of what people struggle with. I think it’s probably still an issue now, but at one time it was a significant issue, where music was being downloaded essentially illegally, and people were treating it as if it was essentially common property that they didn’t have to pay for. The idea that somebody would put so much work into something like a song that somebody else wouldn’t even pay 99 cents for or $1.29 or whatever it is now is astounding when I think about it.

Ari Solotoff: That was a remarkable moment in music history. At the same time that Napster was prevalent, the recorded music industry had something like 735 million physical sales in the US. That was the zenith, if you will, of physical sales. Here we are, it’s 18 years later, that was 2000, in the same week that Spotify announced that they were going public, Russ Solomon, he was the founder of Tower Records, passed away.

If you put those two things together, and then on the same evening, Rita Moreno gets up on the Oscar awards and talks about the universal language of music and what that means, you see, “Oh, my gosh, this is an incredible time in the music industry,” because suddenly people are seeing the value of paying for music. Spotify now has 70 million paid subscribers. That’s a drop in the bucket of what could be paid for.

The other side of this is that we as a community have, I think, a responsibility to acknowledge that when musicians come into our venues, they should be compensated fairly for that work. How do we value that? We value that by looking at the fee structure and by thinking about, okay, look at all the people who came into your venue as a result of this musical act.

If you’re using music in your venue, are you paying for that music just like you would pay for any other resource? I think this is an interesting time because streaming is so prevalent. It is a capacity to compensate musicians more fairly, but there’s still a gap there. It takes 252 streams to earn one dollar of income. That’s 252,000 streams to earn $1,000.

That’s an incredible amount of work that needs to go into generating that kind of income, which means that there’s a lot more, I think, benefit to looking at live performance, touring, merchandise. You see these other mechanisms by which musicians are branding themselves and earning an income. I think that’s part of the picture.

The other part of the picture is really musicians as ambassadors for social causes. I think this is a particularly important time for us to look to music and musicians as a way to translate what’s happening in the world. We see that every time that there’s a significant world event, we look to music as a form of helping us to understand what’s happening.

Lisa Belisle: Are there lessons from music that can be used in say the world of literature, writing, journalism, or the world of photography? Because as you’re talking about supporting musicians and their livelihoods, I’m thinking about the number of times that I go onto the New York Times website and read an article that clearly somebody put a lot of effort behind, and somebody paid to have written, and I get so many views and then I have to subscribe.

I don’t think we’ve quite figured it out, or I think about the number of times somebody talks to one of our Maine Magazine photographers and is like, “Well, can you just give me those photos that you took? I’m going to use them on my website.” There was payment for that. There’s effort and energy behind that, but it still feels like we’re in a place where not everybody recognizes that’s actually important to support.

Ari Solotoff: Well, there’s definitely steps that I think a writer and a photographer and a musician can take to protect their work. I see that as the very first step. It’s almost like if you build a house, you’re not going to just let anybody in your house. You’ve taken a lot of time to design it and construct it, so you want to take the steps that are necessary to protect that asset. Your photography or writing, that’s an asset. We can’t see it, we can’t feel it, but it is very much a creative asset.

The very first steps, and I see it all too often, great work happening and it’s never registered with the copyright office, which is the easiest first step one can take to protect their work. You ensure that there will be value, because it’s that much easier when somebody right clicks on a photograph and downloads it and puts it up on another website or on their blog to say, “No, I’ve actually taken steps to value my work, and you should, too.”

I think that’s a common issue that we see a lot for creatives is building copyright protection into their workflow as “Yes, you’ve taken all those steps to create your work. Well, just add one more. It’s a $35 filing fee with the copyright office and that really is absolutely central to protecting your work.” I can see the difference between those artists who have been diligent about those steps, the degree to which they’re able to monetize their work, and the degree to which that ultimately becomes a pension for them because they’ve taken those steps early on in their careers.

Lisa Belisle: Intellectual property is a relatively young aspect of the legal field, and it seems like it’s one that you’ve really had to hit the ground running to keep up with. What are some of the current issues that are being dealt with, within this area?

Ari Solotoff: Well, I think one of the primary questions in music has been the issue of sampling and how do I acknowledge and reference somebody else’s work as a musician without copying their work? I think that’s still being sorted out. I think we’ve learned a lot more, and musicians have learned a lot more about how to work with each other when it comes to using each other’s work.

The licensing industry has changed dramatically. It’s still in flux, it’s still very difficult to find the rights holder when you’re trying to use or engage with somebody else’s work. There’s not a universal platform for identifying the rights holder. We still have a way to go. Blockchain technology is going to a big piece of how that evolves in the future, where it will be possible for a rights holder to allow for a licensee to use their work, and every one of those different transactions will be registered in the universal blockchain.

That is literally at the nascent stage of that right now, and it’s going to be fascinating to see how that changes in years to come. I think IP as a whole has come a long way, whether it be copyright protection or trademark protection, we really rely on source identification, which is what trademark protection is and copyright to serve as the basis. I mean, every major movie production, every major commercial release of an album relies heavily on the ability to obtain copyright protection in that work.

I think our job is to help lower the barriers to protecting your work, to make it easy and then to make it possible for there to be as many licenses and thoughtful tracking of that information based on who you’re collaborating with, because this is a world of collaboration. That’s where creatives, particularly musicians, are so engaged with each other’s work. We need to make that process really easy, so yeah, it’s an exciting time.

You can see the threads of this happening around the world and in ways in which media and technology are really converging right now and how we work with artists to support their work.

Lisa Belisle: What do you think the most important thing that you could say to an emerging musician is when it comes to any of the things that we’re talking about? Because I know that a lot of musicians, well, all musicians I’ve ever spoken to have put a tremendous amount of effort into learning their craft. That’s part one, and now they meet you. What’s the thing that you say, “Do this first”? You talked about copyrighting. What else do they have to be thinking about?

Ari Solotoff: Well, first and foremost I’d say view yourself as the CEO of your own company. You are a business, you are a startup. As the CEO of Musician Company X, one of the very first questions that you ask yourself is, “Well, who do I want on my team?” You do that whether you’re a startup business … I think the same is exactly true for a musician. Who’s on your team? Being really deliberate.

I think all too often questions come from outside. Somebody might get a label offer from a label they’ve never heard of before and it’s so exciting that this label has shown an interest in you, and yet I think the very first question is, “Do I want them on my team? Is that the marketing distribution channel that I want to work with?”

I would turn the question around and really say, “How can you be deliberate about who do you want on your team?” Because I think that’s the most important question a musician or a creative, a photographer or writer, can ask themselves in who they collaborate with and who they work with. Then from there, is there a process for really thinking through … In the symphonic music world, we used to plan our seasons two and three years out.

What’s your plan for what your artistic output is going to be, not just two months from now or six months from now, but a year from now or two years from now? Because the really exciting projects that are going to come about, are going to come about because you’ve been working on them for some time. Then the legal piece and the business piece comes into play, because then we really have something to bolster and to support, because you have a strong vision for where you want to go artistically, and then we can put in place the systems, which is really where I feel I play the biggest role for helping to protect and monetize an artist’s work.

Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Ari Solotoff, who is a lawyer with the Portland firm Bernstein Shur, who has a background in non-profits and the music industry. It’s really been great to have this conversation with you, and keep up the good work.

Ari Solotoff: Thank you. This has been really fun.

Announcer: Grownupgirl.com, where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life, for free advice, workshops and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes, designed just for you in the Portland area.

Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 349. Our guests have included Matt Chappell and Ari Solotoff. 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.

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Guests

Emily Sharood and Johnny Dickinson

Dr. Dan Landry

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #348: Emily Sharood and Johnny Dickinson and Dr. Dan Landry

Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studio of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician and editor-in-chief of Maine, Maine Home+Design, Old Port, Ageless and Moxie magazines. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.

Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio show number 348 airing for the first time on May 20th 2018. Today, we speak with Emily Sharood of Mousam Valley Mushrooms and woodworker Johnny Dickinson. We also speak with Dr. Dan Landry who has his own clinical practice and is an advocate for health care reform within Maine and throughout the United States. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1: GrownUpgirl.com where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life through free advice, workshops, and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownUPgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area. Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the works of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of men through solo shows in its newly expanded space including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

Lisa Belisle: Emily Sharood is the sales and marketing director at Mousam Valley Mushrooms. And Johnny Dickinson is a woodworker and owner of Winter Hill Design. Thanks for coming in today.

Johnny D.: Thanks for having us.

Emily Sharood: Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: And you brought with you these really beautiful organic Italian oyster mushrooms. They’re in this wonderful cardboard box and they’re so pretty, I want to take them out and start cooking with them or at least just admiring them. You guys had a lot of time to admire the mushrooms.

Emily Sharood: Absolutely. Our Italian oysters have a almost like a chicken teriyaki flavor to them. I’ll cook them whenever we’re doing shows or we’re introducing them to a new chef or an institution. And people will think that I’ve done some sort of spectacular cooking thing with them, but really it’s just simple salt pepper and sauté in a pan for about 15 to 20 minutes. And really it’s just the flavor of the mushroom coming out that kind of has that umami sort of flavor to.

Lisa Belisle: That’s very interesting that mushrooms don’t all taste like mushrooms, they taste like different whatever they are whether it’s Italian oyster or whether it’s a hen of the woods or whether it’s shiitake. Is this specific to the type of mushroom? Is it specific to where they’re raised? Why do they all have different flavors?

Emily Sharood: Mushrooms are a really neat protein in the sense that they are able to absorb whatever sort of flavors and oils that you cook them in. Their tissue structure is similar like a sponge, it’ll just soak up all those flavors in the pan. But then they also do have their own individual tastes as well. And that really does come from the substrate that they’re grown in. It’s important to us at Mousam Valley Mushrooms to ensure that we’re growing them on hardwoods as well as using cottonseed holes and other agricultural byproducts so they taste as natural and organic as possible. And it really shows and reflects in not only the way they look, but in the way they taste as well.

Lisa Belisle: Why mushrooms of all things?

Emily Sharood: Well, I’d have to start back to the beginning about seven years ago at this point in my brother Robert’s backyard in Sanford, Maine. We were starting a permaculture garden, he was suffering from stomach issues at the time and doctors weren’t really sure as to what it was exactly. Rather than going the pharmaceutical route, he decided to begin growing his own food, primarily meats like poultry and rabbits as well as vegetables and fruits. And at the basis of this permaculture garden was the mushroom, the mycelium root. It helped turn that sandy Sanford soil into this rich loam that allowed us to create such a garden. Not only was it supplying us with good soil to grow the other varieties of foods, but it also allowed us to feed the poultry and the ducks with the insects that were attracted to the substrate.

And then also in turn, we were able to eat and have these amazing mushrooms on our dish. I was going to school for marketing and design at the time and then Robert was going to school for business management. And we were both seniors and looking to create our senior thesis and came up with the idea to collaborate. And I started doing the marketing and the graphic work and designing a website and a mock logo. And we came up with the name Farming Fungi LLC. And then it transitioned into the brand Mousam Valley Mushrooms once we ended up locating this barn, a dairy barn that hadn’t been used in about 50 years right in Springvale, Maine.

As it started to develop, we approached my father John on his 50th birthday along with his L.L.Bean slippers, he also got a business plan to farming fungi. And he started doing market research, his background is in entrepreneurialship and working with startup software companies. He started doing some market research and really saw that there was this niche market in the New England area where there was no specialty local mushrooms. It was really just the agaricus strains like the white button and the Portobello mushroom, which is mostly based out of Pennsylvania. We approached Whole Foods and Hannaford to find out if they would be interested in purchasing a product and selling this to their consumer. And they were on board with it.

We started looking into applications, grant applications through USDA for marketing as well as an MTIC grant to create the grow rooms. And then once we found the barn again in Springvale, Maine, we started creating the grow rooms using a proprietary software system that my father John helped design with Mackenzie Designs Engineering. And from there, we started growing a few pounds of mushrooms all the way up to about 3,000 pounds of mushrooms a week at this point. And that’s within a five to six-year span.

Lisa Belisle: Johnny what is your relationship to-

Johnny D.: She’s my fiancée.

Lisa Belisle: Okay. Well, I was going to ask about to the mushrooms, but okay. Your relationship to Emily she’s your fiancee. But you have a bachelor in fine arts from the Maine College of Art in woodworking and furniture design and you build the structures that hold the mushroom blocks for your mushrooms.

Johnny D.: Ever since the mushroom farm started, I’ve always just been there to help out with whatever I can. That usually entails building and creating shelving units and basically anything made out of wood. I’ve always been there to help out and harvest the mushrooms and gone to lots of food shows with them. I’ve kind of had a, I don’t know, a side employment kind of. I don’t know what to call it, but just being there on the sidelines helping out because she’s my lady.

Emily Sharood: We started out way back in the day foraging for mushrooms. We used to go for trail walks. And at that point in time, Johnny wasn’t so familiar with actually eating mushrooms that have been growing in the woods and one thought I was a little bit crazy when we were … I remember this one time specifically, we were grilling chicken of the woods that we had just foraged off of one of our local paths. And I was so excited that we had found it together and I had cooked it up over the fire. And I was like, “Oh, here, try this.” And Johnny he was like no. And at that moment, I was like, “Wow, I’m not sure if this is going to work.” And with that, he took his first bite of chicken of the woods and we haven’t really looked back since.

Johnny D.: Yeah. That was a turning point for me. I like mushrooms now.

Lisa Belisle: That’s a good thing, it sounds like. It could have been a problem if that hadn’t happened.

Johnny D.: I think there was a little name-calling on it going to on a bit if I didn’t try the mushroom, I might have been a loser. And that wasn’t an option.

Lisa Belisle: No, nobody likes that. Why did you not like mushrooms is it just that when you were growing up, you didn’t eat a lot of them or?

Johnny D.: Yeah. You know kids are picky with food and mushrooms just always seem slippery and slimy and unappetizing. I always stayed away from them, I always avoided any food that had mushrooms. I would pick them out, but at best I would just not eat something that had mushrooms in it. And it took eating a really good mushroom that was cooked the right way for me to appreciate it. And now I love mushrooms and I cook them all the time. I think with art or with food or with anything, if you experience it the right way or in a good way that looks really good and tastes really good, you’ll appreciate it.

Emily Sharood: Whenever anybody tells me that they don’t like mushrooms, I have to agree that I don’t particularly like button mushrooms or even Portobello because they’re grown in dirt whereas our mushrooms are grown on this wood substrate so it has this really amazing earthy woody texture to it and flavor that’s just really appetizing. And the other the other thing is that people say, oh, it’s too slimy or meaty. What I particularly choose to cook them is by tearing them up into smaller pieces and allowing them to crisp up in the dish. It’s really all about how you cook it. And I would recommend to the people out there who feel like it might be too slimy for them would be to have them cut in smaller pieces and to cook them longer in the pan until they get nice and crisp. And that’s a really great way to enjoy them.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it’s funny because as you’re talking, I’m thinking about the difference between a heirloom tomato freshly picked off the vine in July and a refrigerated tomato that has come from California on a truck in the middle of winter. And there’s a big difference between one or the other. They both have their function if you wanted tomato in the middle of the winter, that’s the kind you get. But it shouldn’t be that surprising to us that more industrially grown mushrooms are going to have a really different flavor and profile than the ones that you are growing.

Emily Sharood: Yeah. And we try to bring both of those aspects together. You’re able to purchase our mushrooms year-round because we do grow them all indoors. And you don’t have to worry about the bugs, but you get the same feeling and taste and texture as you would if you had just forged it right off of your favorite walking path. But we’ve ensured that it’s the right variety to eat and consume and it’s at the perfect time to be picked. It’ll last about five to seven days in your fridge and you’ll have it in time to enjoy.

Lisa Belisle: That fortune piece is interesting too because there are some mushrooms that are poisonous. It’s not actually as easy as, “Oh, there’s mushroom growing, I’m going to go pick it and eat it,” you actually have to know what you’re doing. You’ve taken that guesswork out of the equation for people.

Emily Sharood: Yes, 100%. And I’d say at this point in time since Johnny is a woodworker and he’s lived here in Maine his whole life that he’s probably a better forager than I am, but don’t telling anyone that.

Johnny D.: You just told the world.

Emily Sharood: At this point, yeah, I think he is.

Lisa Belisle: You didn’t like mushrooms but you were good at finding them, is that what I understand Johnny?

Johnny D.: Yeah. I can read the trees and that’s how I go through the forest as I study the way the environment is changing. And I can kind of see I guess through the forest in a way, a different view than most people have is where I can kind of start to predict which direction I need to go to start looking for these specific types of mushrooms that we might be looking for that time of year. Just going from birch tree to birch tree looking for chaga or knowing, oh, there’s some really big old oak trees over there, maybe we’re going to find hen of the woods or chicken of the woods and just kind of guiding myself through that way I think tends to find a lot of mushrooms.

Most of the mushrooms we forage grow on trees or in some kind of symbiotic relationship with trees or they’re a parasite of a tree. If you know the trees, you’re basically identifying the food sources for the mushrooms and finding them that way.

Emily Sharood: Yeah. And then for those who are interested in looking for their own mushrooms, I always highly recommend three primary sources for confirmation and starting out with tree mushrooms because tree mushrooms are a lot less likely to be poisonous than ground mushrooms. Looking for oysters would be my go-to, that’s how I first started out, oyster mushrooms.

Lisa Belisle: You’ve mentioned chaga, which I believe originally was in Siberia or other colder weather countries that they were using it for its health benefits. And we now know that in Maine, we have this amazing source of really immune boosting, I guess I’ll just call it food or fungus. Is that the way you would refer to it?

Emily Sharood: Chaga is commonly known as a mushroom, it is definitely a fungus. But the chaga itself that we ingest is a sclerotia mass. And it almost looks like burnt bark on a tree as if somebody’s lit the tree on fire. But it’s got more antioxidants than even the pomegranate. It’s also been tested to have anti tumor, anti-cancer properties as well. And you wouldn’t actually eat it because it would be way too woody, you would steep it in tea. Just don’t go past the boiling point or else you’ll kill off the beneficial microflora that’s in there, but steep it in tea and add a little honey, some maple or birch syrup with it, some cinnamon, nutmeg and it’s a really delicious medicinal drink.

Lisa Belisle: We’ve talked about the Italian oyster mushrooms, you also offer shiitake and butter oyster in a mix, in a forest medley. Are there different health benefits to each of those types of mushrooms?

Emily Sharood: Yeah, absolutely. The shiitake mushroom has anti-inflammatory properties to it. Again, they’re all protein based so they all have that slow-release energy, which is great to have throughout the day. I like to even add mushrooms, I’ll cook the mushrooms up first and then add them to a salad and add an egg on top of that and have that as my start of the day. And it’s just a really great way to have energy throughout. But you can also have them at night too as a side dish as well. They’re really versatile in that way.

Lisa Belisle: How about the different tastes of the oyster mushroom versus the shiitake versus the butter?

Emily Sharood: Yep, the shiitake mushroom has more of an umami flavor to it. It’s one of our most mushroomy tasting ones. If people are really looking for that potent flavor, I would highly suggest the shiitake. I even like to cook them up nice and crisp again and make a bacon shiitake. If you’re a vegetarian, just use the shiitake themselves with a little bit of olive oil or if you are a bacon lover, I highly recommend cooking up some bacon and then using the bacon fat to cook your shiitake mushrooms. And I doubt it’s going to make it to your plate before it gets off the pan. And then Johnny is an amazing chef, what do you think about the flavors?

Johnny D.: I love them all. The shiitake again great with any kind of meat. Their texture is a little meteor as well, they’re a little more robust. The oysters are great with anything, with chicken, with veggies, stir fries, fried rice. The other varieties you grow, the lion’s mane are great with seafood. They kind of almost have a crab meat texture to them poached in butter and just lightly sauteed and served with crab cakes or even mixed into crab cakes. What else did we make those?

Emily Sharood: Our scallop, Johnny made an amazing scallop risotto and we added some lion’s mane to that as well and it was delicious. And then going back to the medicinal point, we call the lion’s mane brain mushroom. Not only does it kind of look like a brain in a way when you cut it open, but it actually has great cognitive function and is also being used as a treatment for Alzheimer’s as well as just for anybody who’s looking to think a little bit clearer. I highly suggest lion’s mane as well.

Lisa Belisle: I was talking to a forger recently and he mentioned that there’s a man on the west coast who’s doing work with mushrooms and soil detoxification, that mushrooms are very good at kind of, I don’t know soaking up oil spills or taking things out of the environment that aren’t so good for us. That being the case then it seems to make sense that they would just be picking up the good nutrients from the environment that we could then ingest.

Emily Sharood: Yep. Going back to the very beginning soil remediation was the big factor for us starting with the mushroom as our product. It’s really important to Mousam Valley Mushrooms to know that we are creating a product that uses agricultural waste necessarily to create a product for us to enjoy and eat. And then also our waste then goes back to other farms and helps remediate their soil because the mushroom root really is great at sequestering water and retaining it and then also releasing it when it is hot enough. It’s really helpful in that sense.

Lisa Belisle: It seems like this is a pretty humble thing that we’re talking about, this fungus that grows on trees and on the ground, forest floor. And yet it’s something that your family has decided to build this business around. And the two of you both are focusing so much attention on it. Is this something that you are surprised by? Would you have thought this would be the direction your lives would take?

Johnny D.: Not 10 years ago, no. I guess I didn’t really know you at the time, but finishing up high school and getting ready to go to Wentworth Institute of Technology to study industrial design, I pictured myself drawing and designing sports cars and everything like that. And then gradually got kind of tired of the artificiality of it all and realized how much I missed being back home in Maine and being in nature. And that’s when Emily and I kind of met and got together and just kind of both I think transitioned our lives back towards that.

Emily Sharood: Yeah, we’re both artists in a sense and we both love using mediums that are natural. It makes the most sense to us I think. My college career was in, I started out in pharmacy school. I always knew I wanted to help my community somehow and I’ve always been a helpful person, it’s kind of what brings joy and happiness to me. But I soon realized that the pharmacy route wasn’t for me and then went into fashion design, realized I loved design but that the fashion industry is not sustainable at the moment. I started diving deeper into what other interests I had and everybody needs food, it’s the foundation of life. That’s kind of what brought us to the mushroom because the mushroom is the foundation of life, it’s the beginning and it’s the end. It’s what keeps the circle going.

I just felt like I couldn’t go wrong with the mushroom. The earth needs it, we need it. It’s a stereotype that I want to help kind of break. There’s a symbiotic relationship between mushrooms and humans that I want to help bring about and make it mainstream because it’s beneficial for not only the earth, but it’s beneficial for us too.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about Springvale, this is a part of Maine that not many people know about.

Emily Sharood: Roberts was living in Sanford at the time and Springvale is the town right over. And it’s got the Mousam River running through it. There’s this beautiful section of farms on Blanchard Road. And we knew starting out that we wanted to be around farms because we were going to be creating this substrate mushroom compost that needed to be moved to farms and we wanted to do it close by. Right off of this beautiful pond overlooking the valley, we found this picturesque dairy barn that had last been used as a dance hall and before that had been used as a dairy barn. And I’ve even run into a few people saying, “Oh, I used to milk the cows in there.” I’m like, “Well, yeah, now we’re harvesting mushrooms in there.”

It’s kind of nice to have that history behind it as well. And yeah, we’re also collaborating with the local farms around us. Our operations manager, Aaron Gonsalves has his own produce farm as well as a dairy farm, the whites dairy farm that he works with as well. And then we have Annette’s Gardens, they grow microgreens in greenhouses and then you have Rivard’s Blueberry Farm. It’s a beautiful area and location and the people and the food movement that’s going on in Springvale is so strong. We have a farm trail walk coming up in April. It’s really the community that brought us there, and we’re really excited to be a part of it.

Lisa Belisle: Johnny, what do you hope to do with your art moving forward?

Johnny D.: Well, I own my own business called Winter Hill Design. I do custom furniture and woodworking. I grew up woodworking with my dad so it’s always been a part of me. And like I said, when I went away to school for industrial design, I thought that was what I really wanted to do. But this woodworking and being in Maine has always been a part of me. I hope to just build my business organically, and I just can’t wait to have my own shop someday and just get to go out there and make whatever I want, hopefully things that people appreciate and want. I love creating things, I love working with wood, I love nature and mushrooms. And if we can incorporate mushrooms into furniture someday, that would be cool too.

Emily Sharood: That would be really neat collaboration, absolutely.

Johnny D.: I just picture us having a beautiful homestead with some land and just creating things all day, every day.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I look forward to digging into these Italian oyster mushrooms that you brought although it seems a little bit of a shame to ruin them because they’re so pretty. But I’ll look at them for a little while before I actually-

Emily Sharood: I know, they almost look like a bouquet of flowers really.

Lisa Belisle: They really do.

Emily Sharood: Johnny and I are getting married in September and I’m trying to figure out how I can incorporate the mushrooms in with the bouquets of flowers. We’ll make it work. Yellow Twist Floral Designs actually used our mushrooms for one of their weddings that they set up.

Lisa Belisle: Who knew these mushrooms had so many different sides to them. I’ve been speaking with Emily Sharood who is the sales and marketing director at Mousam Valley Mushrooms and also her fiancé Johnny Dickinson who is a woodworker and owner of Winter Hill Design. Thank you for coming in and talking with me today.

Johnny D.: Thank you so much for having us. It’s been a pleasure.

Emily Sharood: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is also brought to you by Aristelle, a lingerie boutique on Exchange Street in Portland’s Old Port where everybody is seen as a work of art and beauty is celebrated from the inside out. Shop with us in person or online at aristelle.com.

Lisa Belisle: Dr. Zach Mazone D.O. created DaySpring Integrative Wellness in Bath, Maine with the belief that true health comes from building healthy relationships with your community, with your doctor and with yourself. As a board-certified family and integrative medicine physician, Dr. Mazone and the whole staff at DaySpring are committed to supporting your wellness journey by providing integrative family medical care, osteopathic manipulation, herbal and lifestyle consultations, counseling and wave therapy. DaySpring offers an innovative membership-based model of health care that gives you time together with Dr. Mazone to build a personalized wellness plan based on your health goals. Daily access for acute appointments is available and you can even schedule a secure video conference call in the privacy of your own home. I know Dr. Zach and his family, and I believe strongly in the personalized whole-person approach to health that he provides. This is why I am encouraging you to find out more for yourself by visiting dayspringintegrativewellness.com or by calling them directly at 207-751-4775. DaySpring Wellness, the way it should be.

Dr. Dan Landry trained and worked within the Harvard system in Boston as a pediatric anesthesiologist prior to joining Spectrum Health Care Partners in 1994. Over the next two decades, he managed the largest division within Spectrum and served as president and chairman of the board. This past January, he gave up his administrative positions within Spectrum to focus on his clinical practice and advocate for health care reform within Maine and throughout the United States. Thanks for coming in.

Dr. Dan Landry: My pleasure, thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: And you and I happen to be neighbors.

Dr. Dan Landry: We are, yes.

Lisa Belisle: We could just see each other out, you’re walking your dog with your wife Deborah on a regular basis.

Dr. Dan Landry: Yeah. In our little corner of heaven.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah, it’s a pretty amazing place Littlejohn Island. You grew up in Maine, you grew up in Sanford.

Dr. Dan Landry: I did, I grew up in Sanford, spent the first 18 years there. Went to high school in the public high school. After almost 20 years in Boston decided to come back.

Lisa Belisle: What caused you to leave Maine in the first place? I’m assuming it was educational.

Dr. Dan Landry: It was educational. I received a degree in mechanical engineering from University of Maine and then took a couple of years and was a ski bum in Vail. And then went to med school in Boston, and then trained in Boston. My wife was in school in Boston as well. But then after training and working for a few years, we came back.

Lisa Belisle: Did you meet Deborah also in Boston?

Dr. Dan Landry: No, we were acquaintances in college, only acquaintances. And then I met her on The T of all places while we were in Boston. I said, “I know you,” and history from there.

Lisa Belisle: Is she also from Maine?

Dr. Dan Landry: No. Well, she grew up in Pennsylvania but spent the last couple years of high school in New York and then went to University of Maine as well.

Lisa Belisle: For you, there’s something very personal about health care reform within our state.

Dr. Dan Landry: Yes. Having participated in health care for more than 30 years, are you referring to my injury or?

Lisa Belisle: Well, no, I was referring to just being from Maine. But now that you’ve done injury, I’m going to have to ask you about that.

Dr. Dan Landry: This is a word of caution for everybody that owns a ladder. Two and a half years ago, I fell off a ladder and broke both my legs and was a participant on the other side of health care, saw how it worked. I was lucky that I received excellent health care. But my injury, this didn’t propel me to go into health care economics but illustrates the problem. I was injured in the beginning of December, my health plan probably like everybody listening has a large deductible and I incurred roughly $15,000 of out-of-pocket expenses because it was on the end of one year and into the next. I am extraordinarily fortunate that I could pay for that, very few people in this country can pay for that. Less than half of the people in the US have $8,000 or more in the bank at any one time. Health care is the leading cause of bankruptcy in the United States. And of those 62% file for bankruptcy based on health care, 75% percent of those have health insurance.

I’m passionate about health policy because I believe that if we don’t reform the health care system in this country, it threatens everything we know. It threatens our infrastructure, our educational system, our social programs. And no matter which side of the aisle you find yourself on, it will threaten programs dear to you. We have to fix this health care issue.

Lisa Belisle: Are there a lot of people in your field, which is very sub specialized, pediatrics anesthesiology, are there are a lot of people in your field who are interested in health policy?

Dr. Dan Landry: I don’t believe there are many physicians that are interested in health policy per se on a regional, state or national level. That said, I think physicians are interested in health policy in the manner in which it affects their patients. A physician such as yourself who works on the front lines of medicine and deals with patients on an everyday basis, every patient that is undergoing treatment it has been shown that the finances of that care is forefront in their mind, much more so than whether or not they’re getting better. There was a study done on breast cancer, women with breast cancer whether it’s treatment, toxicity, treatment efficacy or treatment cost, the majority of women chose treatment cost as a determining factor of the type of treatment they would receive, which I think as a physician that’s not acceptable. That’s just not acceptable.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah, it’s actually rather scary because if you have somebody who’s deciding that she can’t actually go toward the type of treatment that she really needs, then it might not even be a cost effective way of dealing with it even in the short term.

Dr. Dan Landry: Exactly, exactly, exactly. It’s a pervasive problem.

Lisa Belisle: When you were growing up, did you know that you wanted to be a doctor?

Dr. Dan Landry: Well, interestingly enough, I have a big brother, David who’s seven years older than I am. I’m sorry David. He and his wife who is also a physician, she’s an internist. David went into medicine and I’ve kind of modeled myself after my older brother. I grew up without a father so David was a father figure. I modeled myself after him. He went into medical school, went in to be a physician and I followed in his tracks. And I was thinking of becoming a orthopedic surgeon because of my background in engineering. And both he and his wife said, “No, go into anesthesia.”

Lisa Belisle: Why anesthesia? What was his background?

Dr. Dan Landry: He was a biologist in college. They just said it was interesting, allowed flexibility, which it does. More flexibility than other specialties. And it was interesting, I’m glad I did it. They were right.

Lisa Belisle: What you’re talking about is something that has become an important consideration in medical school generally, which is lifestyle. And many of the people who are going through, being a doctor is hard enough. But as you’re going through if you’ve incurred a lot of debt and you also would like to have a family at some point, you do have to start looking around to decide, “Can I really even afford personally and financially to be a primary care doctor?”

Dr. Dan Landry: Right. It’s very difficult for folks. And I think the younger folks that are coming out of medical school have a better balance than I did. I’m not going to speak for you, but I remember I was just at the end of the year when the term resident physician versus visit was coming out of vogue meaning, a resident physician being one in training lived at the hospital. And the visit, which is the staff person came and went. And that was the norm, and that’s just not healthy.

Lisa Belisle: And I was a resident right before they changed the resident work hour rules, which meant that we were still even though we weren’t technically residents of the hospital, we were there a lot more than the current residents are.

Dr. Dan Landry: 120-hour a week was not uncommon, do you remember that?

Lisa Belisle: I do, I lived it.

Dr. Dan Landry: And now I think rightfully so folks coming out are saying, “I’m not going to do that.” And I think it’s better for them. But that raises the cost of care because it requires more physicians to deliver the same care. It’s a conundrum.

Lisa Belisle: When I was talking to a woman who finished residency just a little bit ahead of me as a surgeon and I had trained in family medicine, she mentioned that one of the problems with the resident work hour rules was that somebody still needs to be taking care of the patients. The work gets shifted back on to typically younger doctors but also sometimes older doctors who have already done their own version of 100-hour work weeks. The issue seems to be that we can move things around so that somebody else ends up dealing with whatever needs to get dealt with but, it’s still there.

Dr. Dan Landry: It’s still there

Lisa Belisle: There are still patients, they still need care. It’s still going to be expensive.

Dr. Dan Landry: The solution is, primarily hospitals which are now the largest employers of physicians, the solution is to hire more either physicians themselves or advanced practitioners. But the money is not there although physician cost of health care is only 11% of total expenditure. It’s not an overwhelming cost, but still hospitals operate on a very, very narrow profit margin. Most hospitals in Maine are losing money. The expenditure for additional physicians is just not going to happen.

Lisa Belisle: We’ve talked about some of the issues, what are some of the other issues that you’ve learned about during the time that you spent in administration and also in the study that you’re doing at the London School of Economics where you’re getting a degree in health policy and economics?

Dr. Dan Landry: It’s a broad question, what have I learned? I’ve learned that I firmly believe, I strongly believe that physicians should be in leadership positions in hospitals and health care. There is a growing trend that that is occurring, but physicians understand what it means to take care of patients and what is necessary, like this conversation you and I just had about the need for more physicians. We inherently understand that and administrators look at it more as dollars and cents. I think non-physician administrators certainly have their heart in the right place and are doing the right thing. This is not to malign them, I just think that physicians have a deeper understanding of what it means to take care of patients. They should be in charge.

And in Maine, there’s only one CEO of a hospital who’s a physician. And that’s Mark Fourre up at Waldo Pen Bay. And that’s a trend, that’s a movement in the right direction. Let’s see what else, you’d asked me what I’d learned. I think physicians should be more involved in leadership, but it’s hard for physicians because we don’t have the training. It’s taken me 15 years of on-the-job education of myself, primarily self education to learn about health policy and finance. It is very, very complicated who gets paid for what and why they get paid. My studies at London School of Economics have given me an insight into how other countries are tackling these problems. Most other countries around the world are coalescing around a capitated payment model, meaning I get paid X number of dollars to take care of you and that’s all the money there is. And the US has not moved in that direction.

Every country in the world is dealing with high pharmacy prices and high increasing health care costs, but some countries are doing it much better than us. These studies have given me a more global view, which has been helpful.

Lisa Belisle: How do we encourage more physicians to take positions of leadership within the health care system?

Dr. Dan Landry: That’s very difficult. I’ve been wrestling with that for a long time. Well, first of all, most of the times when physicians work in leadership positions as you’re moving up and gaining experience, they’re almost always unpaid positions. They’re just tacked on to the end of the day. An emotionally drained physician who then has to sit through three hours of meetings every is very difficult. Companies need to invest in young leadership, there’s no question about that. It’s really an investment that needs to be made. And we need to find leaders and invest in them but also train them as well. Send them to school, send them to programs to learn how to manage. And unfortunately, in my experience, I don’t have experience managing other folks other than physicians, but physicians are a very difficult group to manage, very, very difficult.

And people that have managed other sorts have told me that they’re one of the more difficult, although as I said, I don’t have experience with anybody else. But I will say they are very difficult. The job of the old management style, a physician expected of their manager don’t allow change to occur. And that’s still the mantra to some degree. And in this day and age, that’s impossible, Change not only is occurring, it has to occur. Physicians have got to be on board with what’s coming, and that’s hard.

Lisa Belisle: I can’t really deny anything that you’ve just said. I think I’ve seen this personally as a physician chaffing a little bit under management, although I have a lot of respect for the people that are managing my practice and ultimately, me. I think there’s a different mindset that we have as a result of our training perhaps and there’s a different level of responsibility that’s expected of us. It’s a strange dynamic to be able to go back and on the one hand be responsible in your case for putting children under anesthesia and keeping them alive long enough to get their surgeries and then bringing them back out again and making sure that they’re in good shape. And in my case, trying to work with women who have new breast cancer diagnosis or manage people’s heart disease. And these are people’s lives that you have responsibility for, you’re tasked with being a leader and a protector. And it’s hard to then have somebody come in and say, “Well, we need you to do this, this and this.”

Dr. Dan Landry: Exactly, it is very hard. And I think you and I are of a generation, I think it’s going to have to be a generational change because our training was the captain of the ship model. You are the captain of the ship, you are in charge that a woman that comes to you with heart disease, it is up to you to keep her healthy. And the shift now is in team-based approach. And you and I, we weren’t trained that way. We’re trained to be autonomous. It’s very difficult for doctors trained in our generation to make this shift to a team-based. I don’t mean to say that people aren’t good team players, but team-based approaches you got to follow a protocol. This is a path where you got to follow it even though you may not agree with it. And physicians are very bad at that, they don’t want to be told how to practice.

Lisa Belisle: I’m smiling because I think that’s true although personally I like being part of a team and many of the physicians I work with enjoy being part of a team. I think what I struggle with is at the end of the day, it’s my medical license that ends up being at risk. The malpractice suits are largely filed against physicians. Even though we are part of a team, if something goes wrong on the team, we still are taking responsibility for that. Do you see that shifting so that it enables us to feel more comfortable with the team-based approach?

Dr. Dan Landry: No. It gets into the realm of legislation, that’s a legislative effect. I believe where health care is going is into a much more, we call it a cookbook approach, it’s much more predicated on best evidence. You see the Watson project for the IBM that Watson is now reading x-ray studies, pathology studies, recommending cancer treatments. And I think the cancer treatment is a good example of no matter how good a physician or a team of physicians is, they cannot keep up with the literature that occurs in cancer medicine, it’s just physically impossible. You need decision support. And physicians are less and less developing, making, and implementing the final decision as opposed to using a lot of these decision support tools. And I think that’s what I mean with myself, for instance, uncomfortable with not having it in my head but relying on other things to tell me what the best thing to do is.

I’m just not comfortable with that. And I think we have to be and I think the younger generation is a little more comfortable than I am in that regard.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. What about the recent news of the heads of these organizations coming together and deciding outside of medicine that they want to do something about medicine?

Dr. Dan Landry: I can’t tell you how glad you are you asked me that. Oh, [inaudible 00:50:15] get to that. We’ve relied on the government to help with health care. President Obama did the ACA, which no matter how you feel about the politics was a movement in the right direction in that he was putting a focus on health care. There is a problem, let’s try and fix it. As what happens in politics, it became partisan and some people thought it was the worst thing and some people thought it was the best, but it started the conversation. But what did not occur in the ACA and certainly is not occurring in the debate today is the cost of health care. What they’re talking about is who’s actually going to pay for health care, they’re not talking about the fundamental problem, which is the cost, which we pay almost 18% of our GDP to health care whereas the next most expensive health care in the country is 10 or 11%, international averages around 9.

For every individual in the US, we’re spending $10,000 a year on health care. These companies, you’re referring to Amazon, J.P.. Morgan and Berkshire Hathaway have come together to develop innovative ways for the delivery of health care. Why are they doing that? It gets right back to why health insurance was developed in the first place, which was to keep the workforce healthy and insure a workforce for companies and country. That is why health care and insurance came about. These folks that employ millions of people can no longer afford health care for their employees, it’s just too expensive. It’s become the single largest expenditure for their companies, they are coming up with new solutions. And I believe that health care reform will not occur through the government or through legislation, it’s going to occur through avenues such as that.

Insurance companies really don’t have an impetus to change health care, they’re simply a conduit for the money. In Maine here, we have a large number of self-insured companies. Self-insured meaning like BIW, they don’t have insurance per se, they pay for it out of their pocket. And that’s starting to trickle down to medium and small-sized companies that are taking on this risk so that they can control their costs even more. It’s going to be innovations like self insurance, these big companies that innovate that is going to be where the reform is going to come from. I am convinced of that. And what’s it going to look like? I don’t know although there is technology out there. You can get an EKG done from your smartphone at home with a cardiologist reading in 30 minutes. You can do most things online.

There is an enormous amount that can be done. And hospitals and health systems are reliant upon the money coming in to them because they have such high fixed overhead that this disruptive innovation will have profound consequences for the hospital systems and the hospitals particularly in a rural state like Maine. We no longer can support 39 hospitals. Health care reform is going to come from people like Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett and those folks. They have the money to invest in it. That’s where it’s coming from.

Lisa Belisle: Well, you raise an interesting point because I enjoy taking care of the patients from Bath Iron Works, for example, because they will come in, and I think also L.L.Bean. There’s a few other major employers within the state. And the patients will come in and they will have been seen by their health coach, they’ll have their numbers in front of them. I have a set of labs that have been done by these patients. I’m already starting with more information than I would otherwise. And that’s really useful to me as a primary care doctor. However, the point that you’re raising about it no longer being money that goes into the medical system is a good one. If I am not ordering the labs and they’re not being drawn by my hospital and not being run by my hospital, there’s already a loss of profit. It’ll be interesting to see how this all works out because you can’t really pull a string in one part of the world they say and not feel a tug at the other.

Dr. Dan Landry: And these companies before they relied on the insurer and they thought the insurer was looking out for the best interest of finding the lowest cost. They were or they weren’t, it’s immaterial at this point. But now, their labs are a great example. They can send lab specimens essentially all over the country so you find the lowest cost. And now consumers are starting to do that as well because as I mentioned earlier when I got hurt, we are spending an enormous amount of out-of-pocket expenses. People are starting to look for lower cost, lower cost lab work, lower cost radiology services. And you go to the doctor and the doctor may prescribe three tests and four medicines and people are saying why. There’s much more consumerism in medicine. It tends to be more outside of Maine because there’s more choices outside of Maine than there is in Maine, but it’s coming.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I will be interested to see as my son finishes medical school in a few years, to see where things go with him.

Dr. Dan Landry: Good for him.

Lisa Belisle: I know my dad, he’s 70 something years old, he’s still practicing medicine. The landscape of medicine has just completely changed since he was starting. I know that you have two kids Sam and Chris who are 23 and 20, to know what the things are going to look like for our kids will be fascinating I believe.

Dr. Dan Landry: It will be. I wish the best for your son practicing medicine, we absolutely need more physicians. I’m more concerned about our kids in their ability to pay for health care. If we continue on this trajectory, they won’t be able to afford health care, they just won’t. And if they can’t afford health care, it’s going to be to the detriment of every other program. That’s my biggest concern. And if we don’t change the trajectory, our kids and their families are going to really struggle with health in the future, their own health.

Lisa Belisle: Doing the work that you’re doing in health care reform, I wish you all the best with this. I’ve been speaking with Dr. Dan Landry who is a pediatric anesthesiologist who is now working on his clinical practice and being an advocate for health care reform within Maine and throughout the United States. Thank you so much for coming in today.

Dr. Dan Landry: Thank you for having me.

Speaker 1: GrownUpgirl.com where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life through free advice, workshops and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine, go to grownUpgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area.

Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting works of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormane.com.

Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio show number 348. Our guests have included Emily Sharood and Johnny Dickinson, and Dr. Dan Landry. 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, it’s Dr. Lisa. And see our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. 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’re happy that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Maine Magazine, Aristelle, Portland Art Gallery, Art Collector Maine, GrownUPgirl.com and by DaySpring Integrated Wellness. Our editorial producer is Kate Gardner, our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick, our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy. And our executive producers are Andrea King and Dr. Lisa Belisle, For more information on our production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.

Guests

Emily Wedick and Louise

Kim Swan

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #347: Emily Wedick and Louise and Kim Swan

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 physician and editor-in-chief of Maine, Maine Home Design, Old Port, Ageless, and Moxie magazines. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.

Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 347, airing for the first time on May 13, 2018. Today we speak with Emily Wedick and her friend, Louise, two advertising account managers at the Maine Media Collective who each have young children who are transgender. We also speak with Kim Swan, the owner of The Swan Agency Sotheby’s International Realty and a film producer. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1: Grownupgirl.com, where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life through free advice, workshops, and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area.

Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the works of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly-expanded space, including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

Lisa Belisle: Emily Wedick and her friend Louise are advertising account managers at Maine Media Collective. They are both supporting their children through transitioning, and both have been involved in creating resources for parents and transgender children going through the process of transitioning. Thanks for coming in today.

Louise: Thank you for having us.

Emily Wedick: Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: This is a very interesting time for both of you because each of you has other children at the same time. You’ve been parenting for how many years now, Louise?

Louise: I have identical twins that are five and a half, so yeah, it’s been very interesting, especially with them being identical twins and one being transgender at such a young age and the other one cisgender. That’s another piece of terminology that I didn’t know about but learned about, and that’s just the opposite of trans. You’re cis. I’m cisgender and … yeah, so [crosstalk 00:02:42]-

Lisa Belisle: It means that you identify with the body that you were born into.

Louise: Exactly, exactly, yeah.

Lisa Belisle: That would be cis, and trans would be that the body that you were born into doesn’t-

Louise: Doesn’t match.

Lisa Belisle: … feel like it fits your identity.

Louise: Right.

Lisa Belisle: Okay.

Louise: Right, exactly. Yeah. We noticed that early on. I don’t know. Do you want me to … Would you like to tell about how old your kids are and stuff?

Emily Wedick: Yeah.

Louise: Then we can get into our stories.

Emily Wedick: Sure. My oldest child is six, and I have a four-year-old as well. My six-year-old is my child who is transgender. When she was born, we identified her as male, but she let us know quite quickly, from the age of two started giving us signals that it took quite a while to pick up on that she did not identify as male, so interestingly, also going through this process as a first-time parent, because she was my first-born child, and then I have a four-year old daughter as well.

Lisa Belisle: How does one pick up on a two-year-old feeling not right with their body?

Emily Wedick: Well, it’s interesting. The research has shown or experts in child development say that it is around the age of two or three that we start to develop a sense of gender identity when a child can articulate whether they’re a girl or a boy and sort of have a sense of what that means in a social context. If someone asks you, “Are you a girl?” for example, as a cisgender person who identifies with the body they were born into and the gender that they were labeled as a child, we don’t question why, “Why are you a girl? Why do you feel like a girl?” “Well, I just am.” With a transgender child, it’s a very similar experience. My child had what we would typically think of as a boy’s body. We gave her a traditionally male name. She was dressed in clothing that we would associate with … that I bought from the boys’ section at children’s clothing stores.

Very quickly she started to show, through certain ways of expression … Often, one of the first things that children will do is start to reject the clothing that’s associated with that gender. My child started asking for dresses. Because I had had my daughter, my second child, around that time as well, hand-me-downs were starting to flood the house from friends with dresses for my new baby girl to grow into. My two-year-old, at the time, would say, “Well, is this for me?” We’d say, “No. This is for your sister,” and my two-year-old would say, “No, for me,” and become very insistent and seemed very disappointed, so at some point after persistent asking about dresses, her father and I decided, “Well, why not let this child wear a dress?”

In my mind, it seemed more like a creative expression, maybe kind of like playing dress-up. She would have on her dinosaur t-shirt and cargo pants, and I would put the dress over it and send my child on their way. All of these signs sort of add up over time. When I look back at photographs now of the time period between about two and a half and three, I notice that, almost every photograph, my child, who at the time we knew as a boy, is in a dress. It’s those sorts of signs, and then we can talk about what that looks like as the child gets older and how they start to become persistent and send messages in other ways.

Lisa Belisle: Louise, what did you notice about your son Joe?

Louise: Well, yeah, it’s interesting. It was right around the same kind of timing. Looking back, we could notice signs at two years old. Both of my children, identical, were born as female, but Joe identifies as male. Looking back, we could see kind of his stance and, I don’t know, just little things that you could see, but then, at three years old, it started with the clothes. I used to dress them, of course, exactly alike, and it was tutus and everything. I had identical girls, and I wanted them to be exactly alike, and I just thought it was the cutest little thing, but Joe was having no part of that, though.

Every time we’d go to the store, he wanted to go into the boys’ section. I would look for gender-neutral clothes and take something from the girls’ section and put it in the boys’ section and just say, “Hey, Joe, what do you think about this?” Yeah, well, as long as it came out of the boys’ section, then that was okay, and so we did that, but these were just little signs, and I thought, well, with identical twins … Of course, this is my first time being a mom. I was thinking, oh, maybe they’re just trying to find their own way, and maybe one’s a little tomboyish. Who knows? He can dress his own way and then … so it wasn’t very long that they could dress alike. The things that he did like were the ultimate boy stuff. It was the camo pants, and it was the Ninja Turtles shirt, and it was … those were the things, and didn’t even want pink things to touch him or anything like that, anything that kind of resembled a girl.

Yeah, so there was one instance with my husband where he was laying on the grass and had our two girls, at the time, laying there, and they were looking up at the sky. There was somebody building a house next door, and they were asking, “Dad, how did they build that house?” My husband said, “Well, there’s builders that do that, and they cut down the trees, and this is how they build a house.” Joe, at the time Anna, was looking at the sky. They were both looking at the sky and said, “Well, Dad, who makes the clouds in the sky?” We’re not a hugely religious family, but we do believe in a higher power. He said, “Well, that would be God.” This was at three. Joe said, at the time Anna, “So God put me in the wrong body?” My husband was just taking it in and said, “Um, you know …” Didn’t really know how to answer that.

Those were the kind of things that we just took in, those sorts of things. As it got further along, Joe would say things like, “I’m a boy, and the only one who believes me is my twin sister,” and so we’d ask Carla, “Carla, what do you think?” Carla would be like, “Mom, yes, Joe’s a boy.” Those are some major points.

Emily Wedick: I’m glad that Louise is speaking to some of those kind of anecdotes as well because I think, obviously, one of the first ways that kids will start to express their identity is through their clothing and what they wear, but it does extend beyond that. I want to be careful too because it’s very typical for preschoolers, children between the ages of two and five, to play dress-up and experiment, so-

Louise: True.

Emily Wedick: Parent’s shouldn’t be concerned if a male child wants to put on an Elsa dress and be a princess. That’s very typical, but where you start to kind of understand that maybe something deeper is happening is where you see that consistency. What we’ve learned along the way from child development experts and doctors and psychologists is that the hallmark of a child being transgender is that they are consistent, persistent, and insistent, and so all of the stories that we are sharing are sort of mile markers or things that happened along the way on a longer journey with our children sort of doing everything in their power to consistently, insistently, and persistently kind of wave their arms and say, “Mom, look, this is-”

Louise: “This is me.”

Emily Wedick: “This is who I am.” It extends a lot further than the clothing that they wear.

Louise: Yeah, yeah. With Joe, it was very … wanted to have a boy’s cut, a boy’s haircut, a boy’s haircut and had the same haircut as his sister, let it grow out long, whatever, and so getting that first haircut … I mean we already let him dress the way he had wanted to, but seeing him cut just like … and he wanted it very short, just like a boy, because he really wants you … but to see it unfold and see himself in the mirror, he could see his external match who he felt internally, and that was just amazing as a mom to see that, to know that your child is so happy with who they see in the mirror. That was another moment, I think.

Lisa Belisle: Did either one of you experience anxiety coming from your children, or were there behavior changes? Did they feel depressed? I mean some people believe that maybe kids are too little to actually feel anxious or depressed, but I’m not sure that’s true, and I’m wondering how this impacted your families.

Louise: Yeah. Did you experience much of that?

Emily Wedick: I did. It’s tough with children because they have such big emotions and don’t always-

Louise: Right, to try to decipher-

Emily Wedick: … know how to express themselves, so sometimes it’s very hard to tease out what’s sort of developmentally typical and what is kind of more on the extreme end of things, and then of course-

Louise: What’s a tantrum and what is-

Emily Wedick: What is something-

Louise: … trans-related or getting out anxiety or what is just a normal kid’s tantrum?

Emily Wedick: I would say the way that I, and with my child, saw things progressing was a lot of anxiety around going to school whereas, at earlier ages, this was a child who loved daycare, who thrived, who loved preschool, who was excited about going to school every day, who easily made friends, who was very outgoing and confident, who began to suddenly get very upset before going to school, become very clingy, develop separation anxiety that had not previously been there, and then slowly started to be able to articulate in words, “I can’t wear a dress to school because the boys will laugh at me. The other boys will laugh at me.” It’s incredible. I would say this is around the age of four or four and a half, around that time, when I think kids start to understand and have a social awareness of what certain norms are with their peers.

Of course, we’re learning now that gender can be a very creative spectrum in that there are children who are male who will always identify as male who are not trans who may enjoy nail polish or things we typically associate with feminine, but at that age it’s very black and white. Children often organize themselves, boys’ team, girls’ team, and suddenly, my child didn’t know where they fit and started to become self-conscious and develop almost a sense of shame is how I perceived it, and so, suddenly, we were battling to go to school every day. Finally, my child looked at me and just said, “When it’s summer and the school year ends, I’m going to grow my hair long. I’m going to wear it in braids. I’m going to wear dresses every day, and I’m going to be a girl, and that’s who I am.”

It kind of became, at that point … It was the freight train that was running and either her father and I were going to get on it and be supportive and start to understand what she was going through and experiencing and how we could be the best parents that we could be, or it was going to run away without us. I think that, as you talk to parents who have kids who come out at a very young age, there are a lot of these sort of seminal moments that we all experience where we realize this is happening.

Louise: It happens all of a sudden, yeah, like a freight train. It’s like it-

Emily Wedick: Whether I like it or not.

Louise: You see these little pieces that are determining things, but then, all of a sudden, they’re ready, and they’re telling you. Joe felt a lot of anxiety and stress after he got his hair cut because we hadn’t come out to the class yet. It was the weekend. It was Sunday night, and he was going to be going into school the next day. The night before that, Sunday night, he was worried, “What if the kids still don’t believe I’m a boy?” even with his haircut. He started saying that his throat was hurting him and burning. I didn’t know if it was something physical. I took him to the emergency room. Come to find out, it was all just very nervous energy about all that.

That was one of the times, and then another time was when the teacher started to notice where … and the kids too, which line was he going to get into for the bathroom? Was it going to be the boys’ line or the girls’ line? They started to name off all the boys, and then they put Joe, and then they’d start off the girls. He came home that day, and he was so excited that he was at the end of the boys’ line. That was when we were just like, “Okay, this is it. We need to talk to the teachers. We need to start making this change,” and he was so happy about it.

Lisa Belisle: You both met through a play group that you, Emily, had put together for parents and children who were transitioning this way. From what I understand, this was very helpful.

Emily Wedick: I had, through sort of chance, met another mother in southern Maine who had a then also four-and-a-half, five-year-old child who had come out as a transgender girl, meaning they thought she was a boy when she was born. She came out as a girl. We got together and had a play date together and sort of started kind of brainstorming and talking about how there are quite a few number of resources that we can also share with this audience for transgender adults and for transgender youth, but those tend to be geared a lot more toward older youth teens, and we found that there wasn’t a lot to support families with younger children.

What we wanted to do was not really have sort of a formalized support group or something really clinical. We just wanted a safe space for families to get together, for parents to be able to kind of share experiences, and for the kids to just play, and have a very normalized experience, and understand that there are other children like them, because it’s so important. We know that it’s important for children to have dolls that represent their skin color, or their hair type, or whatever it is. Children love to see themselves and know that they’re okay and know that … to feel special, and to feel okay, and to not feel other than or feel so different, and so we thought this would be a good opportunity for kids to just kind of know that there are many children like them.

To put that in context, there is a private Facebook group for parents of transgender children that is actually an international group. I think, at this point, it has over 5,000 members.

Louise: It’s huge, and it’s-

Emily Wedick: If you think about it, that includes parents who are actively seeking out resources to support their children. It’s most likely a fraction of the number of children who are transgender. There are a lot of us, and so our group has sort of organically been growing. I would say there are probably about 15 families now-

Louise: Yeah.

Emily Wedick: … who have joined us in the southern Maine area. One of the things that we did was we provided information about our group at … there is, through Maine Medical Center, a pediatric gender clinic, and that’ll … provides some context as well and indication of, I guess, the need for these services, so that’s where we’ve shared some information as well as through my pediatrician’s office. We can certainly provide resources and to connect to other families who might be interested as well.

Louise: Yes, we’re happy to do that. The trans youth group that I go to that Emily started is just amazing. It’s been such a great resource for us, the bonds that we’ve made with the parents. The kids all running around, whether it be the siblings or the gender-nonconforming kids, you don’t even know who’s who, and nobody cares, and they’re just running around in packs, and us, as parents, being able to talk about things that are unfolding with our young children and if we’ve had any experiences. Most of them are very similar experiences.

It is great for us to have that community of people so our kids don’t feel different. They feel like they belong, and they’re having a strong sense early on of being themselves, and I think that that’s what’s important because for transgender people who are not supported, the … I hate bringing up this because it really … it hurts me as a parent that there’s … it’s a 41% suicide rate, and that’s for people who are not supported. When they are supported, that drops down tremendously. I know that, with the group that we’re together with, our kids are going to thrive. They’re going to survive. They’re going to do great things, and so, yeah, I want to thank Emily and her friend for starting that.

It just keeps growing, and we would love for it to grow and to continue to grow, and so, yeah, if you would like to hear more about the group or talk to Emily or myself, we do have an email address that you could email us at. It’s transkids Maine, ME, so I’ll spell it out, [email protected]. Just write to us, and we’d love to talk to you.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I really appreciate your taking the time to come in and talk today because I think this is something that many people are working through right now and don’t necessarily know what the resources are, and this is a good way for them to connect with people who have been through similar experiences.

I’ve been speaking with Emily Wedick and her friend Louise who are advertising account managers at Maine Media Collective. They are both supporting their children through transitioning, and both have been involved in creating resources for parents and transgender children going through the process of transitioning. Thank you so much for what you are doing and for coming in and being willing to share your stories.

Emily Wedick: Thank you so much for having us.

Louise: Yes, thank you so much.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is also brought to you by Aristelle, a lingerie boutique on Exchange Street in Portland’s Old Port where everybody is seen as a work of art, and beauty is celebrated from the inside out. Shop with us in person or online at aristelle.com.

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Kim Swan is the owner of the Swan Agency Sotheby’s International Realty and is on the board of the Bar Harbor Historical Society and a longstanding friend of the magazine, so thanks so much.

Kim Swan: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: I’ve really been interested in all the different types of work you’ve been doing up in the Bar Harbor area, because you could just focus on your business selling houses, but you also … You have a finger in the inns industry. You’re doing work with film. I mean it’s like I can’t turn around and not have your name be there up in Bar Harbor. Why all of this different stuff? What keeps you so interested in so many different things?

Kim Swan: I think it’s a combination of being a Gemini and wanting to do a lot of things at once, but I was thinking about it a few weeks ago, and I actually said to somebody, “Differently than most people in the real estate business … For most, it’s a second career or something they’ve done and then moved into full time. I didn’t have a choice.” Real estate was the family business, so when I was leaving for my freshman year in college, my father said, “Hey, take some real estate classes, and you won’t have to waitress during summers,” so I ended up selling houses during summers, and then it just became … I was going to go back and go to law school, but it was lucrative, and a lot of the local attorneys would say, “Kim, you’re making more money than we are,” because it was a good time.

I didn’t choose real estate, it chose me, so I think when I got to the point where I could start making choices, I was able to start doing some things that I was passionate about, like the film making is probably the newest thing, but the inns, and design, and just finding … It’s easy up there to find ways to marry them all into each other.

Lisa Belisle: Well, let’s talk about the film. You just told me that you’re now working on a second film, but you’re referring to this first film, which is called The Fire of ’47.

Kim Swan: Yes, so The Fire of ’47, which was really a statewide thing, happened … It decimated Bar Harbor, and it changed Bar Harbor. Up until that time, Bar Harbor was very much a wealthy community. Most of the people had jobs working for the cottagers, as they were known. It had started through the Depression and everything. It had started to not be as attractive, but people still had their big houses and everything. A lot of very notable families were there, and so when the fire came through, it ruined so many, I mean over 67 of the huge mansions, over 100 of the year-round people’s houses, so it changed Bar Harbor. That’s when we went, as somebody said, from being a summer community to being a tourist community. That’s when the hotels started being built. That’s when the motels started being built.

It was fascinating, and this was the 70th anniversary. In order to get people who had been through it 70 years ago, we need to start getting those people to record their experiences, so we sent out a casting call and said, “If you knew this, come down and talk to us.” The director, Peter Logue, who had approached the Bar Harbor Historical Society to make this film, and as a board member I said, “I’ll produce,” and then when the Historical Society would save the money on the producer, he just started interviewing people and put together this amazing film.

Lisa Belisle: Did you know all of the people that were involved in the storytelling aspect of this?

Kim Swan: Yes, they were all local, so most of them would have been in their teens, but never really knew their stories. You know how you always hear, “Oh, he doesn’t talk about the war. He doesn’t talk about …?” Some of these people had never talked about the fire, so some of their kids and grandkids had never heard these stories. It was amazing. I mean we just opened the doors to the Historical Society, and these people just started coming in, and the stories they were telling, when I saw the first trailer, I was … and I’m not exaggerating. I was in tears because this one guy talks about how … He says something along the lines of, “After the fire, they let us back in.” He said, “And we went back to the house,” and he said, “and it was gone,” and he said, “and I think I knew it was going to be gone, but I didn’t really realize everything was going to be gone.” There were some very sad stories and some very happy stories, but so compelling.

Then everybody came on board. Steve Zirnkilton, who is the voice of Law & Order, he’s a Seal Harbor guy, and we asked him … I mean we hadn’t even finished the sentence and said, “Hey, Steve, would you narrate this film?” It was yes, totally as a donation, and so we had some fun with it. The people loved being part of it with Steve and everything. At the beginning of the film, it’s just a black screen. We had five major sponsors that gave us $5,000 each, and then Maine Magazine, thank you, came on as our media sponsor, and so, at the beginning, there’s just a black screen with the logos and that booming Steve Zirnkilton Law & Order saying, “Without the support of these people, this wouldn’t have happened,” kind of like a Downton Abbey beginning, and then at the end, “And Maine, The Magazine.”

Everybody was just like, “Wow, this is the real deal. You got the Law & Order guy on it.” We didn’t have to ask twice. We said, “Can you help do this?” “Yes.” “Can you help do this?” When we called down here to Maine Mag, “This, I think, would be a really cool things for you guys to be involved in, and would you be the media …” I didn’t even finish the sentence, and it was, “Yes, we’re in,” so it’s been a great thing for the whole state.

Lisa Belisle: Your family is a longstanding Bar Harbor family. How were you impacted by the fire?

Kim Swan: We actually didn’t move to Bar Harbor til I was four, and so I’m not allowed to say I’m from Bar Harbor, because my ex-husband was born in Bar Harbor, and he always would remind me. Somebody would say, “Are you from Bar Harbor?” Sometimes it’s easy to say yes, but if he’s anywhere near me, I have to say, “No, I was four.” We don’t have any memories. That was in the late ’60, end of ’60s, so we had just always heard about it. There’s still ruins. As kids, you would go and explore the ruins and everything of these old cottages. I’ve had listings in real estate. I have one right now that they never took down the gates and everything that didn’t burn, so it’s just … It’s in the fabric of your life if you grew up in Bar Harbor because it’s all around.

Lisa Belisle: Did it mean something to you that there were fires happening in other parts of the country, and really have been for quite some time, as you were working on this movie?

Kim Swan: That’s so interesting that you mention that because that was the time that the California fire and everything … It was happening, and I would watch these things and think, “Oh, my gosh. That looks so horrible,” where sometimes, with the ’47 fire, it’s almost like it was a movie or it was an event. It wasn’t real. Then the combination of reading the news and then also working on editing these interviews where people have these memories that were so clear, yeah, it was extra impactful, I think. I remember talking to a few people about that and saying, “Wow,” or, “70 years from now, is there going to be somebody looking back on these fires?” It gives you pause.

Lisa Belisle: It’s also a good reminder that, I mean, obviously, fire is something that’s so big that you can have all the most modern accessibility to things like water and firefighting equipment, and it could still really devastate just miles and miles and acres and acres of land and property and people’s lives.

Kim Swan: Yeah, yeah. Of course, back then, they didn’t have as much, but it’s interesting because the story that Steve Zirnkilton narrated, the story that the director chose to use was the written memories of the fire chief. I had always heard growing up that he always had a lot of guilt, and so it was … that’s the voice we heard telling this story and how … I mean they had put the fire out once and had no idea it was underground, which maybe today they would have known with all those little heat sensor things and everything. When it started up again, they didn’t know what was coming.

Then it goes back to how it started, and there’s so many … I call them urban myths even though Bar Harbor isn’t very urban, but how did it start? We never answered that question because there’s too many … I mean there are people that think it was arson. There are people that think it was a cigarette from some cranberry bog workers. There are people who think it was … it started near an old dump, that thought the sun came in just right on broken glass and started it. To hear it through his eyes and then the destruction, I mean, just horrible destruction, and then how it affected everything going forward.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me how Bar Harbor did rebuild from losing so much.

Kim Swan: It was most of the wealthy people left. Now, when you look at Mount Desert Island, the major cottages are in Northeast Harbor now. They’re not in Bar Harbor anymore. Bar Harbor is really the tourist center for Acadia and everything, but I think, going forward … One really interesting thing, I just sold a property a few weeks ago called Reef Point, and it’s right on the shore at Bath and Bar Harbor, so there’s not a lot of houses. They are very, very special properties, but Reef Point, at the time of the fire, and the fire didn’t take those houses, was owned by Beatrix Farrand who was a very, very famous landscape architect, we would call her now, but she insisted on being called a landscape gardener, had a beautiful house right on the shore at Bath, and she wanted to donate it to the town of Bar Harbor to be a horticultural center, and town of Bar Harbor couldn’t accept it. The town of Bar Harbor was broke. We had this horrible fire. So much of the tax base was gone, and so it was just a horrible situation because this mansion was breathtakingly beautiful.

Everybody’s making documentaries about her now. They’re starting to understand how important she was. When the town wouldn’t accept her house because they couldn’t because of the fire, she got upset, and she had it bulldozed and knocked it down. She had so many gardens, azalea gardens and all these other perennials that she had nurtured through the years of going all over the world doing most of the Rockefeller work and everything that, at the last second before this razing was done, Mr. Rockefeller, Mr. Savage, and the architect, his name’s going away from me, but they all said, “Can we at least come and take all these plants?” So azalea gardens and everything that were on this estate became the Azalea Gardens and part of Thuya in Northeast Harbor. They saved all these things, and it was directly because of the fire that Bar Harbor didn’t have the money to take this house and maintain it. Then you had other houses that would start being ripped down even well into the ’60s and early ’70s, and everything was because of the fire.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me what you leaned about with regard to the psychology of making it through a fire. If you’re talking to people who were children and teenagers, this is very traumatic for them.

Kim Swan: Yeah, it was traumatic. Some people in the film, you almost feel like, and not necessarily in a bad way, they grew up through the fire. There’s one man that talks about … I think he was 17, and they went outside, and there was … The fire chief, I think, was outside his house, and they said, “What are you doing?” He said, “Sign this paper,” to these kids. He said, “You’re now members of the fire department. Get going.” What they were in charge of doing is finding these paths to bring sandwiches and stuff to the men fighting the fire and to lead people through these Boy Scout paths that they knew, and so there was a huge source of pride with some people. There was a lot of humor in it. When you see the Criterion Theater, which is a big theater, 700-plus seats, when that whole theater erupts in laughter because of a documentary about a sad time, you know you’ve done something right.

There’s a man that tells the story about his father being out fighting the fire and realizing he had to evacuate his family, and so he told everybody, “We have to evacuate,” so he ran in the house and said to this young boy at the time, “Where’s your mother?” He said, “She’s upstairs getting dressed.” He said, “Where the hell does she think she’s going, to a party?” The whole theater erupted because, though they were very sad stories, they were also these stories of community coming together and everybody getting together, and that was the theme.

At the end, the director used a quote, a lady that said, “Islanders come together.” Even though I think that’s a Maine-wide theme, I think Mainers always come together, for that story, it was islanders come together. I don’t think you know on a documentary film like this. It leads you. I don’t think the director knew, and we certainly didn’t know, where it was going to go, and he followed it to this beautiful place.

Lisa Belisle: This film has actually led you into another project.

Kim Swan: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: And another film.

Kim Swan: Another film. We’re so excited. A neighbor of mine who just had her 90th birthday said to me after the success of the fire film … because we sold out the opening. We had red carpets. I mean we literally had a red carpet that all the stars were on, the photographer for Maine Magazine was there, Faces Maine had every single one of them, and some of these … They’re all in their 80s. She said to me one day, “You know, the next big thing here is happening is the 50th anniversary of Mount Desert Island High School is this year, 2018,” so we got thinking about that and thought, “Wow, we did a really cool things with marking the 70th anniversary, what’s this all about?”

On the face of it, okay, there’s a high school that was consolidated. Southwest Harbor, Tremont, Bar Harbor, and Mount Desert all went to separate high schools until 1968 when they came together, so that’s kind of cool, but how big a story is this? It’s huge. We’re actually working right now … The curator of the Bar Harbor Historical Society has been talking with the curator of the Rockefeller archives.

Back to the urban myths that happen, growing up in Bar Harbor, you hear this story that Mr. Rockefeller had always said he would build the high school for the island if they would call it Rockefeller High School. That’s just a well-known urban myth. If you really know the family or of the family, you know the last thing they do is ask for things to be named after them. I mean for Mr. Recent Rockefeller’s 100th birthday, they wanted to name a mountain after him, and he declined. Even though everybody believes that about the Rockefellers, it’s not true, and so now we have found, by going back through the archives, he was very involved in giving the land and buying the land but very quietly.

We’re going to be able to address things that, for the last 60 years, people have thought and how the high school started being talked about right after the fire because people had lost tax bases and can we keep these schools going? Again, it relates to all of Maine because there was so much resistance to this in some places and so much advocacy in other places. Everything on Mount Desert Island always goes back to basketball. You had guys who were superstar basketball players that couldn’t wait to consolidate and have kind of an all-star team that they could play on, but then you had other guys that might have been fourth or fifth man on their basketball team that knew, as soon as they consolidated, they wouldn’t play anymore.

It’s fascinating to hear these stories. I think it’s going to be as interesting and … I mean the audience for The Fire of ’47 was huge, but there’s going to be kids now … The director just filmed one of the championship basketball games, so he’s going to tie everybody in now, so there’s going to be 50, well, really 70 years of people, and just, again, letting the documentary find its own path and follow it has been amazing.

Lisa Belisle: Is it interesting to you that you’ve built your life around place and moving a place from one person to another or one company to another, and now your life is really focusing on place and the story of place in kind of a different way?

Kim Swan: I hadn’t thought about that, but you always have very good insights into stuff like that. That’s really interesting. I hadn’t thought about it like that, but it’s been a struggle because I love being in Portland. I still have businesses in Portland and everything, but I really … and I blame the Yorkies. You can’t travel a lot with two little Yorkies, but because of that, the last few years I’ve become so much more focused on Bar Harbor and working with the Historical Society, so yeah, it’s interesting. It’s also interesting when people come to Bar Harbor and buy a house, and a lot of what I do would be second homes or businesses, they get absorbed so fast. Bar Harbor is a town where, oh, you’ve been here five years? If you want to, it will be like you’ve been here 20 years because everybody kind of embraces this amazing history, and this complicated history, and all the different things going on.

It’s when people come from out of town that I realize you can be busy every night of the year in the winter in Bar Harbor. I didn’t know that. You see it through their eyes, and so, yeah, I think it is a sense of place and a sense of appreciating what you have and wanting to share it in any different way you can with other people, whether it’s through helping them purchase a property or understanding what’s happening and really embracing the history and taking the Historical Society … The Historical Society was a quiet little organization until we did a designer show house on a historical property with Maine Home & Design, and it was the first time that anybody had every done a fundraiser for the Bar Harbor Historical Society. They will all tell you this. That one experience has catapulted the Bar Harbor Historical Society, and it’s now one of the really talked about and, I think, admired organizations for kind of retooling the effort and saying, “Okay, first we’re going to make it so you can enjoy this historical house.” A lot of people don’t get to go into those homes.

Now we’re doing these films, and it’s all under the Historical Society umbrella, and it’s not just for local people. We have a board member that was talking about the mission statement, “We have to make these new people learn about what’s the history of this.” In my mind, it was always I’m preserving history for the people whose history it was, and that really gets you thinking. It’s everybody’s history. Nobody owns the history. If you want it to be your history, it’s yours, and how do you make it so that everybody has access to it, I guess?

Lisa Belisle: As you’re talking, I was thinking about a conversation I recently had with Abigail Carroll who is an oyster farmer. She told me that her oysters generally live on the bottom of the ocean floor. They started this new thing where they put them on trays next to the ones on the bottom of the ocean floor, and not only did they look different, but they tasted different, and they had a different consistency to them. I just thought, wow, what a great metaphor for us as humans, and where we live, and how we are shaped as much by the places we live in as we believe we shape those places. Now you’re talking about Bar Harbor, and you’re talking about people coming in, and I wonder if it’s not a little bit like oysters, that they start to take on the character of the place that they’re in, even kind of unwittingly.

Kim Swan: I think absolutely. Yeah. I think that you can see people who are … and it’s interesting because sometimes you will negotiate on a big sale, and somebody will be in New York or wherever they are, and they’ll be really tough. You get through that, and you think, “Oh, wow. He was kind of aggressive and everything but …” which I admire, so I don’t look at that as a bad thing, but then you kind of think they’re going to come to Bar Harbor and what’s it going to be like? Then it’s not there, so it’s exactly what you’re saying that that aggression and that thing that maybe fits somewhere else and that you use that mode of communication, I guess.

Then you come to Bar Harbor and that same person would never, never even raise their voice, never even … they’re just get adapted, I guess, so fast, much like the oysters. They’re going to live different ways considering what they’re surrounded by, so I think everybody calms down. We have Acadia National Park. It’s like, my gosh, that’s my backyard, what everybody wants to be … All of us in Maine, no matter where we are, everybody wants to get up there at some point. For us, it’s just where [Ava 00:53:39] and [Izzy 00:53:39] go for a walk every afternoon, so we count our blessings all the time.

Lisa Belisle: You’ve already talked about a lot of things that you’ve worked on and are working on. What’s the single biggest thing that you’re most excited for right now?

Kim Swan: I think the biggest thing is going to happen in the fall, actually, and I’m planning for it now. I’m really, really lucky to be acquiring a major lodging facility in the fall, and it’s something that I have had wanted forever. Everybody always says, “Why are you in the inn business in Portland, and Rockland, and all these places but not Bar Harbor?” I always said, “I want to be Kim the real estate broker in Bar Harbor. I don’t want to be this other person,” and I always used to say, “There are maybe one or two places in Bar Harbor I’d like to have,” and so the opportunity has come up and at the end of the year.

I think working on that design, and renovation, and rebranding, and ideas hands-down … I almost have to calm down because I’m so excited about it. It will launch in 2019, and it’s going to be … It’s just going to be amazing, and it’s going to be … I’m so lucky to have worked all over Maine in the lodging business, so it’s going to be something that Bar Harbor doesn’t have yet, so … because I also don’t want to compete with friends. Everybody in the business they’re almost as friends, so I never wanted to have something that would compete, so we’re going to create something completely, completely different.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I can’t wait to see it.

Kim Swan: You will be there on opening day, I hope.

Lisa Belisle: I absolutely will. How can people watch your movie The Fire of ’47?

Kim Swan: The Fire of ’47 is now out on DVD, and they can order that by going on barharborhistorical.org. We are working right now, and I don’t think it’s up yet, but we’re working on getting it onto iTunes so that people can stream it. It’s about 39 minutes. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but the DVD’s just fun to have. Brand Company did this amazing movie poster. I mean we had it all. We had the movie posters and the red carpet and everything, and so the movie poster is the cover of the DVD. Probably, that’s the easiest right now. We’re going to do more showings throughout the state. We’ve already done a lot in libraries and different theaters and everything, but pretty soon online.

Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Kim Swan who is the owner of The Swan Agency Sotheby’s International Realty and is on the board of the Bar Harbor Historical Society and has done so many other things. I really appreciate everything that you’re doing. This has been a fascinating conversation. I will be there and to see what you’re going to be coming up with for your next big thing this fall.

Kim Swan: I can’t wait. I can’t wait. Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Lisa Belisle: Thanks for coming in.

Speaker 1: Grownupgirl.com, where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life through free advice, workshops, and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area.

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You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 347. Our guests have included Emily Wedick, her friend Louise, and Kim Swan. 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 our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram.

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Guests

Sean Alonzo Harris

Richard Russo

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #346: Sean Alonzo Harris and Richard Russo

Announcer: 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 physician and editor-in-chief of Maine, Maine Home+Design, Old Port, Ageless, and Moxie magazines. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.

Dr. Lisa B.: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 346, airing for the first time on May 6, 2018. Today, we speak with Sean Alonzo Harris, a photographer concentrating on narrative and environmental portraiture, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo. Thank you for joining us.

Announcer: Grownupgirl.com, where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life, for free advice, workshops, and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area.

Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest, and is located in the heart of the Old Port, 154 Middle Street. The Gallery focuses on exhibiting the works of contemporary Maine artists, and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space, including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

Dr. Lisa B.: Sean Alonzo Harris is an editorial, commercial, and fine art photographer concentrating on narrative and environmental portraiture. He has also received critical acclaim for his fine art work and was recently awarded a Kindling Fund grant from Space Gallery and the Warhol Foundation for his project Visual Tensions.

Thanks for coming today.

Sean Alonzo H.: Thank you for having me. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: Let’s start with Visual Tensions.

Sean Alonzo H.: Yeah. It’s a project that’s been stewing around for a while. Basically, the idea, just because there’s so much tension between people of color and law enforcement, that just most of the focus has been on the anger and I wanted to focus in on what actually is the start of the anger. Basically, the thought process is that I would photograph the police officers and people of color in the same space and looking at each other, because most of the time, we make assumptions on the visuals before we know the person’s heart or mind or spirit. I wanted to break that down and pose that question of … to look beyond what we see and pause and then make a statement that way to ask that question. Hopefully, bunches of people can answer it in different ways, in their own ways.

Dr. Lisa B.: What have you learned so far?

Sean Alonzo H.: It’s really hard to work with people because people, especially in institutions … Also to convince the public that what I’m trying to do is not trying to like, “I gotcha.” You follow me? I’m not trying to trip anyone up. I have to make sure that my intentions are honest, and I have to make sure that … I have to convince people that my intentions are honest and also that I’m going to show them with dignity. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: That’s something that you’ve probably been working with through the entirety of your career, I would think-

Sean Alonzo H.: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: … as a photographer.

Sean Alonzo H.: Exactly. Exactly. Basically, my photography is basically to show dignity and power and humanity. Those things are really important to me. I feel that I … Because I still study a lot about photography and the history of photography and also I look at a lot of images always. I think it’s really important to see what’s out there. A lot of the photographs that I take in, especially with people of color, a lot of them aren’t as dignified, or it’s either celebrities and athletes. But what about the doctors and the teachers and the everyday people and showing them in a presence where they’re in a place of power or in a place of dignity? That’s kind of one of the things that I like to do, just to change the history a little bit, to show another side. A lot of people are doing it, but I think that I can play my part, too.

Dr. Lisa B.: When I was on your website, I noticed that you had a lovely portrait of Ashley Bryan.

Sean Alonzo H.: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Dr. Lisa B.: When I think about dignity-

Sean Alonzo H.: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: … I think about him. We did a story about him last year for Maine Magazine, and there’s something about him that I think you captured really well, the sort of simultaneous seriousness and joyfulness-

Sean Alonzo H.: Right, right.

Dr. Lisa B.: … I think, about his personality.

Sean Alonzo H.: Right. Well, Ashley is an amazing, wonderful man. I shot a story for him for another magazine, and he is such a playful, joyful spirit, and the way that he comes across, he fills the room with his love. When you see him, most of the photographs that I see of him have this sense of … They try to capture just that, the moment of, the layer, the first, the topical of him. It’s like these joyful, these moments of joy, laughter, and that is him completely.

But what he’s achieved in life and what he’s done is serious work. Just think about what’s in his mind is an amazing fete. I think that you need to sit back and pause and look at him as this man, as this powerful and intelligent, serious man because he’s serious as much as he laughs and plays. He has this very robust life, I just think. I just took a different … I just stepped and looked and took a completely different take on how I saw him.

Dr. Lisa B.: You also did a project on the last of the Shakers.

Sean Alonzo H.: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: A few years ago.

Sean Alonzo H.: Right. Yes, yes. That was a fun project to work on. One of my favorite things to do, a photographer, is to create fine art projects and also editorial work. Because when you go off and you photograph, especially editorial magazines, you’re usually going to photograph people who have done something amazing or have come over incredible odds, and they have a story to tell, so you sit there and watch.

The Shakers project, what happened … I went up there to … It was one of those things. I don’t know if you know the story, but there was four Shakers, and there was a magazine or a newspaper came up and did a story on them, and one of the Shakers ran off with the writer, I think. I’m not exactly sure of the whole inside, but this could be gossip or rumor, but it was very, very hard for them to … It was very, very hard for us to get in there to photograph them. They were like, “No.”

We had to go in there and really talk with them and let them know our intent. I went in there. They had to interview me before I even took their photographs. I went up there to take photographs and literally thinking it would be a half a day, and it was a three-day process. I had to go back and back and back, and it was amazing. I fell in love with the people. I fell in love with the whole thing that they’ve done.

We photographed it on 8 x 10 film, which was amazing in itself, which is a great … By photographing with 8 x 10, it’s a slower process, and I think they truly respected it. It warranted that kind of respect, I think, on the photographs because by taking that time and just because of their legacy, and also, at the time, there was only three left. I thought that it just needed to have that extra, okay, we’re going to sit down and spend 30 minutes setting up my camera. I’m going to talk and we’re going to sit, and we’re going to wait for that moment so that we can take the appropriate photograph.

Dr. Lisa B.: On the flip side, you also have an interest in street photography-

Sean Alonzo H.: Well-

Dr. Lisa B.: … which doesn’t have the … You don’t have quite the same amount of time, I would think, to build that same level of trust.

Sean Alonzo H.: No, no. Street photography is one of those things. I always looked at photography as an athletic sport, and I think that you have to exercise to continuously make strides and leaps. Street photography is one of those things. It’s like an additional exercise that I give myself to do. It’s a way to be free, because most of the things that I … The way that I shoot or what I do, they’re more of a controlled environment. Environment of portraiture itself is I’m going into your environment and we’re going to look through and see what pull … We’re going to try to pull elements out.

In street photography, it is what it is. You go out and you just have to react to what you see. Sometimes it can be like, ooh, I smell something, and you just kind of follow the smell and let those things happen, or a noise or just the rhythm of the street, which is a beautiful thing. I enjoy doing it. Most of the time when I do street photography, a lot of times it’s like travel, or I end up going to some place or an event and those kind of things. It’s like the idea. Sometimes I take no photographs. Sometimes I just fall in love with the movement and everything happens. It’s just a lot of fun. It’s an exercise to keep me sharp and keep me moving.

Dr. Lisa B.: Tell me how you decided that photography was your path. I know that you have a background. You have an art degree.

Sean Alonzo H.: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: This was an early focus of yours, but you could have done so many different things.

Sean Alonzo H.: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: Why this? Why this particular art form?

Sean Alonzo H.: Well, I start from the beginning, beginning. Well, I asked for a tape recorder when I was, I believe, about seven for Christmas from my grandmother. My grandmother was so special, she’d try to get me anything I wanted. Yeah. There was this, where you put cassette tapes and you just tape record stuff and you make sounds and you record sounds. She got me a camera, and I’m like, “What’s this? This isn’t a tape recorder.” She’s like, “Son¸ you can record with that too.”

At the time, my parents … We lived in Cambridge, Mass., and my grandmother lived in D.C., so when I had this camera, I would take photographs of the family, cousins, aunts, and uncles, and friends down there, and then I’d come back with all the film and we’d process them and I’d look at them. It would be kind of the same thing as baseball cards, and it just happened year after year after year after year.

I outgrew my Keystone camera, which is this little camera with 1/10 film. Then I got a Pentax K1000 camera, which was amazing. Then, by the time I was 13, I was taking photographs in such a regular basis, the next step was to build a darkroom. I was talking with a guy, and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, I’ve got a darkroom.” He gave me all this equipment, and I built a darkroom in my bedroom at 13. That lasted all of maybe four days because my mother probably saved my life on that one. You really can’t sleep with that kind of chemicals in your room.

Then, after that, someone asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, and it was like a no-brainer. I was just like, “A photographer,” and it wasn’t even a hesitation. It just came out of my mouth. I never even thought about it, but that was what … Then, when I was a sophomore in high school and I won a national award from photography, and it was the James Van Der Zee Black Heritage Award. I won that. I won first place and honorable mention. The next year, I won honorable mention. Then, when I was a senior, I won first place again. It was just like those things just kind of happened, and here I am. I just never put it down. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: I also remember reading about an interest that you had in baseball and a project that you did several years ago that had to do with baseball.

Sean Alonzo H.: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: You got very involved in this project, and some of the photos you took were very striking.

Sean Alonzo H.: Yes. Yes. I did a project of vintage baseball. I love baseball. That was another passion that I had, but I just wasn’t quite that good to get to the next level. But this project that I did was vintage baseball project, which was the Dirigo Vintage Base Ball Team, and they play with rules from the 1860s. They play really hard. A lot of these guys played in college and stuff like that. When I first thought of shooting these guys, I thought it was more like a reenactment kind of thing, but when I went to photograph them, they actually played really hard. It was awesome.

Me understanding the game and watching the game, it was just like this really nice … I had a really nice understanding of what was happening, what was going on, so I felt really comfortable to photograph it. The whole idea of the project was to photograph it in a way where it holds the vintage integrity. We did shoot some large format 8 x 10 stuff and digital, and then I did treatments to the digital so that they could have that same vintage feel without making it look like I shot digital and trying to make it vintage. I worked really hard to make it have that vintage feel without taking away from the actual project. Because sometimes what happens is you make it look vintage and that’s what you see versus the image. It’s like, oh, it has … That’s the first thing you go to. But I tried to balance the two so that it was seamless.

Dr. Lisa B.: Why is the history of photography so important to you?

Sean Alonzo H.: The history of photography is, for me, I don’t think … Because of the style of what I do and the respect that I have for my craft, I believe that it’s paramount for you to understand the history of what’s gone before you. There’s so many great stories when you dig down deep into the history of photography, someone’s life, someone who triumphed, some people who’ve done great photography but didn’t have any success until they passed, and some of the techniques that have gone before. I just think it’s really important.

I just bought two brand new books that were amazing, that I had no idea that existed. One was Richard Avedon and James Baldwin did a book just recently. Not recently, in the ’60s, and it’s called Nothing Personal. Just the history and the understanding in that relationship was a beautiful thing. I would have never known that Richard Avedon and James Baldwin went to the same high school. That’s an amazing thing.

Then I just bought another one. It just came in the mail three days ago. It was Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellis, and they did a beautiful book, Invisible Man, and I didn’t realize. This was a new publication that came out from Chicago Institute of Art. Newer, I should say. I think it came out 2014. Yeah, to understand those relationships of the writer, the writer’s role, and the visual artist’s role.

By me digging down and figuring out history, those books would have never crossed my path, but because I’m looking and constantly trying to study and figure things out, these do come up. It just gives it another breath and life of two … I have many books of Richard Avedon and many books of Gordon Parks, and I have a few books of James Baldwin and a few books … Those things put together, two loves that come together, I think by studying, those things become so much more and they become treasures.

Dr. Lisa B.: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about the work I do as a writer and working with the photographers that I have worked with for the magazines and how even that dynamic can really shape a story.

Sean Alonzo H.: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: Because I’ve worked with people like Matt Cosby or Greta Rybus or Ann Little, Nicole Wolf. Each of them as photographers have their own take on things, visual sense. It’s really fascinating to see how they interact with people. As I’m creating a word-based story, they’re creating kind of a simultaneous visual story.

Sean Alonzo H.: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: Tell me about some of your experience in working with writers.

Sean Alonzo H.: Most of the stories that I’ve gone out to, the writing a lot of times is almost done. The couple of times that I’ve worked on stories that the writer was on, was there, I believe that you know the photographers that you are working with. I think that’s really important. I think it’s harder to figure out your place sometimes with the writer if the story isn’t written as the photographer is shooting, because you want to respect both sides of the story.

I think it takes a little bit of finesse, and then you kind of just … Because, for me, for instance, I worked on a story and it was about a particular subject matter that I knew a lot about historically, and the writer really came in in a very narrow point of view. Without me saying, “Well, you know, back in the ’30s this was going on and this was the norm back in the ’30s,” so I really had to dance around without putting my bent on their story and just kind of go along with it and just listen and try to just do what I knew how to do and take photographs.

Dr. Lisa B.: Yeah, I love hearing this from you because I have also … I remember a story that I did with Matt Cosby about the Special Surfers Program down in Kennebunk. He actually helped shape the story in some ways because he was really great about getting in the water with these younger people on their surf boards, and he was able to say, “You really should talk with this person. You should really talk to this person.” I think that he actually made the story better for me, and I can see how that would be … It could go either way.

Sean Alonzo H.: Right. It could actually-

Dr. Lisa B.: You can absolutely have a situation where the writer and the photographer are at odds.

Sean Alonzo H.: Right, right.

Dr. Lisa B.: I think learning to figure out that interaction can be really valuable.

Sean Alonzo H.: Well, it is. I think as professionals, I think that that’s kind of our duty. First, we need to figure out boundaries, and then we need to figure out where we can … I don’t want to use the word negotiate, but where we can figure out to collaborate and try to make the story as fit as it can be. Sometimes when I’m doing stories, traveling, doing stories with magazines and stuff like that, the writer will go alongside, which is a different kind of thing because they already have these bullet points, so things that need to be, this is kind of where we’re going with it. They have a lot more background on the person, so we discuss either on the plane or we discuss in the hotel room before we even go out and figure out. We kind of set up a schedule of writing and of photographs so we don’t overlap and those kind of things. It is a little different in some ways.

Yeah. I’ve worked side by side by, I guess, some writers. Then other times, it’s just, okay, this is the story. Go shoot, and I’ll see what comes back. I’ll see the story. Most of the time, I’ll know who the writer is, so it’s good too.

Dr. Lisa B.: Talk to me about the Biennial. You’ve been honored recently by the Portland Museum of Art by being part of that process.

Sean Alonzo H.: Oh, yeah. That was pretty cool. Well, I got an email from Mark Bessire and he was like, “Hey, I want to do a studio visit.” I’m like, “Sure.” The next question was, “Are you looking for anything special?” And he was like, “No. I just want to see some stuff.” He came by and he pulled out some stuff, and he’s like, “I really like that.” He took some photographs with his phone, and he left. He was, “Hey, see you later. Bye.” I get an email probably three weeks later, and he says, “Hey, I want to come back, and would you mind if Nat May would come by? He’s the curator for the Biennial.”

At that point, I knew what it was. The whole casual kind of thing that I had with Mark was like, oh, okay, now I need to pull out some other stuff. He picked out some photographs that I really liked, which I believe would have been worthy to be in the Biennial. But I was working on this new body of work which I hadn’t shown anyone yet, which I was waiting to … I could show some of it. I knew the work was strong, but I wasn’t ready to present it at that time. Then, I was like, oh, I got to show this new work that I was doing, which is the Kennedy Park Project, which is in Portland, Maine, Kennedy Park. I guess it’s one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Maine. I could be wrong, but it’s pretty diverse.

I pulled this work out, and they were like, whoa. The images they picked were four photographs of basketball players, and they’re black basketball players and their skin, because of the light, it was so amazing, almost became metallic. They were just so beautiful. I’m really proud of these images. They’re just really beautiful moments captured.

Back to the street photography, this is kind of what happened with … That was, I would consider more street photography or as an artist, you do have a visual language, and I think that when you can hone in and understand your visual language, it makes it a lot easier for you to move through your craft or figure out exactly where you need to be or what images that you need to capture at the particular time. With these images what I believe happened is that they expanded my voice just so, so I was really excited about it.

Dr. Lisa B.: This has been a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed having the chance to talk with you. You and I have interacted many times over the years.

Sean Alonzo H.: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: To be able to sit down and have a little bit more of an in-depth back-and-forth is pretty wonderful.

Sean Alonzo H.: Awesome.

Dr. Lisa B.: I appreciate it.

Sean Alonzo H.: This is a wonderful experience. Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: I’ve been speaking with Sean Alonzo Harris, who is an editorial, commercial and fine art photographer concentrating on narrative and environmental portraiture. I’m sure we’re going to continue to see great things from you, and we appreciate your coming in today.

Sean Alonzo H.: Thank you for having me. Thank you very much.

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Novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo is the author of eight novels, two short story collections, and the memoir Elsewhere. His novel Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002. His new collection of essays, The Destiny Thief, comes out in May.

Thanks for coming in.

Richard Russo: Great to be here.

Dr. Lisa B.: It’s interesting that I have this book of your essays in my hand because I had just finished a book of essays that I believe were by Neil Gaiman. Really an interesting, I guess, look over his life as a writer because he had done some reviews, he had done some pieces for other people’s books. And yours was actually an interesting kind of time capsule of your life as well, but in a slightly different way.

Richard Russo: Yeah. Yeah, I haven’t read the Gaiman. But there are a fair number of books that are coming out right now with writers who are maybe not quite as long in the tooth as I am, but writers who have been writing for a while, so there’s Neil Gaiman, and Ann Patchett had a wonderful book of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, that came out a few years ago.

Now, Lorrie Moore had a book that just came out, I think this week or last week, too, that looks at a better life as a fiction writer but also as an essayist and book reviewer, and it’s getting a lot of attention too, so there’s something in the water, I guess, that’s causing writers who have been at it for a while to take a step back and try to figure out if there has been some sort of pattern. Of course, this book is called The Destiny Thief, and it’s really about that. As I look back on my life as a writer, it just seems also just so incredibly improbable, all of it.

Dr. Lisa B.: The Destiny Thief, and you wrote about that. You were kind of contrasting your life with the life of another individual-

Richard Russo: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: … who was also a writer.

Richard Russo: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: At least in theory, at the time, it seemed like might be the one who had the success and you were known as the one who was going to be the teacher.

Richard Russo: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: Then, somehow something shifted and you had this success as a writer, and I believe something about he called you up to apologize for a drunk dial one night, and you said, “Well, thank you for your apology, but you didn’t drunk-dial me.”

Richard Russo: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: Tell me a little bit about that.

Richard Russo: Well, there was this … I gave him a fictional name because I didn’t want him to be embarrassed by anything that I might be recounting in this particular essay, but I remember I was at that point a … We were both students at the University of Arizona taking a workshop class together, but I was almost finished with my PhD, and I had only discovered then at pushing 30 that I thought I might want to be a writer.

I expected the director of creative writing, when I told him I was interested, I expected him to put me in this graduate-level writing workshop. There was a very strong one at the time at the University of Arizona. I expected to be in with other graduate students, but he took one look at my writing and said, “No, no. I think not,” and he put me in this undergraduate, sophomore undergraduate class. Everybody in it was at least 10 years younger than I was.

There was this one really, really talented young man who was writing this rock and roll novel, and it was so good. I was so jealous because he had at a fairly tender age discovered not only what he wanted to do with his life but what really mattered to him. He seemed to have a great read on what his subject matter might be, and he was just, despite being 10 years younger, was just miles ahead, and I could tell it. I think that the instructor in the class recognized that talent and where he was in the overall scheme of things. I think every other student in the class did, too. He was the star.

I did get better, and ultimately I got into the graduate workshop, but I don’t think that there was a time during that … In my entire apprenticeship at the University of Arizona, I don’t think that there was ever a time when if you had taken a poll of the participants in the workshop and asked them who’s going to be … who 10 years from now, 20 years, 30 years from now is not only going to be writing, but maybe writing successfully, who’s got a career, I don’t think I would have appeared on any of those lists starting with that first sophomore class.

As I was thinking about all of this, I just kept thinking about this one incredibly talented young writer who did get in touch with me years later, and he was puzzled by exactly the same things that I was puzzled by. How could this have happened? What kind of cosmic joke has just been perpetrated here? As if I would know, as if I could explain it to him.

Dr. Lisa B.: Well, at least you took it that way and not, “Well, of course, I would have been good. I don’t know why you even questioned it.”

Richard Russo: Yeah, yeah. But that’s what people do. Most people, I think they get to a certain point if they’ve been fortunate, if they’ve had some success, the story that they kind of want to write or rewrite is, “Oh, you know, it was all hard work and it was all talent and hard work.” They want to suggest that they knew it all along and that it was only a matter of time for things to play out.

I think a much more honest assessment of success, certainly my success … I don’t want to speak for everybody here, but my own sense is that if I got to do this all over again, without the knowledge of what has happened to me, but if I had the same opportunities another 99 times to round it off to a full hundred, the other 99 wouldn’t turn out anything like this one. There are just too many variables. You make too many mistakes. Sometimes you get things right, but just as often, you get things wrong and you change something and you change everything.

Yeah, part of the reason that Destiny fascinates me so much, the whole idea of Destiny, is that you get the sense when you’re looking at things through one end of the telescope, when you’re young and you’re looking at all the things that could happen and you see how many moving parts there are. Then you get a little older and you’re looking at things through the other end of the telescope, and it all seems kind of inevitable. Well, of course, it isn’t. It isn’t. The other view is probably closer to the truth.

Dr. Lisa B.: I particularly enjoyed the story of the gravestone and the toilet because I think it shows this interesting challenge that there is these days with having a sense of humor and perhaps a little bit of irreverence about oneself and one’s writing.

Richard Russo: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: Because what you were describing was … And I’m going to let you tell the story because I found it very, very funny, and I read it to the person who was with me and he also found it very funny. But you were describing something that other people in your family didn’t really find all that humorous at all, but every time you would look at this situation, you would crack yourself up.

Richard Russo: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: Part of what you say is that it’s kind of about your ability to help other people see your way of looking at things, not trying to be funny but just present it so other people understand the humor.

Richard Russo: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: Tell me about that story.

Richard Russo: Well, the story starts out true. There’s some embellishment later on, but the story starts out as true. When we moved to Maine, we bought this house that had two features that over the years were interesting. There was this apple tree out in the back yard that grew every year and dropped these poisonous, worm-infested green apples out there that I used to mow around on my riding mower.

What was interesting was at the base of the tree there was this gravestone, and it was filled out. Someone had intended to use this gravestone, and apparently there was a stone cutter who lived in the house many, many, many years ago. I never did find out why the gravestone didn’t get used, but there it was leaning up against this kind of poisonous apple tree. It was as if the gravestone itself was in some way poisoning the tree, just guaranteeing that every year, you’d get this harvest of really disgusting poisonous green apples.

There was an inscription. We know who the person was who died, and he was a Syrian, I believe, and how he ended up in Maine we don’t know, but there was this … Some of the details were kind of comic, or to me anyway they were kind of comic. Here is this kind of emblem of death itself. There’s a gravestone in the middle of our back yard, and to almost anybody, this thing would have been a symbol that we saw every day, a symbol of our own mortality.

Why in the world, number one, would you leave it there? When we tried to sell the house, people would come by and they would see that and decide they didn’t want the house on the basis of the gravestone. Most people see that symbol and it reminds them of what we don’t want to be reminded of, the fact that we’re all going to die.

What to me was interesting about that was that it didn’t affect me that way at all. So what? So it was a gravestone. I didn’t really believe that it was poisoning the apples in the tree, nor did it particularly bother me that this Syrian, young Syrian man had somehow come to Maine and died there. Didn’t bother me at all that his stone was leaning up against my apple tree. Didn’t bother me as I was riding around it.

After a very short time, I just learned not to see it. It just did not register on my writerly imagination at all until one day when we were doing some renovations on the house, and in order to put some tile down in the three-quarter bath we had to pull up the commode. I say we, the people we hired had to pull up the commode. For a day or two, while they were working on the bathroom, out there on the back deck sat the commode. Nothing else is there, no folding chairs. It was late in the autumn. We’d brought everything back in. Here, right in the middle of the back deck was this commode, open. Leaves were falling and swirling out of the sky into the commode.

When I was sitting there in my office writing, every now and then, I would look up and I would see the gravestone in the distance and right in front of the gravestone, the commode, and it just cracked me up every time. When my kids came home, my daughters came home, I would say, “Look at that,” and my wife the same way. They just kind of squinted at it, and didn’t understand really why it just tickled me so.

But the essay, the essay is really about that, for a writer, that which slows you down. Whatever it is, because I was able to look at that gravestone, something that really caused other people to slow down, somebody who was thinking about buying the house and liked everything about it but then saw that gravestone and it stopped them right in their tracks. They couldn’t go any farther. I learned not to see that at all, but put the comic thing, put the commode right in front of it, and now suddenly, my imagination is just in full bloom. I’ve got all kinds of possibilities for fiction.

I think that day, I probably already knew it, but if I hadn’t known it, I think that day, seeing those two things right in the same frame and knowing what interested me and what didn’t, particularly was a crystallizing moment in the sense that I thought, all right, I know who I am now. I’m a comic writer. Because most writers, it’s a question of what slows you down, what causes you to look twice, what causes you to really see something. For me, it’s almost always life’s foolishness, people looking for dignity and it eludes them. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: You wrote about the craft of writing, and you spoke about your, I believe it was your grandfather, who was a glove-maker in upstate New York.

Richard Russo: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: And how he was part of, I believe, a guild and actually went and spent two years learning how to make gloves-

Richard Russo: Yep.

Dr. Lisa B.: … which was unpaid, I think, and-

Richard Russo: If it wasn’t unpaid, it certainly wasn’t well-paid. I think at that time in the guild that he was part of, you were probably dependent on the largesse of whoever was teaching it, and probably whoever that was wasn’t making a fortune either. I don’t think glove cutters ever made an enormous amount of money. My grandfather, his timing not being great, kind of came at the very end of this whole process.

But, yeah, he was in a guild, and I’m sure that during those first couple of years before he finished his apprenticeship and became a glove cutter, a certified glove cutter in his own right, I’m sure that he and my grandmother, although they hadn’t married yet, they couldn’t afford to until he got that first job as a glove cutter, I’m sure that they were living very, very hand-to-mouth as he was learning his trade.

Dr. Lisa B.: And there is something about writing which is not dissimilar. There is certainly an art to it. Everybody understands that, but there is a craft to it.

Richard Russo: Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa B.: Something about that time that one needs to spend often largely unpaid and lots and lots of work, that maybe not everybody understands in this day and age when it seems like it’s so easy to just throw words together.

Richard Russo: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. One of the most difficult things about teaching yourself how to write and teaching other people how to write is that almost everybody misunderstands just how long it’s going to take for you to get there. Ann Patchett said in one of the best essays I’ve ever read about writing called The Getaway Car, she says that anybody who has ever picked up a cello knows instinctively that you’re not going to be playing that instrument in Carnegie Hall any time soon. It feels foreign, and there are so many things that you need to do, and the first time you draw that bow, you understand intuitively just how much you have to learn, just how difficult and complicated what you’re setting about to do is.

You factor in your imagination, if when you pick that thing up and you love it, despite its difficulty, you still in your mind have to say to yourself, “This is going to be a very, very long road that I’m going down before I can, number one, probably play for the relatives when they come over on Thanksgiving. It’s going to be a while before I’m even that good.” Then, during an apprenticeship, the various things that you have to do over a period of years and even with just astonishing dedication, it’s going to take you a very long time because what you’re looking at here is something foreign if you’re going to have to learn it. It’s not part of you.

Whereas for a writer, the problem is that it’s words, and you’ve been talking almost your entire life, and so you think, why not? Right? A year should be plenty of time, shouldn’t it? We’re going to write the words down. We’re going to put them through a spell check. I have stories to tell. My parents had stories to tell. I come from a family of bull-throwers. Why shouldn’t I be able to tell stories? It’s just an extension of what I’ve been doing for a very long time. I still think of that in terms of my own family. I come from a long line of people who were telling stories and pretty good storytellers, but they’re not writing. But they’re good storytellers, my father, in particular.

But the amount of time that it actually takes to get good is … Most writers just misjudge, and they don’t misjudge by a couple of months. They misjudge by years how long it’s going to take, partly because the competition is stiff, but also because you don’t know what you don’t know, and it’s very difficult to judge that gap which seems shorter than it is. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: Well, this is a quote that I really identified with, “Hunger remembered is not the same as hunger felt. Indeed, for some, that’s the final cruel joke. That hard-won mastery of craft coincides almost to the minute with passion’s ebb. Art offered shoulders to stand on often has not been yours.”

Richard Russo: Right. Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: Because that thing that you’re talking about, that grabbing the cello where you have that passion, or in your case, in this book, you’re describing grabbing a guitar-

Richard Russo: Guitar, yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: … as a teenager.

Richard Russo: Because that was my first hunger.

Dr. Lisa B.: Yeah.

Richard Russo: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: But I mean that idea that I really, really want to do this.

Richard Russo: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: You’re right. Over time, that doesn’t necessarily stay at the same level. In fact, for most people, it won’t.

Richard Russo: No. For me, part of the cruelty was that when I felt that first hunger, and as I described in that essay, that first hunger to play rock and roll at a very high volume, what was coming between me and doing that I thought was equipment. I had kind of a beat-up guitar and an amplifier with one blown speaker, and I got together with some other high school kids and we formed a band. Obviously, we weren’t very good, but we deceived ourselves into thinking that if we just had better equipment, we would get better and we would become worthy of our instruments. We would become worthy of our drums, worthy of our guitars, our keyboards and all of that.

I did, I played band. I played in various bands in high school. I put myself, in part, through graduate school playing 12-string guitar in a restaurant in Tucson, the same gig for seven years or so. And I finally got, at some point, I finally got this gorgeous Gibson guitar with pearl inlay on the neck, and it was a 12-string. You put that thing up next to a microphone. You’re singing into one microphone and you’ve got your 12-string guitar, a really good one with a throaty, it’s got some base to it. You strum that thing through a microphone and it sounds like an orchestra. It sounds really, really good.

But I remember getting that 12-string guitar, the kind of instrument that I had been lusting for since I was 15, and hearing how good it sounded also convinced me for the first time that I was never going to be as good as that instrument, that I was always going to be … I could get better, but I was never going to be as good as that instrument was. Yeah, the hunger is wonderful. It’ll keep you going. It’ll drive you forward. That desire is sufficient to keep you going for a very long time, but my god, it can be heartbreaking. That realization that you finally have everything at your disposal, you can’t blame it on anything else anymore and the realization that, all right, I’ve achieved a kind of level here. I might get a little bit better, but I’m never going to be good. I’m never going to be really good.

Writing, on the other hand, was something that despite the fact that nobody else seemed to think I would be any good, at least for a very long time, that was something that as I continued to plug away, it did seem to me that as bad as the writing was at times, and there were many times that it was really bad, I began to sense that it might be okay. Not so much because I would be good enough or that I would be skilled enough, but that the people that I wanted to write about, the characters who have graced my novels all of these years, what happened was that at some point, I became convinced that they were good enough, these imaginary, these people that I wanted to write about, the kinds of lives that they lived.

Not many people were telling their stories. And so at some point, it was different than looking at that guitar and realizing how beautiful it was and that I was never going to be worthy of it. It seemed to me that maybe because these characters who were swimming in my head seemed so real and their stories seemed so important, it seemed to me that despite the daily evidence that the writing wasn’t as good as it should be, I never felt that I’ll never be worthy of these people or I’ll never be able to tell their stories. It always seemed to me that if I kept at it, maybe I’d be able to.

Dr. Lisa B.: One of the pieces that I enjoyed reading was the one that you wrote about Jennifer Boylan. It’s very interesting to me now because this was something that happened how many years ago? 15 years ago maybe?

Richard Russo: Oh, I think … As a matter of fact, well, yeah, something like that. The 10-year anniversary of She’s Not There, Jenny’s groundbreaking memoir, was a couple of years ago, I think. So, yeah, we’re talking pretty close to, pretty close to 15 years now. Of course, I think of it as longer than that because we were friends longer than that. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: I’ve enjoyed our conversation, and I encourage people to read The Destiny Thief, because it’s really very interesting, and it covers a lot of different topics in different ways.

Richard Russo: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: I think it offers an encapsulation of much of the things that you did outside of the fiction writing, which is great to have because as a writer, it’s nice to know that there’s a larger … We’ve used the word landscape before, the landscape itself, the landscape of craft that goes beyond just what you specialize in.

I’ve been speaking with novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo, who is the author of eight novels, two short story collections, and the memoir Elsewhere. His novel Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002, and his new collection of essays, The Destiny Thief, comes out in May.

Thanks so much for coming in today.

Richard Russo: Thank you, Lisa. I really enjoyed it.

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Dr. Lisa B.: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, Show Number 346. Our guests have included Sean Alonzo Harris and Richard Russo. For more information on our guests and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes.

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This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.

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Guests

Eddie Woodin

Steve Rodrigue

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #344: Eddie Woodin and Steve Rodrigue

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 physician and editor-in-chief of Maine, Maine Home Design, Old Port, Ageless, and Moxie magazines. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.

Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 344, airing for the first time on April 22nd, 2018. Today we speak with Eddie Woodin, the owner of Woodin & Company Store Fixtures in South Portland, and Steve Rodrigue the founder and owner of Maine Raised Gardens. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1: GrownupGirl.com where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life with free advice, workshops and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area.

Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the cities largest, and is located in the heart of the Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the works of contemporary Maine artists, and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

Lisa Belisle: Eddie Woodin is the owner of Woodin & Company in South Portland. He is also a conservationist working with the Scarborough Land Trust, Maine Audubon, and Friends of Casco Bay and he helped to pass Scarborough’s pesticide ordinance last year. Thanks for coming in.

Eddie Woodin: Oh, pleased to be here. Thank you, Dr. Lisa.

Lisa Belisle: Well, let’s start with talking about the pesticide ordinance, tell me a little bit about that.

Eddie Woodin: Well, very interesting. I’m a lifelong nature birder was sitting out in the month of June at my home in Grondin Pond near the Scarborough Marsh. When I moved to Maine, Maine was known as the mosquito capital of the world, and had eight brown bats that had been historically in the yard. All of a sudden I noticed there were no brown bats and this was in the early evening, and I had noticed earlier that there were very few insects. It really caught my attention and probably two weeks later we had a nesting box of tree swallows, and they abandoned the nest with young because there were no insects, so we’ve gone from the mosquito capital of the world to no insects. I immediately became suspicious of is the state spraying as they do in Massachusetts.

I grew up in Concord, Mass and we had screech-owls nesting in an ash tree and in the mid ’50s polio was an issue so there was an overkill. We would hear in the summer the drone of this tank trunk and seated on top was a man with a spray hose with DDT and you ran for cover. You closed the window, no warning, and it was incredible the spray that was down the middle of the road killing the Baltimore orioles, eventually killed the screech-owls, so it made an impression on me and I was aware of Silent Spring in ’62 and having been involved in the bird world so I said, “Something’s wrong.” I was at a Land Trust meeting a few months later and there was Karen D’Andrea, a birding friend of mine. I said, “Karen, there’s something wrong,” and I said, “I think we really have to look at this pesticide, herbicide issue because it’s killing everything.”

She said, “Well, that’s interesting. Let me consider.” So she got back several weeks later and she said, “I think I want to go further” because she was involved with doctors and a holistic doctor group, so in the end she agreed that she would work on an ordinance. She was on the town council. She was on the ordinance committee and six months later a mother, Marla Zando, approached … So I’m from nature, but Marla said, “Gee, I have a young son now, Karen.” She had spoken to Karen. “I’m concerned about his future and about chemicals.” So off we went and by 2011 after a year and a half work an ordinance was created that was very effective and we passed and it was terrific.

We had a great group called Citizens for a Green Scarborough and it’s a great Margaret Mead example of a committee of passionate, committed, impassioned people can change a community. We had a lot of opposition, so it was quite a battle. We did win and that was only the beginning. We had a lot of press. My concept was if we could convince the town to go organic on their municipal property including the athletic fields they were the tip of the iceberg and all the press anything written is good, press is good. It would then start to influence the homeowners and that was our goal, and we’ve converted hundreds of homeowners from there, but in the process we compiled 700 pages of documents it was amazing.

We had a dream team. We had a gentleman, Mark, who works for the EPA. Elizabeth was a lawyer. Marla’s husband was in landscape, and she had been president of the Land Trust and the list went from there. We had a very flat horizontal organization no president. We all took ownership and share and we completed and went a long way. We had opposition. I had glass vases smashed in my driveway twice, so this is very contemptuous between the chemical industry and the people. They used the landscapers as their pawns, but in the end we were successful. Brought in Casco Bay they do a great job. Cathy Ramsdell and Mary Cerullo and we were great friends talking anyway and handed off a power PAC. In the power PAC were the key documents of our 700.

Mary had been very involved anyway as the field worker, and she ran with the packet and then she started South Portland working with the folks there. I did, I spoke, and I brought the power PAC and our ordinance so it’s easy now. We just want more and more groups that might be fired up and want to commit to this and run with it. I do have all the documentation is a starter kit, so we’re still in it. Portland just passed, which was terrific. Ours was an ordinance, but Portland is a policy, which is one step higher so kudos to them and they start now to say that homeowners even can, so the pesticide herbicides are killers and organics become the key on the bird side.

The insectivore birds have dropped by 70% in population. Beyond Pesticides is one of the groups involved in that movement, and they’re saying 75% of the insect biomass has been eliminated, died, and there are so many chemicals going into the air so there’s great concern there. Six pages were written on Long Island. The lobster industry if you’re a lobsterman or you’re in the fisheries you should be very concerned and jump into this fray. It’s reported that their lobster industry collapsed because of pesticides. They were spraying malathion. The federal government, finally, the EPA there are 800 toxins and in 20 years they have thoroughly investigated three, so the chemical companies still have too much influence. The fisheries Marine Fishery group, Institute produced 3,700 pages that just recently they’ve been fighting for 10 years, and finally the government is starting to take action on malathion, but this malathion on Long Island you spray mosquitoes in whatever purposes it washed into Long Island and six different studies have been produced that it killed the lobster industry, so we need to be careful in Maine too.

Malathion back in the ’70s, oh, this is the best, this breaks down quickly. It doesn’t, so organics is the key, and then on the health side I learned a good lesson. By the way, I just want to make the comment how important the women have been in this whole chase. We developed a group, Citizens for a Green Scarborough, there were seven of us, five of them were women, and they were great writing talents and great leadership. Karen D’Andrea and Portland Avery, so the women have been really key and important in this. So I’m in Augusta, Amy Volk and Mary Nelson from Falmouth introduced the schoolyard bill because we now in Scarborough on the athletic fields you have organics, or you have abstinence. The country of France, for example, has banned Roundup.

Roundup you’re starting to see on TV class action suits for a number of blood diseases, so Susie and Johnny slide into second base, and they’re ingesting Roundup. The human aspects go beyond that, so there was a schoolyard bill in which organics … The synthetics compared to organic are the killers. They last five times longer, they’re more toxic. In the organics you actually have a number of natural things that aren’t killers, but affect well, so I went to Augusta and I testified twice. I’ll never forget it we’re sitting there for four hours. We had to wait our turn, and a woman got up she was probably late 30s, and she said, “I’m here to tell you that organics are the way to go and that these pesticides and this bill should be passed.” She said, “We have an autistic son.” She said, “My husband and I decided we would buy local organic food only and then two years later you would not know that he was autistic.” She said, “He is, but marked improvement it’s tremendous.”

Then for women there was an article in 2011 that one of the three chemicals that now is being restricted by EPA, finally, after a 10 year battle is a derivative of a poison gas from World War I in between to World War II and they use a derivative of that in the apples, et cetera, and women with a child in the womb can be ingesting particularly from fruit. If you have lead paint exposure a child could lose two to three IQ points. With the pesticides it’s seven points it’s significant, so the idea of apple juice, and a number of these other things it’s just I think important for people with youth to be careful and consider that. The list of the human things goes on.

Lisa Belisle: You have a large and beautiful garden that I visited a few years ago.

Eddie Woodin: Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: It’s been important to you over the years not because of the plants, but also because of the birds which you love and I guess the insects. I’m not sure if you love the insects.

Eddie Woodin: I do their role.

Lisa Belisle: So tell me how you keep that going because that is often one of the concerns people have about not using chemicals is how you are able to keep everything blooming and growing and happy and not be overrun by pests?

Eddie Woodin: Great question. I bought a home 20 years ago. There wasn’t a blade of grass it was all sand. A former sandpit overlooking a 30 acre pond and I said, “Wow, here’s an opportunity.” I’m spiritual and I said, “I want to plant one of everything God made” which would never happen, but I wanted a great variety. In my college days I had a lawn business which I started and I did some landscaping so I had a little bit of experience and I really enjoyed it. These are living things and I recently realized that the earth has a soul, everything does. I wanted to create habitat for birds, but interestingly I wanted to plant as much as I could on two acres because of the conversion of oxygen in taking carbon dioxide out and converting. A modest lawn, for example, in a home can produce enough oxygen for a family of four on a daily basis so I had this view that if I could do spruce trees and a number of other things, coniferous trees through the winter that I’m doing my part, and the National Audubon their theme this year is do something.

Take a piece of puzzle in your home, in your property plant something, do something for nature, so it’s a great concept one-by-one, so that was my concept. So I started planting and it got bigger and bigger and birdhouses and now nesting birds and bird feeders. I decided I was going to have a successful property with nothing but water. I was not going to put fertilizer on the grass. I was not going to use pesticides or herbicides. Dandelions I embraced. I enjoy them. It’s the first natural flower for the bees the bumblebees. I’m really into honeybees, so I embraced it and clover I love clover. All the greens it mixes in it’s green, so I developed this two acre property with simply water.

My message is abstinence. You don’t need the chemicals. If you work on your health and you take probiotics you take this little capsule and this is like 20 billion probiotics it’s like, wow, this is really mind-boggling. Well, your lawn is the same thing the microbes billions and billions and those are those you can’t see them living organisms that then build on a chain as the organisms become more sophisticated. When you stop all the chemicals they come back to life, and then there’s a wonderful ecosystem within that lawn and within your property that is self-maintaining.

I have garden beds, perennials. I use dehydrated compost and that’s it. That’s the only enhancement on the property. It’s a successful great property. We’re going to have an open house. If you are listening and you’re interested in abstinence and how to have a lawn where you’re not using the chemicals July 28 of ’18 we’re having an open house. We have hundreds of people. We’ve had 600 people at a time from 10 to two p.m. We will run ads, but everyone’s invited if you really want to see it. All you need is water. Just say no, abstinence is the key.

Lisa Belisle: You also have dogs. How do they react to your property?

Eddie Woodin: Well, that is a great question. We had a set of labs, chocolate labs, and back in 2011 there were some indigenous weeds in our 30 acre pond and two neighbors took it upon themselves to put 2,4-D herbicide which was Agent Orange the mainstay in the water pellets and the puppies got into the pond. I didn’t know what it was and I went in and pulled them out and then my skin started itching greatly so we got a hold of the state. They came down it was 2,4-D and on, believe it or not, 9/11 that very day these two were before the assistant attorney general for having broken the law and had to pay a fine. 2,4-D is that toxic and serious to the state. So the puppies were exposed and we decided not to breed because of that because it can create a lot of lymphomas, et cetera. So they did live a long life, but of course, they died of blood issues, which probably came from the 2,4-D.

Scottie dogs when you lay down your chemicals on your lawn Scottie dogs, for example, have seven times the liver cancer of normal dogs because they’re low to the ground and their hair is brushing. I mean, it’s an unseen thing and it’s time for people not to ignore it. 63% of all households have 2,4-D in it. It’s tracked in whether it’s from their property or not. We ran some ads we have a great marketing machine. I’m a marketing guy with CGS and ran some ads and one of them was of a little baby crawling on the lawn and it’s like how can you do this? I have two sons and it’s like how can you do this?

I just read another article out of the 700 pages where chemicals were applied on the lawn and shortly, thereafter, 15% of the children had ingested in their lungs the chemicals. MIT in ’14, ’15 and ’16 wrote articles regarding pesticides, herbicides and autism. Having listened to this lady in Augusta they were forced to withdraw them. I’m not sure what the science was or wasn’t, but they’re very bright people and I’m just concerned that this exposure is detrimental to kids particularly younger ones, and the athletic fields as well, just say no.

Lisa Belisle: Did you see the birds come back once you had started to create a natural habitat for them without chemicals?

Eddie Woodin: I did, and the birds, the robins when this whole thing started on night I’m thinking I thought of a robin eating a worm from the soil and I’m thinking, “What’s in that worm? It’s ingesting all this stuff.” That was a driving point for me and it’s rewarding now. We have robins galore feeding on the worms. We have worms galore that’s the other thing, I mean, we’ve always been natural, but the number of worms. Now I’m so proud when I drive by our baseball field up at the high school the herring gulls are there and they’re feeding on the worms and other organisms because everything isn’t being killed. I’ve seen the birds come back and I think the population is still on the decline, but I’ve had good success. However, the butterflies have declined and properly one of the big canaries in the mine for me are the moths.

If you go out at night if you have a garden it’s fun in perennials and I’ll go out with a flashlight at night around nine p.m. in the summer and you’re going to see a whole new living group flying around and pollinating at night. Those numbers are just down significantly so it’s a real issue. These pesticides, herbicides, honeybees, all the pollinators, boy, we need to wake up and just say no, so that’s a big concern. Monarchs did come back a little bit, but I’m creating a new Monarch garden, new concept. You take swamp milkweed, butterfly weed and I’m working with Broadway Gardens, Phil Roberts, the owner to bring in common milkweed. When you try and pull it from the side of the road the roots don’t fully develop, but it’s grown commercially so I cut two new beds in the lawn not much grass left now, and going to use those three items for Monarchs. We had great success last year with Monarchs and the swamp milkweed. We can all take a piece of the puzzle and create even if it’s one swamp milkweed you’re helping nature. You’re helping pollinators and that’s my current theme.

Lisa Belisle: So in addition to your swamp milkweed what is maybe the most important thing that you would suggest to someone who is trying to have a nice lawn but do it without the use of pesticides or herbicides?

Eddie Woodin: Boy, great question. I like the idea of a green lawn which is green because of nature and water. The dandelions I dig some of them, but they’re great for nature so plantings. I have over 260 species of trees, shrubs, et cetera. I think a combination and then perennial flowers and, of course, the crocuses, et cetera, but have fun with it. I mean, empower yourself and enjoy nature and we start with the crocuses. It’s like, oh, man, they’re coming up through that ice how can this be? Then there’s a process we actually have blooming flowering from April into October, but I think the shrubs in particular have great beauty.

We have coniferous trees and oak trees and a number of trees, but then you layer down and build a perimeter, if you will, but rhododendrons are beautiful the PJMs which are in the Rhodo family. Those are those pink ones that you see on all the commercial properties they come in early. Azaleas will work here and Boxwood. I’m out feeding the birds very icy right now, but here are these Boxwood plants that look so frail, but they’re pure green against the contrast and living things they’re a great item.

So my method was to go to Broadway Gardens and O’Donal’s. O’Donal’s, by the way, is all organic. A number of hardware stores will not sell synthetics anymore. There’s a real move and a real change. Eldredge Lumber, kudos to all of them. We the consumer drive that bus so ask for it, but I’d hang out. I go over I see Phil and I spend like an hour walking around saying, “Wow, this is great,” and then fill the car with perennials. It’s great fun. Go take a look. See what is in your pallet and what you like and crocosmia. We have open houses that we’ve had now for 15 years the favorite of everyone is the perennial called crocosmia. It’s a like a bird of paradise with red. Hummingbirds love it. So if you’re looking for some fun in April, May go to the nursery and look for crocosmia. I think it’s the most appreciated aesthetically from my experience so go find some crocosmia, plant one, enjoy it.

Lisa Belisle: It sounds like what you’re suggesting is to really focus on the reason why one would want to have a pesticide free lawn and home and do it by really engaging with nature and saying here’s some beautiful flowers, here’s some beautiful shrubs, and making this and the health of your children and the health of your pets the reason for doing it rather than having it be entirely sort of against.

Eddie Woodin: Absolutely, that’s a key point. It’s really interesting, I’m spiritual and born in ’88. I have a historic bird art collection, so I go to the Peabody Museum in Massachusetts there was an interest and we were discussing, so we went into the nature area and Eskimo curlew in their case and they have some good things. I thought, “I don’t know this is a little strange.” It was more geared for children than it was in my art collection type of thing so I’m embracing it and a gentleman had a display on trees. They had different activities for children regarding wood and trees and here was this main placard of information and it said, “Come and listen to the voice of the sound of the tree.”

I’m going, “No way, come on.” So Jerry a great nature friend a worldwide great warrior, so we go and we listen to this thing and it was like it just was pretty mind-boggling. It was this high-pitched, not eerie, but sound that was incredible. So I digest that and then I realized nature has a soul, the earth has a soul, living things have a soul. You think of it as dirt and this thing, no, it’s a living thing with soul. You see it through Psalms especially in the Bible, so I embrace nature as an appreciation for what it is, but also to inspire me to keep going and to be charged up and going and I think our soul it’s soothing to the soul and sitting out there in the evenings and seeing the leaves rustling and the birds and nature and the bats it’s enriching for the soul.

Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking to Eddie Woodin who is the owner of Woodin & Company in South Portland who is also a conservationist working with the Scarborough Land Trust, Maine Audubon and Friends of Casco Bay. Eddie helped pass Scarborough’s pesticide ordinance recently. Thank you so much for coming in.

Eddie Woodin: Thank you, pleasure, nice to see you, thank you.

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Lisa Belisle: Steve Rodrigue is the owner and founder of Maine Raised Gardens, a full-service vegetable garden company. He previously worked at Johnny’s Selected Seeds. Thanks for coming in today.

Steve Rodrigue: Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: I love this topic. I think more and more people are doing gardening in the state of Maine. I think it’s coming back again. We always did it. It’s coming back again, and the idea of raised gardens kind of creates a little bit more ease of use I think.

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, I started off the idea of just doing raised beds the first year. This coming year I will be offering in-ground gardens as well. I realize that raised gardens aren’t for everybody, so I want to target everybody.

Lisa Belisle: You grew up here in Augusta.

Steve Rodrigue: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: You have kind of an interesting background not everybody goes into horticulture.

Steve Rodrigue: No, let’s see where do I start? I think first off I’d say what kind of got me into I was first interested in trees. I thought I’d go to school for forestry and I can recall as a young child working with my dad and my grandfather doing firewood and both of them teaching me the different trees just from looking at the bark and sometimes even the smell. Then from there I remember one time actually being sick with a flu and after a few days of laying in bed, and I finally was up and my mother brought me to Longfellow’s Greenhouses, which I later did an internship during college. I just remember being around the plants and feeling really, really happy and healthy and uplifted. Then later on I worked for the City of Augusta planting trees and gardens around the city, and I worked with a man named Larry who had actually gone to school for landscape design. That’s when I finally realized that it wasn’t just a hobby I could actually go to school for this and here I am now.

Lisa Belisle: It’s interesting I didn’t realize that you could actually tell different trees by what they smell like.

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, some have distinctive smells, specifically, cherry you can smell the wood it has a slight smell of cherry. I even say that red oak kind of smells like ketchup, which I don’t know if everybody agrees with me on that.

Lisa Belisle: It sounds like this is the kind of thing that people know about, but it’s not necessarily common knowledge.

Steve Rodrigue: Right, yeah, I would say that for sure. I wouldn’t say there’s not a lot of people that have wood stoves in Maine, I mean, there are a lot, but at the same time there’s a lot of people that don’t rely on wood stoves. I remember we had a wood stove ever since my whole life actually.

Lisa Belisle: So that’s how you became involved with the smelling of the wood is it when things actually burn that you can smell this or is it when they’re being cut or?

Steve Rodrigue: It’s when you’re stacking it, when you’re splitting it, when you’re cutting it, all the above.

Lisa Belisle: I’m interested, also, in this idea that you were not feeling well and your mom brought you to a place that had plants and somehow it kind of energized you. Is this something that you’ve noticed throughout your life?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, I mean, seeing green plants is uplifting I think to anybody whether they realize it or not.

Lisa Belisle: Maine Raised Gardens you’ve been doing this for the past year and the pamphlet that I have says that this is perfect for restaurants, inns, bed and breakfast, cafes, schools, assisted living and elderly care, community gardens, business parks, and anyone who needs just a little help. Do you find that people are responsive to this business?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, the first year, actually, most of my business was in the residential sector so had a lot of homeowners that actually wanted gardens at their house. Some just for themselves, some for their whole family, some for the kids. In reality, I think it’s a great fit for anybody because we all have to eat, right?

Lisa Belisle: Are more and more people asking you to do gardens for them for the eating or for just the enjoyment of the gardening itself?

Steve Rodrigue: I would say it’s both I guess, I mean, the end result is going to be eating, right? Because I’m just doing just edible gardens. I’m trying to differentiate from a regular landscape company that does ornamentals that’s where I first started and then I started working at Johnny’s to get more into edibles and vegetables and what-not so now that’s what I’m just targeting that’s trying to be very specific.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about your time at Johnny’s.

Steve Rodrigue: So I worked there for nearly six years as a vegetable research technician. My job was I was responsible for about a half a dozen crops, and I would solicit from different companies seed varieties working with different breeding companies throughout the world get the seeds back, design the trials, do the evaluations, and then ultimately pick and choose what went into our 200 plus page catalog.

Lisa Belisle: When you say design the trials you mean plant the seeds and see what happens or?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, we had a farm crew that would seed them in the greenhouse, and I was there to monitor germination and then we would have them planted out in the field. Then I would monitor them throughout the season make sure that they were getting the care that they needed, and then I would look at a wide range of criteria for those crops.

Lisa Belisle: What are the types of criteria that you used to determine whether they would be a good fit for the catalog?

Steve Rodrigue: It really differs from crop to crop, but some of the specifics we would look for disease, we would look for how long something would hold in the field. There’s a couple ideas of what we would look at. Flavor, that was really big. We would do taste trials so sometimes my carrot trial, or one of my crops. There might be 70 plus varieties and I’d have to go through and taste test.

Lisa Belisle: Wow, so trying to determine out of 70 types of carrots which one was the tastiest that’s quite something.

Steve Rodrigue: Yes. I didn’t have to taste all 75 because there were some that you would select out they weren’t uniform enough or they had bolted and gone to seed before they even produced a root so there were some eliminating factors in the beginning which made it a little bit easier but, yes, definitely, a tricky thing.

Lisa Belisle: Where did you get these seeds from?

Steve Rodrigue: They’re from companies throughout the world all over the world, so different breeding companies.

Lisa Belisle: Do they contact Johnny’s and say, hey, we have these seeds, or do you somehow find out about them?

Steve Rodrigue: There was some of that and also Johnny’s has been around they just had their 40 year anniversary just a few years ago so they had worked with a lot of these companies over those 40 years so they developed relations with them.

Lisa Belisle: What have you found to be your favorite edibles?

Steve Rodrigue: Let’s see here, yeah, that’s tricky. I think one crop that I think is very interesting is chicory. That’s the world of radicchio, Belgian endive, escarole. It’s a crop that nobody, I shouldn’t say nobody, but a lot of people don’t know about. It’s not very popular it the U.S. I think it’s getting there. I remember when I was applying to Johnny’s I was reading a book on root cellaring and one of the crops in there was Belgian endive. You grow the chicory outside, dig the roots up in the fall, and then you actually plant them inside through the winter and then you force them into the chicons. I thought, “Wow, that’s really neat I’d like to grow that some day.” Never knew if I’d really get around to it. Then I got the job at Johnny’s about a month later, and that was one of my crops and that same year I was growing Belgian endive under the counters in the dark. You have to grow it in the dark because you want to exclude the sunlight.

Lisa Belisle: Why isn’t that a popular food here in the United States?

Steve Rodrigue: I think mostly because it’s a bitter green and that’s kind of not really something that most Americans like is bitterness, although, they don’t realize it, but they do because they like coffee and they like IPA beer, right?

Lisa Belisle: Well, I have noticed that more and more people are aware of things like dandelion roots and dandelion leaves and other types of bitters. There are more people it seems to be this is more of a thing.

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, I think things are becoming more popular it’s what’s the next best thing? I mean years ago Brussels sprouts and cabbage that was what peasants ate, and now that’s like the number one thing sometimes in restaurants so we’re getting kind of bored with some of our regular things that we’ve eaten over the years and now it’s, yeah, what’s the next newest thing.

Lisa Belisle: Does that same sort of idea occur in horticulture where people get a little bored of the plants that they’re growing and they think, “Oh, I want to try something different.”

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, each year there’s new varieties coming out both in the ornamental and the edible industry, if you will. Yeah, it’s just let’s get rid of the old stuff and let’s come in with the new stuff.

Lisa Belisle: What are some of the things that are on the horizon right now?

Steve Rodrigue: Really in the breeding industry, well, in the seed industry the breeding aspect is huge. There’s companies that have multi-million dollar breeding departments that are just working towards coming out with new varieties. Some of that is to combat disease issues that these varieties are seeing. There’s also cold hardiness that’s something people are looking at. Yeah, there’s a whole slew of reasons why these breeding companies are coming out with new varieties.

Lisa Belisle: When you study horticulture and you got your degree at the University of Maine what are the types of courses that you go through in order to get that degree?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, a lot of plant classes. I took a lot of woody ID, herbaceous ID those were some of my favorite classes. There’s soil science, and then I was in the design concentration so a lot of design classes where I was actually hand drawing doing residential designs.

Lisa Belisle: When you say design you mean designing what a landscape might look like?

Steve Rodrigue: Yes, exactly.

Lisa Belisle: So this has come in handy then as you’ve moved into your own company.

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, I think it’s kind of combining all of my interests into one. I really like building. I like hands-on. I love food. I want to grow my own food. I’ve kind of been working on that over the past few years. Long ways to go still. Yeah, so it’s combining all of my … It’s combing design, it’s combining construction, hands-on, food all into one.

Lisa Belisle: If I was a residential customer and contacted you is that something that you start the process in the spring and start having conversations about what that might look like and then you actually get into the sowing of the seeds in I don’t know May, something like that?

Steve Rodrigue: Ideally, we’d have the conversation in the winter. I think a lot of people start to think about gardening kind of towards the tail of winter as spring’s approaching, so in reality we can talk about it anytime, but ideally it would be in the winter.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me what that process looks like. Somebody finds out about Maine Raised Gardens and says, yeah, I want to do this and they get in touch with you and where do you go from there?

Steve Rodrigue: I set up a consultation. I do free consultations and then I meet with a customer. I look at where their ideas are or where they want the gardens, and really try to nail down their goals and expectations. What do they want to do? Do they want to grow all their own food? Do they want to be able to serve salads to their guests that come to their house all summer long? Really narrow that down so that I can give them exactly what they’re looking for.

Lisa Belisle: What do people tend to want you to grow for them? Is it more like I want to have some tomatoes and basil so I can have pesto or?

Steve Rodrigue: It really depends on the customer. I get all kinds of things, I mean, I get some of that. Sometimes, customers they say, “I don’t know. I don’t care just plant whatever.” Yeah, so it really, really varies. I’ve talked to some restaurant owners that are maybe just interested in growing some herbs like garnishes for their cocktails in their restaurant they could be as simple as that, or it could be a lot more elaborate than that too.

Lisa Belisle: So somebody says, all right, Steve, I’m going to have you come to my house and I’m going to let you do whatever you want. What do you suggest as far as the types of foods that you would plant?

Steve Rodrigue: First, it depends on how big the garden is going to be. Do they want one bed? Do they want three beds? Do they want six beds? It really depends. I would try to really narrow down at least what they like to eat I would ask them what do you really like and what do you really not like? A lot of people know what they don’t want. They might not always necessarily know what they do want, though.

Lisa Belisle: So if somebody said, okay, so I don’t want onions let’s say, but I do like broccoli and cauliflower. Are you able to balance out different things so that they’re not just getting broccoli and cauliflower?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, and there’s always different techniques, too, such as like succession plantings, so instead of planting a whole bed of broccoli I can plant a row of it and then plant a row of it a week later so then they’re getting a harvest at multiple times throughout the season to stagger it out.

Lisa Belisle: Do you also try to grow plants together that seem to be symbiotic?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, that’s a whole other world. It’s an interesting idea. I haven’t done that yet. I need to look into that more. There are things where you don’t plant all the same crops together and that’s for pest and disease issues.

Lisa Belisle: What about some of the soil issues because some plants I would think would offer different nutrients back into the soil than others?

Steve Rodrigue: That’s another thing I need to look into. There’s definitely something to that, but I don’t think it shouldn’t hinder somebody from trying gardening. You’re going to succeed, you’re going fail. It’s just you have to try different things each year.

Lisa Belisle: What are some of the plants that you had a lot of success with last year for your residential customers?

Steve Rodrigue: I’d say lettuce was a really good one, and I think it also comes down to watering, too. If you water correctly plants will, you know, they’ll thrive. A lot of times people tend to overwater, or they water too frequently, and really the idea is you want to water infrequently, but deeply so then you get those roots established, you get the roots deep, and then the plants will be a little bit more resilient, but I would say lettuce and another one was pumpkins. I had one customer they grew just a few pumpkin plants in one of the beds that I installed for them and they had produced 18 pumpkins out of that one bed. I was pretty amazed at that.

Lisa Belisle: Does that have anything to do with where they live, where their gardens are located?

Steve Rodrigue: Potentially. It was in a full sun area. They had a good soil and compost mix that I had brought in. They had one of their little boys attended it everyday watering it I think it got a lot of care.

Lisa Belisle: If you come in and you notice that somebody does not have good soil is that how you deal with it is to bring in some soil yourself or bring in compost for them to use?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, I recommend raised beds if you have really poor soil. You can amend soil that’s in the ground it just might take a little bit longer to really get that garden going, and I think to get people really engaged it’s nice to have kind of a good impact the first year and make them want to the next year but, yeah, there’s ways around it. You just have to kind of think outside of the box no pun intended.

Lisa Belisle: If somebody comes along and says I would like to have this garden in the ground here near my house, and you notice that the soil is just not going to be that great for that particular year will you help them amend that soil and maybe suggest a raised bed?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, that’s part of the consultation phase, so if somebody if they say I want a garden in-ground here part of my job is to start digging around seeing how that soil is, feeling it for texture, even smelling it. There’s a lot of different things you can do to really see how that soil is there, and then the education comes in where you may have to kind of sway the customer one way, but ultimately it is their choice in the end.

Lisa Belisle: Do you notice a lot of difference between people who are trying to put gardens in on the coast versus more inland?

Steve Rodrigue: That’s a good question. I did install a few gardens down in let’s see down in Lincolnville this year and I did one in Rockland, but most of my work this summer was actually more inland. I did a big job in Jefferson which I was not expecting that. I’ve got some pretty neat photos on that that will be displayed on my website along with some of the other works I’ve done. That’s what I was expecting, but it wasn’t necessarily the case this year.

Lisa Belisle: When you’re working on the coast versus inland are there different things that you have to think about for your clients?

Steve Rodrigue: Not too much. I’d say there’s probably less frost on the coast or the frost is usually later in the season so there’s just kind of some minor like microclimate issues that I’d have to … I shouldn’t say issues, but microclimate challenges and opportunities I should say that I have to be aware of.

Lisa Belisle: Speaking of challenges and opportunities what have you noticed in your own life as you’ve decided what path you wanted to travel with regard to your career?

Steve Rodrigue: The biggest thing has been the first year when I would get maybe a little slow with work I would pick up a little side job and then all of a sudden I’d get really busy again with my work so that was kind of tricky trying to balance that so I think it’s basically just a work-life balance which can kind of be tricky. This year I plan on just working for myself having a few little side projects that I’ll work on. I grow pea shoots on the side I’ve done that in the past so I think I’ll do that this year, so then if I need to slow down with one thing I can because it will be my own thing rather than an obligation working for somebody else.

Lisa Belisle: So having I guess a little more faith in the process with regard to your own business and your own clients?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, there’s no doubt in my mind that this year is going to be better than last year and the year after that is going to be even better than this year, so I just have to buckle down and go for it.

Lisa Belisle: What types of things are you hearing about in your industry with regard to gardening?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, when I first started in horticulture I think it was still more of an ornamental basis. There wasn’t a whole lot being done with like environmentally friendly gardening companies. There was still a lot of pesticides being used. I think the movement is more towards environmentally sound use of more natives less pesticides all that, but I still think we have a lot of work to do in the landscape and gardening industry to change that. I think going forward you’re going to see more of that. You can see more of it in the news, people talking about it, consumers are more aware of it, so I think things will improve.

Lisa Belisle: We’ve had several referendums down in this neck of the woods and perhaps you’ve also had it up where you live that have to do with residential pesticide application. I’m a big fan of not using pesticides whenever possible, but there’s still then you end up with pests so how do you deal with that type of thing naturally?

Steve Rodrigue: There’s a number of ways. Sometimes, it can be just the timing of when you plant something. I really like the method of exclusion. For instance, flea beetles they love brassicas they put little holes in brassica leaves and also cabbage moths you can take a row fabric and you cover those crops until they’re ready to harvest and it excludes the insects, so no pesticides.

Lisa Belisle: So there are tricks that are out there that you could use if you wanted to have a garden not using pesticides.

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the biggest advantages of having a small garden. You can really manage it. You can take care of it. It’s harder on a farm scale, but on a smaller scale it’s definitely doable. Gardens I’ve had for the past 10, 12 years I’ve never used a pesticide on any of them.

Lisa Belisle: How about weeds what about herbicides and use of chemicals for weeds?

Steve Rodrigue: Well, I think weeds are kind of like there’s a saying a weed is just a plant that maybe you don’t know what it is yet or you don’t have a purpose for it. It’s kind of like dirt and soil. Soil is outside and dirt is underneath your fingernails and in the corner of your kitchen floor or something, so a lot of these plants that we call weeds, actually, have a lot of uses. For instance, you mentioned the dandelion greens. You can use both the greens and the root. I think we have to change kind of our viewpoint on some of these topics that have been ingrained in our mind since children from our grandparents and what-not. I think in a small garden there’s ways around that too. There’s mulching. A small garden is easier to tend to. Raised beds are great because the soil is not compacted. You’re never walking on it so it’s really easy to weed. I think weeds are one of the things I worry about the least, actually.

Lisa Belisle: Do you ever have clients ask you about things like GMOs?

Steve Rodrigue: No, I haven’t yet, but I definitely know I will. It first started off know your farmer. Then where’s our food coming from, and now it’s even getting deeper than that where do our seeds come from? You see that some seed companies are being more and more transparent where their seeds are being bred, where they’re coming from so I think I’ll definitely have that question.

Lisa Belisle: When you do plantings do you try to avoid seeds that you know have genetically modified organisms?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, that’s one of my goals, too. I shouldn’t say goals that’s just what I’m going to be doing, no GMOs. I also want to be really picky about where my seeds are coming from like the companies that are breeding them so there’s kind of behind the scenes with that as well.

Lisa Belisle: What about compost?

Steve Rodrigue: Compost, yeah, I’ve used some of Coast of Maine I’ve used that. I’ve used a couple different sources. I also have a friend that does his own composting. He uses leaves and grass clippings, and he’s also using a byproduct seaweed. He actually has a mussel farm in Maine so he’s putting that in the compost as well so I have some pretty good sources for compost.

Lisa Belisle: So if somebody needed you to provide compost you’d already have it available to use on their beds?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, just a call away.

Lisa Belisle: What are you noticing about restaurants and the types of herbs that they want you to grow what types of things are they asking about?

Steve Rodrigue: I haven’t had a lot of work with restaurants yet. I’ve been meeting with some and talking with them. They’re definitely, definitely interested. I think this year there will be more of the commercial side than last year which was more residential business for me, but I think it will be mostly things that they use on a regular basis probably some of the more common ones, but maybe some herbs that they can’t get at the grocery store or from the farmers’ market.

Lisa Belisle: Do you think that in general people are more aware about herbs and their use for cooking?

Steve Rodrigue: I think so, yeah, I definitely think so.

Lisa Belisle: What are some of your favorite herbs to use and you said that you like to cook so what do you like to cook?

Steve Rodrigue: My favorite herbs to start with sage I love sage. I love rosemary. I love thyme, so I guess some of the more common ones, but those are kind of my go-tos I would say.

Lisa Belisle: Do those find your way into your cooking?

Steve Rodrigue: Yeah, sometimes, I might not pair the herbs with the correct dish I just kind of mix them in, but it works the end result is great.

Lisa Belisle: Are you growing things year-round you talked about some of the lettuces that you had worked on in the past?

Steve Rodrigue: Let’s see where do I start with that? One of my focuses actually at Johnny’s was winter growing, and I was fascinated with growing through the winter in unheated passive tunnels so there’s no electricity, nothing, I would go out and manually roll up the sides, everything, and I was amazed at what you could grow late into the season. I was growing stuff into Christmastime. Some things into January and this was all with no heat whatsoever. Spinach, chicory, even parsley and cilantro can make it through the winter. I think a lot of people don’t realize that. A lot of people ask me what are you going to do in the winter and there’s a lot of work that can be done in the winter as well.

Lisa Belisle: What about growing things inside do you have clients that start growing things inside that they can then put into their gardens when the spring comes?

Steve Rodrigue: I would imagine I will have that. I haven’t encountered that yet, though.

Lisa Belisle: Where would you like to see your business go over the next five years?

Steve Rodrigue: Good question, yeah. Really I’d like to, I mean, I want to tap into the commercial market. I think it will really take off with restaurants and bed and breakfasts and inns, so I really want that. I want to develop an education portion to my business where we can go into schools. We can educate children. If a residential customer wants us to come there and do an hour long session every month or every two weeks with them and their family, their kids we can do that. I have a lot of ideas for the next five years. I’m trying to stay focused right now with the few ideas and a few different options than just each year kind of coming out with new options to keep people engaged.

This coming year you’ll see I’ll offer mushroom logs that I actually do right at my house. They’ll be oysters this year. Also, onsite and offsite composting. Potentially, even donations to food banks when a garden is producing way too much and the people can’t keep up with it I can do a donation in their name to local food banks. I have a lot of ideas, but trying to stay focused and not weigh myself down too much with too many different options.

Lisa Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Steve Rodrigue who is the owner and founder of Maine Raised Gardens a full-service vegetable garden company. He previously worked at Johnny’s Selected Seeds. I’m really glad that you took the time to come in and talk with me today.

Steve Rodrigue: Great, thank you so much. Thank you for having me.

Lisa Belisle: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 344. Our guests have included Eddie Woodin and Steve Rodrigue. 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 our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. 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 pleased that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Maine Magazine, Aristelle, Portland Art Gallery, Art Collector Maine, and by grownupgirl.com. Our editorial producer is Kate Gardner, our Assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy, and our executive producers are Andrea King, Kevin Thomas, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.

Guests

Jennifer Hutchins

Evelyn King

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #343: Jennifer Hutchins and Evelyn King

Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle. Recorded at the studio’s of Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician and editor-in-chief of Maine, Maine Home Design, Old Port, Ageless, and Moxie magazines. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available of lovemaineradio.com.

Dr. Lisa B.: This Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 343 airing for the first time on April 15, 2018. Today we speak with Jennifer Hutchins, the Executive Director of the Maine Association of Nonprofits, and fly fisher Evelyn King, who is a founding director of the Sebago Trout Unlimited Women’s Fly fishing Group. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1: Grownupgirls.com, where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life. For free advice, workshops and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about our available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area. Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio.

Portland Art Gallery is the cities largest, and is located in the heart of the old port, 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the works of contemporary Maine artists, and hosts a series of monthly shows in its newly expanded space, including Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

Dr. Lisa B.: Jennifer Hutchins became the Executive Director of the Maine Association of Nonprofits in July 2016 where she leads a member network of more than 900 charitable nonprofits and 150 private partners. Prior to joining the Maine Association of Nonprofits, she led the city of Portland’s efforts to strengthen the creative economy as Executive Director of Creative Portland. Thanks for coming in today.

Jennifer H.: Thank you.

Dr. Lisa B.: You’ve actually had a foot in all kinds of different sectors, you’ve got some public policy experience, you’ve got some creative sector experience. Now you’re doing nonprofits, what was your original thinking on how your life would unfold when you were say a senior in high school, did it look like this?

Jennifer H.: Well, that’s a great question. I was just talking to some young people the other day about my path. I actually, when I first graduated from high school, I wanted to go into international banking. This was back in the day when Melanie Griffith was defining what it looked like to be a working girl, and so I pictured myself with the big hair and the big shoulder pads and the high heels going down the boulevards of Paris and London, and that’s what I thought I wanted to do.

I went to college and that’s where I discovered more deeply what my real values were, and where I still had high aspirations for doing a lot of international travel and getting to know a lot of different types of people and a lot of different types of cultures. I realized that it wasn’t in the private sector that I really wanted to have impact, and so I have spent time internationally, and I’ve spent time in some of our larger cities in the United States.

Ultimately however, I determined that living in a place like Maine provides an opportunity to have a greater impact in my community.

Dr. Lisa B.: You originally came to Maine as a child of Navy parents.

Jennifer H.: Right, yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: You moved here because I believe it was your father that was stationed at the Naval Air base at the time?

Jennifer H.: Yeah, my father is a retired Navy pilot, and had spent some time stationed at Brunswick Naval Air Station. They really liked it, and so when he got out of the military, he was still young enough to fly commercially. They chose to move to Maine from Southern California, so that was quite a change for my teenage older brothers and myself, and just getting ready to go into middle school.

I remember moving here in the dead of winter from Southern California and coming home from school and saying to my mom, “They’re wearing boots with chains on the bottom.” The famous L.L. Bean boot, which I still have that pair of boots, and I’m quite proud of today, because I’m not wearing any of the fancy new ones, mine are old school. When I first moved here as a young kid, I really questioned the style choice of those L.L. Bean boots, but I quickly grew to love living in Brunswick, and I eventually graduated from high school in Brunswick, Maine.

Dr. Lisa B.: It’s interesting that you’ve had, you’ve had the chance to live in other places. You obviously could, you could still be in DC, you could go back to Southern California. You could go somewhere international and be Melanie Griffith presumably.

Jennifer H.: Yeah, I guess.

Dr. Lisa B.: You still are here, what’s kept you here?

Jennifer H.: Well, first and foremost family. When I moved back to Portland having lived abroad and lived in bigger cities, at first I didn’t want to stay. This was 20 years ago when Portland wasn’t quite as hot. I was in my 20s, and it seemed like everybody lived out West, and there were the big cities out West that were really drawing people at that time. For the first couple of years I really resisted staying in Maine for too long, and then I was taking a photography class at Maine College of Art, and I was having a conversation with the instructor.

She said to me, “You know Jen, if you go to New York or Boston and you try to be a photographer, you’re going to be one in a sea of people.” She said, “If you stay here, you actually might have a shot at making a niche for yourself.” Now I ended up choosing to get my Masters degree at the University of Southern Maine and staying here, and so my niche ended up being policy and community development, public policy and community development.

The same remained … It was the same case, I would meet with professors and they would say, “That’s a really great question, why don’t we find a time when we can meet with one of the Governors policy advisors?” or, “Why don’t you give this CEO a call?” It was amazing how the access to decision-makers and people who wanted to make a difference was just 1° or 2° of separation, whereas I knew that if I moved back to Washington DC, or I started a new career in New York or elsewhere, it would just be so much more complicated to really feel like I could connect with people who were making a difference.

Dr. Lisa B.: What was it about the creative economy that kept you working as the Executive Director of Creative Portland for so long?

Jennifer H.: My early career had started in advocacy for arts and culture. I worked for an organization in Washington DC called People for the American Way, which was a First Amendment organization, and I did research into challenges to creative expression. It was founded by the TV producer Norman Lear, who was concerned about the impact that the religious right was having on the media waves. He started his own watchdog organization that was just tracking how that movement was impacting the media.

I became very familiar with the national endowment for the arts, and the back then challenges to the national endowment for the arts around artistic expression. I also come from a long line of musicians and actors, and so the arts and culture just from my family’s perspective were very important to me. Then I also had spent, after college spent two years in Europe and saw how the Europeans embed arts and culture into their daily lives.

It’s not considered something like entertainment that you do when you have an extra few dollars, it’s embedded in everything that they do. I became very passionate about advocating for the arts, and so I built on that interest in arts and culture with my public-policy skills. Then the creative economy work really came out of some of those attacks to artistic expression in the early 90s as a way for people to understand the importance of arts and culture in our lives beyond just the entertainment value.

I really became very interested in how the creative economy, economic development work really was integrating and developing a whole new case for why we need arts and culture in our communities.

Dr. Lisa B.: What did you learn? What were some of the lessons? Why do we need arts and culture in our communities?

Jennifer H.: Well, I firmly believe that Portland wouldn’t be Portland without all of those arts and cultural institutions. I think that when you go out now and you ask people about Portland, certainly they list restaurants is right at the top of the list, and some include restaurants as part of the creative economy at this point for sure. Even deeper than that, I really believe that people respond to the ethos, the Zeitgeist of the community, and I firmly believe that the history of Portland has been shaped so much by cultural institutions that have been here for decades.

Then more recently, some of our institutions that are about 30 years old, the Portland Stage Company and some of these other institutions, Maine College of Art, and the Museum of course have been here longer than that. Then in the 70s there was another wave of cultural institutions, and I think no one can deny that it’s what really makes a true impact of what the community is. I think the other thing that I learned that was really interesting in some of the research that we did, is sometimes you think of the creative economy as only impacting urban areas.

What was interesting to learn, was to go to other more remote parts of Maine and realize that there is an activity and a vibrancy to community that is magnetized by creative activity. Again, even in some of our smaller communities where it might be harder to find a cluster of activity if you will, there’s really demonstrated value in people who want to be there, and who are creative people just doing great things. Then as a result, economic activity comes with that.

Dr. Lisa B.: As you’re talking, I’m thinking about the Stone Mountain Arts Center out in Brownfield, which I mean that’s a perfect example of something that grew out of Carol Noonan’s love of music, and seems like it’s plopped down in the middle of nowhere, but it has been so accepted and loved, by not only the local community, but also the greater community.

Jennifer H.: Yeah, that’s an excellent example, another really favorite example of mine is the Stonington Opera House, and what I really love about the Stonington Opera House and I think Stone Mountain’s very similar, is that if you initially go to Stonington, you see a very, very traditional fishing village really. Not at all like a more developed community like Boothbay Harbor, or Camden, but very much still a fishing village, a working village.

You might at first think that plunking, or renovating an old community center and opera house into an art center that does Shakespeare and plays and movies and community events, that they might have a hard time integrating. Really to the contrary, the people who founded that organization and who maintain it have really done an exceptional job. I feel like I know a little bit of what I’m talking about, because I married a man whose family is from Deer Isle, Stonington.

The Weed’s and the Eaton’s worthy were the early European settlers of Deer Isle, and so my husband’s family are still fishermen in that community. When we visit Stonington and we talk with people who have been living there for many years, families who have been living there for decades, they only speak very highly of the Opera House, and they refer to going to events there. Again, I think Stonington wouldn’t look the way it is without the Opera House, and they’ve done a phenomenal job in my opinion of integrating themselves with people who’ve been there longer than they have.

Dr. Lisa B.: Music is a particular interest of yours, and you have an affiliation with MAMM.

Jennifer H.: That’s right, Maine Academy of Modern Music, yeah. I’m on the board, and my daughter Sadie is a musician there. What a fantastic organization, my daughter Sadie is shy and introverted, but we have my parents old piano, and she started piano and singing a little bit when she was young. Over time, she became familiar with Maine Academy of Modern Music and said she wanted to be in a band much to our surprise, because of her introversion and her shyness.

Well suffice it to say that much to our surprise Sadie manages to get up on stage and sing in front of 300 people at their annual Girls Rock Concert. It’s just so inspiring to see a kid who wouldn’t dare speak a word in class, get up and sing on her own an Amy Winehouse song, a Regina Spektor song, and just really thrive in that environment. I’m so grateful for that experience for her, because otherwise I don’t really know what …

I’m sure she would figure out how to come out of her shell, but it was so helpful for me as a parent to see her have a really constructive venue for expressing herself and coming out of her shell in a way that made sense for her.

Dr. Lisa B.: I’m struck by the fact that in order to bring the arts to the Maine community and really the larger community, that we actually have to have nonprofit supporting them, because as you’ve mentioned, we aren’t like other parts of the world where the arts are really integrated into governmental funding for example. Is this one of the ways that you became interested in nonprofits? Tell me that story.

Jennifer H.: Yeah, sure, so if I had had the talent of being a singer I would’ve done that first. However, I have realized that it is best for me to keep my singing as an advocation. If I in terms of my profession, if I can be the aficionado, and I can be the advocates for artists and people who are doing good work in the community, I’m happy to recognize where my true skills lie.

The way I look at the nonprofit sector, is that it’s the way the American system has set itself up for taking care of the work that either the public, or the private sectors have either opted not to do or can’t do themselves. What happens literally with nonprofits, is that a group of community people get together and they say, “This work has to happen in our community. We are passionate about having these values, these activities, whatever mission it is that they come to, we want this in our community.”

They’ve determined that it won’t either be funded through the public system, or it won’t be funded through the private system. You’ve said, and as I was mentioning about being in other parts of the world, in the United States the arts and cultures tends not to be valued to the extent in either the public, or the private sector as much as you see in other parts of the world. As a result, a lot of the arts and cultural activity does happen supported through the nonprofit sector.

We have about of our 900 members, and then we also know this is similar to the entire population in nonprofits, roughly 16% to 20% are arts and cultural institutions. I would venture to guess that most of the cultural activities that people participate in, there’s a nonprofit behind them that is working hard to expand access to communities to make sure that everybody has an opportunity to do that. It certainly is the nonprofits that are the ones that are taking care of that work.

Dr. Lisa B.: What is the advantage of having an association of nonprofits?

Jennifer H.: Our association is, one of the primary activities that we do is provide information and education to nonprofit staff and board members and volunteers. We really want people to see us as the place they go when they have a question. Our members are and do call us on a daily basis with various questions that pop up, and we also want them to be able to go onto our website and get what we call the best practices of being a nonprofit.

The old adage is, is that you seen one nonprofit, you’ve seen one nonprofit. There are so many different kinds, different sizes, different missions. At the same time, there are some standard ways that in terms of ethics and values, in terms of legal responsibilities, in terms of fiscal responsibility, a checklist of things you need to take care of. We try to be that resource for everyone.

That’s the education side of making sure nonprofits have the information they need to be efficient and effective, but we also do quite a bit of work in advocacy. That’s around making sure that the voice of the nonprofit sector is at the table. As we’ve already talked about, nonprofits are filling a very important role in the success of our Maine communities, and to that end nonprofits really need to be at the decision-making table when a community is figuring out the steps that it wants to take to rectify issues, or take advantage of opportunities.

We feel responsible for making sure that people outside the nonprofit sector understand who nonprofits are, understand the impact that they are making, and facilitate the opportunities for nonprofits to work more closely with their community partners to support Maine nonprofits.

Dr. Lisa B.: You’ve been doing this particular job for about a year and a half, and that’s enough time to know what you know, and know what you’d like to know. What are some of the things that you’ve learned that you are surprised by? What are some of the things that you’d like to keep trying to figure out?

Jennifer H.: That’s a great question, I think in the first year and a half in this job, I think what I’ve learned the most is really mostly about me. That sounds really self-centered, but one of the things that we try to emphasize at the Maine Association of Nonprofits is the need for Maine to have leaders who are prepared to work collaboratively, transparently, with integrity, in a collective fashion, that moves Maine forward.

I have had the opportunity, because our Association places so much emphasis on providing nonprofit leaders with the awareness, the self-awareness of what they bring to the table, the type of leadership skills and attributes that they bring to the table. I have learned a lot about my own leadership style, and the things that I think are the qualities and the attributes that I think I can add to our community, add to the state.

This has been really helpful for me, it’s a little bit like you’ve got to understand yourself before you can really start to understand other people. The second part of your question is what more do you want to learn? I’m really excited about following this path a little bit. You may have heard recently that the Maine Association of Nonprofits has adopted a new program from the organization Lift360, a program called Emerging Leaders.

It’s for younger people, younger professionals who are interested in supporting nonprofits to go through a program by which they learn how to serve on a nonprofit board. They will learn a little bit about themselves as leaders, and how they can contribute. I’m really excited about this opportunity, Lift did a great job of getting the program started, and has run it successfully for several years. We are excited now about building on that foundation, and potentially moving it to other parts of the state.

As I said, I’ve learned a lot about myself, I’ve learned a lot about the qualities of leadership that I think are going to be really important to Maine’s future. I’m excited about the prospect of working with people out there in the community and applying those newfound skills and attributes to the issues of impacting Maine.

Dr. Lisa B.: It’s interesting that you would talk about younger people being on boards, because a lot of times, and maybe this is a complete misperception on my part, but there is the idea that once you retire you join a board, or several boards. I always think of older people who have a lot of experience and have been doing things for a while, and they’re coming in and they’re going to add their valuable knowledge and connections to a board.

What you’re talking about is completely opposite, it’s a fresh perspective and a different approach perhaps. Why is that important?

Jennifer H.: The nonprofit community nationally for a while now has been talking about the need to diversify the perspectives on boards. That’s diverse perspectives from a lot of different angles, whether it’s gender diversity, or ethnic diversity, or age diversity, or profession diversity. Many nonprofits are contemplating the idea that they should really have clients who benefit from their services, make sure their representation is on the board.

At the same time there is a lot of research out there, and this was in the creative economy as well, that makes it very clear that having a variety of thinkers and diverse viewpoints leads to more innovation, leads to more creativity. Some of the major corporations these days are talking about how the more diverse the team is, the better outcomes. I think there’s definitely an awareness out there. There’s been lots of research, the trick is how to actually make that happen.

There has been some recent research that we know about nationally, one is called, “Race to Lead,” that is talking about how people from communities of color are having a hard time getting into nonprofit leadership positions at nonprofit organizations, and realizing that a lot of the resistance is coming from an implicit bias on the part of the stereotypical board member as you’re identifying. The challenge for us now is not in the is it important?

I think there’s a lot of evidence that suggests that it is very important and beneficial, the question is how do we make that happen? If we go back to age diversity for a minute, some of that is just a practical who has the time to serve on a board? As you’ve said the first group that you mentioned were retirees, and they are some of the ones that are the most effective on boards, just because they are the ones who have the time to show up.

What people are thinking about, is as a result of that we need to change the way we think. We need to be flexible in the way boards govern themselves, in the way boards receive that type of perspective. It may be that the thirty something who’s just starting a family and has a full-time job and commitments in and outside of work, they may not be able to go to a board meeting once a month for three hours.

They may have to be able to contribute in alternative ways, and so that’s another reason why I’m excited about this new program, is by bringing that program into the Maine Association of Nonprofits, we can really start to chip away at the how do we get these new perspectives on these various boards?

Dr. Lisa B.: It’s interesting that you have a foot in both camps, you have the right brain, left brain thing going on. You’ve got the creative, and then you’ve got the more perhaps linear. I know that this has been a whole journey for yourself, if you were able to talk to your self at the age of 17 or 18 when you thought you were going to be Melanie Griffith with the shoulder pads and the good hair on the streets of Paris and London and all that sort of thing, what would you say?

Jennifer H.: Stop worrying, sometimes I think about all the time that I spent worrying about, what if I had done this? Should I have done this? Did I miss this opportunity? Was I good enough? I’ll never be good enough, and I just literally think about the time, the literal time that I spent worrying, and had I been able to take that time back and just pour it into whatever interested me that day.

Instead of judging what I wasn’t doing, but to focus on what I was doing, and to find the things that truly interested me, the things that make woke me up, and shifted the amount of time I was investing. I really would love to reinvest my worry time. I don’t know, now that I approach my 50s I feel like maybe my worry time is finally starting to abate, but I did a lot of hand wringing in my 20s.

Dr. Lisa B.: I don’t think you’re alone in this, at least I’m in your group anyway. It’s good to hear you say that. I’ve been speaking with Jennifer Hutchins who became the Executive Director of the Maine Association of Nonprofits in July 2016. We’re happy to have you doing the work you’re doing, and really appreciate your taking the time to talk with us today.

Jennifer H.: Thanks, it’s been really fun.

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Dr. Lisa B.: Fly fisher Evelyn King is a founding director of the Sebago Trout Unlimited’s Women’s Fly fishing Group. She also serves on Sebago Trout Unlimited’s Board of Directors and volunteers with Casting for Recovery, a fly fishing instructional program for breast cancer survivors. Thanks for coming in today.

Evelyn King: Oh, I’m honored, thank you for inviting me.

Dr. Lisa B.: One of the reasons we were interested in having you in, at least one of the reasons I was interested in having you in, is that one of the ways that my father, who’s a family doctor, used to decompress after having taken care of patients and my nine younger brothers and sisters was to go fishing along the Royal river. He was not a fly fisherman, but I remember this very clearly that there was something about the water that really gave him great calm and great peace.

I didn’t really quite get that as a child why one would do that, but it seems like you get that, because otherwise you wouldn’t be doing the work that you do.

Evelyn King: Absolutely, when you’re on the water you’re living in the moment. You appreciate what’s around you, it slows you down, and especially for someone that has a job that requires a lot of thinking or stress, when you get on the river you put that aside. It’s like meditation or yoga, you live in the moment and the double reward is that it de-stresses you, but also the more you live in the moment and notice what’s around you, the better fishermen you are.

You start to see the bugs on the water, you start to really see what’s going on in nature, see the water patterns. It just tunes you in and you become a much better fisherman, so I can see that.

Dr. Lisa B.: You’ve been doing this with women specifically, but you’ve been basically doing fly fishing your entire life, not just with women.

Evelyn King: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: You see the benefit for everybody really?

Evelyn King: Absolutely, I fish with my husband who was then my boyfriend when I was a teenager. He laughs about it, because I loved … I always want to be outdoors, I love to be outdoors, but I was primarily a runner like Joan Samuelson, but I would go fishing with him, because I wanted to do things with him and I would try. If ever another man showed up on the river, like if we were in a river or on a pond in a boat, if another man showed up I would tuck the rod away.

I thought that I wasn’t good enough to be fishing and I was embarrassed. I loved to fish, but I was really a shy fisherman. He kept encouraging me, telling me that it doesn’t matter, you don’t need to cast well. You do as well as anyone else on the river, and I think that’s why I eventually figured out that a way to give back was to encourage other women to take on that risk as well. To not be afraid and not to be intimidated, and not to follow their passion, because other people were watching them.

Dr. Lisa B.: It’s interesting that you would find that intimidating given that you were one of the early classes of women to integrate at Exeter, and then were in one of the early classes of women to integrate at Bowdoin, where you were in the same class with Joan Benoit Samuelson, and yet you got on the river with men and somehow you felt like it wasn’t your place?

Evelyn King: Wow, that’s a good question, or a good comment. I’m also a perfectionist, somewhat of a perfectionist, and I think when I do things I really want to figure them out. When I was fishing, what really got me motivated to get better at fishing, was I would watch other people fish. I didn’t understand why they would put the fly under the bank along the other side of the river? Why were they not fishing below us? How did they know which fly to put on? How did they know to get their fly to land just right?

As a somewhat of a perfectionist I knew I couldn’t do what they were doing, and so I wanted to watch I think. It gave me a lifetime of learning to try to figure those things out.

Dr. Lisa B.: I actually think that there is something a little bit gender oriented about that, because from what I understand female physicians often feel like they are imposters when they’re early on in their careers. There’s something called the imposter syndrome, whereas male physicians are more likely to believe that they know enough, and feel confident in the work that they are doing.

Evelyn King: Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa B.: I suspect this is probably true across other fields, but it’s interesting that what you’re describing, and I don’t know that this is the case, but I just wonder if there is a gender predisposition here.

Evelyn King: You might be right, because I know a number of men that I’ve met through the years that are avid fisherman and have fished all their lives. It hasn’t been their passion to figure out all the flies. They know five or six flies and they know one stretch of river, and they’re very confident at that. That imposter syndrome is … I definitely felt like an imposter, but it didn’t keep me from doing it, it just slowed down my risk-taking when other people were around.

Dr. Lisa B.: You are also a fourth-generation camp director at a girls camp.

Evelyn King: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: You’ve been responsible for encouraging young women from an early age to go out and do the things that made them happy regardless of whether there is a gender orientation to their choice.

Evelyn King: Right, right, and we always laughed, my grandfather who was the second-generation camp director, camp owner of Campbell Wohelo. He always said there’s nothing women can’t do that men can do, it just sometimes it needs a few more bodies. We would be moving these huge docks on the beach to get them in the water, and sometimes we’d put 30 people, 30 women around the dock to move it. We didn’t need a tractor, we just got enough woman power together.

Yeah, I’ve always felt really strongly about empowering women, and I have two daughters, and I was raised from the time I was two at the summer camp for girls, all the way up through to being a counselor and a camp director. I raised our children the same way there, and I just always felt like it was such a positive environment, but it wasn’t ever about women being better or stronger or anything. It was just having women be in their own environment as a community, and empowering each other and not comparing themselves to the opposite gender during those informative years.

Dr. Lisa B.: We’re in an interesting time, because you’ve been doing this work for a long, long while, trying to empower women. Yet many young women are feeling like we’re not far enough along.

Evelyn King: Right, it is interesting. I think people are becoming more aware. I don’t have the answer for that one.

Dr. Lisa B.: I don’t either, that’s why I was asking you, because I figured maybe you had some insights based on the work that you’ve been doing.

Evelyn King: Yeah, I think my approach has always been to work in collaboration with men, like with Trout Unlimited. When I started there it was basically all men in the meeting room. I didn’t go in saying, “I am a woman, I am strong.” I just went in saying, “How can I help you bring more women into the fold? Let’s expand this,” and they asked me to do that, and it was just such a treat. I’ve had the men help us with a lot of events, and they’ve been really welcoming, they have been so supportive.

I feel like in my life I’ve gotten so much more done by collaborating with all across the community regardless of gender or nationality or anything, rather than being confrontational about it. Not that, that’s a bad way at all, it’s just a different way, and I just have benefited from collaborations.

Dr. Lisa B.: I feel the same way, I have two daughters also and a son, so my son is my oldest child, and then my middle child is 22, and I have a 17-year-old. It really never made sense for me, and I have five brothers and a father who I adore. It never made sense for me to be confrontational and to be blaming these men around me for problems that women were experiencing. I don’t know that this is what’s happening now in our culture with every young woman, but I definitely am sensing some friction with some of what’s happening and it’s painful.

Evelyn King: It is.

Dr. Lisa B.: I think specifically of my own son, and I would never want him to feel responsible for things that an entire gender is possibly being blamed for.

Evelyn King: Right, yeah, no, I have a son and the two daughters as well. I love the fact that women can be treated equally, should be treated equally, and I like to think of it just on the positive side that it’s so wonderful what we can do to empower our youth. I have a granddaughter now, empower our grandchildren, be role models. It’s not breaking down barriers, but just opening doors of possibility. Look you can go to Trout Unlimited and be one of the first women in the group, and then other women will follow.

Eventually, I’ll hope to take my granddaughter with me to Trout Unlimited, yeah, just to be inspiration and a mentor, and try to take that approach.

Dr. Lisa B.: Tell me about Trout Unlimited. I’m sure there are people who are listening that don’t have a good sense of what that organization is or does.

Evelyn King: It’s a national organization, they’re 400 chapters within the US. Maine has five, I belong to Sebago Trout Unlimited, and we have about 600, 650 members. It’s just a wonderful organization. I think a lot of people that are just in the audience that aren’t really participating in conservation are there because they love to fish. Through fishing, they’ve really gained an appreciation for how important it is to have clean, cold water, and to keep invasive species out of the water, and take down dams, and open fish passageways.

Our group has been instrumental in reclaiming five ponds in the state of Maine, and by that I mean taking the invasive species out and cleaning the habitat, so that the native brook trout can spawn and grow, and not be eaten by invasive species. We’ve also helped with two dam removals, and that’s so exciting because you’re opening up the waterways, sea-run brook trout can come in from the ocean. Often on the Mousam River, or the Royal River, they can only go as far as the first impediment.

Trout Unlimited is looking at all these river systems and trying to figure out and collaborating with the state of Maine and National TU, and National Inland Fisheries and Wildlife and Maine Fishing Wildlife to try to find ways to fund the removal of dams, or safe passage around them. It’s a very dynamic group, there’s a core group of people, Steve Hines is on our board, and he organizes the conservation part.

He has developed this whole team that helps him now grant writing and organizing with towns and with the water quality people, just trying to collaborate to help pull these things off.

Dr. Lisa B.: Tell me about the work that you do with Casting for Recovery.

Evelyn King: Oh, that’s so rewarding. I got asked, I was friends with Bonnie Holding, I have been for years and years. She has annually held a Casting for Recovery retreat for breast cancer survivors. I tried to get into the program for a couple of years, and she always had more volunteers than she needed, and so it motivated me to get my guides license, so that I was qualified, so she couldn’t say no.

Eventually I got to go, I’ve been going for about five years to help on the weekend retreats. It’s the whole combination of getting into nature, getting women into nature, breaking the pattern of thought by exposing them to a new sport. Meeting new people, and developing that bond, and then fishing is, fly fishing especially is therapeutic as you know being a doctor. The motion of casting is therapeutic for people that have had surgery on their breasts.

I think the community that’s built on that three-day weekend is just amazing. I’ve read the comments that people have made afterwards that it sometimes has changed their lives, because it gives them something beyond their illness and their current situation, to dream about, to think about. It’s a peaceful place, so I’ve been helping for five years, and then a couple of times I got discouraged at my skills, because casting looks like a simple thing, but it’s hard to teach it without going down these rabbit holes.

I wanted to learn how to teach it in a really simple, positive way. That inspired me to get my casting certification to be a certified casting instructor just so that I could give back. It’s not something I do as a career, but I just wanted to make that experience as rewarding, and simple, and stress-free as possible for the girls.

Dr. Lisa B.: What does that entail to get one’s casting certification?

Evelyn King: For me it was a two year process of really intense practice. I went to L.L. Bean’s and Rod McGarry, and McCauley Lord. McCauley went to Bowdoin as well, they were instructors in a program, and I did it two years in a road to reinforce what I was learning. The skills, the specific skills needed to teach casting, but along the way it’s really to perfect your own casting, because you need to put yourself out there.

Talk about risk taking, put yourself out there to show what a good cast looks like. What people are inspired to try to learn, and then for two years of practicing, Rod McGarry was my mentor, and we met a couple of times a month at Payson in Park, and then I would cast … I work in Portland, and I would jump in the car in lunch breaks and go to the West End, or Payson Park, or Back Bay with my fly rod and my cones and my hula hoops, and I would just practice accuracy and distance casting.

I also liked doing that, because people would stop and ask me about it. It was a way to show a woman doing something that men would usually do, and also just bring awareness to fly fishing, so that was it. Then the whole process culminates with a written test and an oral practice test, which is harder than anything I’ve done in my whole life. Just being ready for that moment, and being calm enough, and you really have to perfect your skill for any weather, any wind conditions.

When I passed it I was ecstatic, and I remember I did it with another girl, and the two of us both passed. We went down to Massachusetts and passed it, and on the way home we were driving, there was this full moon in front of us, and I said, “Laney, we did it, and every time you see that full moon for the rest of your life you need to feel that sense of empowerment, and just believe that you can do it.” It was wonderful.

Dr. Lisa B.: It’s interesting that you have gone in this direction of fly fishing, because in your parallel life you are a commercial real estate paralegal at Monaghan Leahy, so you have this very intellectual and very technical aspect in your work life. Then you have an intellectual and technical aspect to your other life, but it’s also there’s a mindfulness to that second life I guess.

Evelyn King: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: Do you think that you were seeking something like that? Do you think you were seeking a counterbalance?

Evelyn King: Oh, always, always. My work path, I love to read, I love to learn, and I really like to be a sleuth. I do due diligence in my work, but it’s the same skill set that you use on the river. I’ve been working in Portland for Monaghan Leahy for 10 years this summer and it’s been wonderful. They’ve been so supportive of what I do, and I have friends, Tom Leahy is a big fisherman, so we are able to share that passion, talking about what we do on the weekends.

When I started 10 years ago, prior to that I had worked for myself doing the same type of work, but I had always dictated my own schedule. When it was a nice day, I took off the middle of the day and I was outside. I always managed to put work in with … Fit it in between other things that I did with the kids, or did with fishing. When I started in a job, a real job, it was my first real job where I had to leave the house at seven in the morning and work a long day.

I got home at seven at night, the number one priority was to have a window. They laugh about this, but I said I really could not work in a room without being able to see the outdoors at least. Then number two priority was to make sure that every moment on the weekend counted. That I could be outside, that I really would treasure, feel so grateful for that time I had outside. No coincidence that 10 years ago was really when I went full force into fishing on the weekends, and into everything fishing related to counterbalance the inside work.

Dr. Lisa B.: This is probably not a relevant question, but I’m just interested, I’m a little nosy sometimes. Why did you decide to go from this other life that you had to this full-time job?

Evelyn King: Oh, I am a real estate broker as well as a title abstractor. What I did prior to working at Monaghan Leahy, was going from courthouse to courthouse pulling books and doing research. Right about that time two things happened, and one is that they put the books all online so that it was digital, so that people could stay in their office to do the research. I was a dinosaur, I was of that era of the private independent title abstractor’s.

There are very few now, because people can do the work from their office. Then also there was a slump in the real estate market, and I was doing primarily residential real estate research then, and it really took a nosedive. My husband is a commercial Lobsterman, and at the same time the lobstering industry was floundering. I just decided that it was time for a new adventure, fun to be in Portland, I really was excited to come and work in Portland.

When I interviewed with Tom Leahy at Monaghan Leahy, I was just really excited about the possibility of being in a team. I’d done work mostly on my own, I had a few abstractor’s that worked for me for a while, but suddenly to be part of a community. I think that’s always been a common theme in my life, so it intrigued me and I have really enjoyed it. Never questioned that decision for a second.

Dr. Lisa B.: Well, I guess it is actually relevant, because most people in their lives now are going to have several iterations of their selves. You can believe when you graduate from Bowdoin as you did and I did, that your life is going to look a certain way. Then things happen, and you adjust, and you sometimes become a different version of your earlier self. That’s actually okay, and it’s actually a good thing, and maybe it’s really important for the new graduates of Bowdoin to understand that.

That there’s not really any wrong choice.

Evelyn King: Right, so every downside, every thing that seems like a conflict in your path is apt to lead to something more powerful, more relevant to your life. I think you have to approach life that way, just see every challenge as an opportunity to grow. When I think of what has happened in the last 10 years by that decision, it’s mind boggling. I don’t know what the next story is, I don’t know in 10 years from now what I’ll be doing, but I think it’s very important to not feel so strongly that you have to make a choice that you stick with the rest of your life.

Dr. Lisa B.: I also have noticed that, particularly in Maine, most people wear lots of different hats, so someone can be a commercial fisherman, and they can also be a filmmaker. Someone can be a chef, and they can also be a singer-songwriter. It’s a very interesting thing that in this … It seems like Maine is very much fostering of that creative spirit.

Evelyn King: Absolutely, and the irony is that I was an art major at Bowdoin. As an art major that didn’t prepare me for working in a law firm at all, but that theme has been underlying. Prior to getting into the fishing wholeheartedly, I was doing a lot with jewelry, but at the same time working as a title abstractor, and then working at the summer camp as a camp director. I think Maine is that way. Maine is also so special, because it’s a small community, so you can really make a difference.

My voice is not going to carry forever and ever, but in Maine I can have an impact, you can have an impact. This show is fabulous, and by living in a state where our voices can be heard, it just feels like we can make more of a difference in all the different directions we go in.

Dr. Lisa B.: You’ve been coming to Maine since you were a child really, but you moved to Maine when you were 12?

Evelyn King: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: You’re originally from Montréal?

Evelyn King: Yes, my mother was from the United States and went to McGill to school. She was a skier, and she met my father who was from Canada, and so when they got married they settled in Canada, in Montréal. I have fond memories of skiing in the Laurentian’s, and we lived on the water, but every summer we came down to camp, to the Luther Gulick camps. When I think of my memories of childhood, it’s much more about being in the woods on Sebago Lake, building fairy houses out of twigs and pine cones, and learning to canoe, and being outdoors.

When my parents decided to move to Maine I was thrilled. Yeah, Maine is a really special place.

Dr. Lisa B.: For women who might be interested in learning about fly fishing, what would you suggest?

Evelyn King: Oh well, I mean obviously I’d love to have anyone that’s interested join our Women’s Fly fishing Group. We don’t charge for the events we have, up till now we have monthly meetings. We’re just trying to provide a very social community of energetic, enthusiastic women that want to learn a new skill. Some are good fly fisherman, women that want to learn additional things, and a lot of the women that come to our meetings are brand-new to the sport.

It’s really exciting to me, I can think of a handful of people that have started fishing because of our group, and have just been so grateful for that community and that empowerment and the enthusiasm of everybody that’s around that’s helping with the group. We’re trying to break down the barriers in making people realize that it’s accessible, you can fish in the Royal River, you can fish in the ocean. In Maine, you can fish just about anywhere, and you can buy a package of gear for under $100 at L.L Bean’s, or probably Cabela’s.

You don’t need to have fancy equipment, and you don’t need to be able to cast perfectly. You can fly fish with six feet of leader out at the end of your rod, and just as if you’re playing with a cat with a little toy. You can just tease the fish and have joy just doing that.

Dr. Lisa B.: Evelyn King is a founding director of the Sebago Trout Unlimited’s Women’s Fly fishing Group. She also serves on the Sebago Trout Unlimited’s Board of Directors and volunteers with Casting for Recovery, a fly fishing instructional program for breast cancer survivors. Thank you so much for the work you’re doing, and thanks for coming in.

Evelyn King: Oh, my honor, thank you for having me.

Dr. Lisa B.: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 343. Our guests have included Jennifer Hutchins and Evelyn King. 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-news letter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page.

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Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Maine Magazine, Aristelle, Portland Art Gallery, Art Collector Maine, and by grownupgirls.com. Our editorial producer is Kate Gardner, our Assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy, and our executive producers are Andrea King, Kevin Thomas, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our production team, Maine Magazine, or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us lovemaineradio.com.

Guests

Quincy Hentzel

Paul Golding + Alexandra Sagov

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #342: Quincy Hentzel and Paul Golding + Alexandra Sagov

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 physician and Editor in Chief of Maine, Maine Home and Design, Old Port, Ageless, and Moxie magazines. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.

Dr. Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 342, airing for the first time on April 8th 2018. Today we speak with Quincy Hentzel, the CEO of the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce, and Paul Golding and Alexandra Sagov, of Family Hope, a mental health resource agency located in Scarborough. Thank you for joining us.

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Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor “Love Maine Radio.” Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the art of the Old Port, at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space, including Ingun Jorgensen, Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com

Dr. Belisle: Quincy Hentzel has been the CEO of the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce since July of 2017. Thanks for coming in today.

Quincy Hentzel: Thanks for having me.

Dr. Belisle: You’ve been in Maine for, we decided I think, 15 years.

Quincy Hentzel: 15 years. Yes.

Dr. Belisle: Yeah. But you’re not from Maine originally.

Quincy Hentzel: I’m not. I grew up outside of Chicago, in the suburbs, spent my whole childhood there, did college, did law school, and moved to Maine … I think we just decided … 2003.

Dr. Belisle: You followed a boy here-

Quincy Hentzel: I did.

Dr. Belisle: … is what you told me.

Quincy Hentzel: I did. I followed a boy here who was also not from Maine but had gotten a job out here. And we thought that we were gonna stay for just a few years and then move back to Chicago. And we both fell in love with Maine. We’re both still here. We’re not still together, but we’re both still here. And I just love, love the city of Portland, love the state of Maine, and have made this my home.

Dr. Belisle: You had an interesting detour between Chicago and Maine. You actually were in DC for quite a while.

Quincy Hentzel: Well, I worked in DC, so my time in DC was while I was living in Portland, so when I moved to Portland, the very first job that I got was doing government relations work and lobbying work. And that job took me to Augusta and also to Washington DC, so I was always living in Portland but traveled quite a bit to Washington.

Dr. Belisle: When you were in school, did you know that you wanted to do lobbying work?

Quincy Hentzel: No, I think lobbying work is one of those jobs that you don’t really know exists. I mean, there’s so many of those jobs out there. I think people know doctor, and lawyer, and accountant. And I really didn’t know what lobbying was. Actually, the very first opportunity I was given to lobby, I had taken a temporary job at a law firm in Portland. And one of the attorneys there asked if I would be interested in lobbying. And the first thing I said was yes. And then the second thing I said was what’s lobbying? And that’s kind of what started my professional career in the area of government relations.

Dr. Belisle: So define lobbying for us then.

Quincy Hentzel: So how I define lobbying is actually is being an advocate, so I spent my first 11 years in Portland, I spent lobbying for the Maine credit unions. So I was essentially an industry advocate for credit unions. And I represented the credit unions, both in Augusta, in our State House, as well as Washington DC. I worked on policy issues that would impact credit unions, which is essentially anything in the financial services realm and worked with lawmakers, to ensure that the laws, and the rules, and the regulations that they passed were actually gonna be helpful to our industry and not hurtful to our industry.

Dr. Belisle: That’s a long time to spend on something like credit unions. Did you have an interest in the financial field before you started doing that?

Quincy Hentzel: I did not have a particular interest in the financial field. I think, what happened, not so dissimilar to me moving to Maine, is I really fell in love with the credit unions. I fell in love with the credit union movement and the people who make up the credit unions. Maine is a very heavy credit union state. We have a lot of wonderful banks, as well, and we have a lot of wonderful credit unions. There seems to be plenty of room for both in the market. And I just really fell in love with the people. And I enjoyed my time there, so yeah, I think I probably stayed in that job a lot longer than I ever thought that I would, but you blink your eyes, and all of a sudden, 11 years has passed.

Dr. Belisle: So what is it about credit unions, in particular, that you found so fascinating?

Quincy Hentzel: I think it was just the people. I think credit unions are non-profit financial institutions. And I just really felt a connection to and a passion to their work. Their motto is people helping people. And that’s just something that I’ve found, over the course of my own life, as something that I’m very passionate about, as well, so it was really kind of neat to be able to work for a financial institution, that really had the same values that I have and just the people, you can imagine the people who work in an institution or in a movement, like the credit union movement, are people that I wanted to spend my time with and I wanted to be connected with. So it was really easy for me to end up spending over a decade, my first job, which is probably pretty rare, to stay at your first job that long. But I did, and I really enjoyed every second of it.

Dr. Belisle: Why did you decided to go to law school in the first place?

Quincy Hentzel: So I essentially went to law school, because my dad was a lawyer as well, and I know that’s probably not the best reason to spend ungodly sums of money to go to graduate school and to get a JD, but I don’t regret going to law school. I love school, and I would be a perpetual student if I could afford it. I’ve never really practiced law, so I guess that goes to the point that maybe it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do with my life, but it was the path that I went down, and honestly, it was the path that led me to where I am today.

Dr. Belisle: What did you like to do when you were younger, when you were in school?

Quincy Hentzel: In terms of just fun activities or subject matters?

Dr. Belisle: Yeah, well when you were in high school, what was it that was most interesting to you?

Quincy Hentzel: That’s a really good question. You’re gonna bring me back, bring me back a few years. I always really enjoyed politics. I think high school was when I started to really pay attention to the news and pay attention to what was happening in DC and pay attention to the President. So I think I always had an interest in politics and in policy. And I think it was the policy piece that maybe led me down the path of yeah, law school may be a good decision to do that, because everyone always says, you can do so many things with a law degree. I think that is very true, and I never thought that I would actually work in policy though, which is really interesting. I actually thought I would go into corporate law. And I don’t know exactly why I felt that way, but in college and in law school, I was like, I think I could see myself in a big corporation practicing law, which now I find that actually comical, because I don’t see myself doing that at all.

Dr. Belisle: Was your father a corporate attorney?

Quincy Hentzel: He was a corporate attorney, which there you go. Now we’re piecing it all together. He was a corporate attorney, so he was a corporate attorney for US Steel, in Chicago, for many, many years. That was his background, and again, I think I just kind of thought so highly of my dad, and knew what his career path was and what his profession was, and just really saw myself following in his same footsteps.

Dr. Belisle: I think what you’re describing is not that unusual. I mean, my father was a doctor, and I became a doctor. And he was a family practice doctor, so I got training in family medicine, and I still practice family medicine. But it is interesting that he and I are different people, so he and I have different ways of approaching the world in general, but when you’re young, you don’t really know. You don’t know how different you are from your parent. You assume that if you do what they do, then you’ll have the success that they have, right?

Quincy Hentzel: Exactly.

Dr. Belisle: But now you are working with the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce, so tell me about that.

Quincy Hentzel: So that’s been a really great opportunity. I stepped into that role at the Portland Regional Chamber, in February, as Interim CEO, and I held that position for a few months and then was named permanent CEO in July of last year. And it’s been such a fun and eye opening experience. I’ve been closely connected to the Chamber for a long time. I served on the board of the Portland Chamber for probably nine years before I took over this role. So I was not a stranger to the Chamber or the Chamber community. But it is a drastically different thing to serve on a board of directors as opposed to actually run an organization.

Dr. Belisle: How many people are in your organization?

Quincy Hentzel: So in terms of staff, there’s only six of us. But in terms of members, we have over 1300 member organizations that are part of the Chamber.

Dr. Belisle: So describe your day-to-day activities.

Quincy Hentzel: Wow. I think that’s one of the aspects of my job that I love the most is that it’s so different every day. Yesterday, I actually didn’t leave the office once, which is really rare, but I had a pretty calm day at my desk. I was able to get some work done. I had a few meetings in the office. We had a staff meeting. We’re kind of all back from the holidays, so I kind of purposely gave myself a slow ramp-up day. But my days can be all over the place. Tomorrow, my day will start at 7:00 in the morning. I will be at the Holiday Inn by the Bay for Eggs and Issues, which is our monthly breakfast series that we have. And then from there, I think I have a litany of meetings, whether I’m meeting with a member of my board, whether I’m meeting with a member of our organization. I could be meeting with the City Manager about an issue. I could be meeting with a city counselor about an issues. Maybe there’s a stakeholder group that’s pulled together to talk about the opioid epidemic in our city. Maybe we’re talking about regional transportation issues.

I think one of the things I’ve learned … I knew this, serving on the board, but having stepped into this role, I’ve realized the reach of a chamber of commerce. When part of your mission is to promote regional prosperity, that encompasses a lot of things. And so I think by virtue of that I get the opportunity to talk about and to be engaged in a lot of the critical and really important conversations that are taking place. And those conversations lead me, so hence, I’m going back to your first question of what’s your day look like. It’s different every single day, and it’s exciting every single day. And I feel like I am helping the Chamber of Commerce in Portland have a role in helping to shape our community.

Dr. Belisle: You’ve mentioned the opioid epidemic, just for example, and regional transportation. Are those two of the big issues that you’re working with right now?

Quincy Hentzel: They’re two of the issues. If I had to prioritize the issues that we’re working on, those would probably be in our top 10 list. Our list is long, long and mighty, but those are two that are really important to our members. I think the opioid crisis, again, that’s been something that I’ve been very acutely aware of, even before I took on this role. Now that I’m in this role, I think I’ve become just extremely aware of the prevalence of that issue and the impact that it has on our members. And we see it, too, every day. Our office is on Congress Street, Congress and Elm. We’re right by the library. You can see the crisis on the streets, and it’s really heartbreaking to see that. And you can see the impact that has on businesses, whether it’s a business that happens to be, maybe, in that are of town, where there’s a lot of activity on the streets or whether it’s a business that has employees or staff that are struggling with an opioid addiction, or maybe they have a family member who has. I just think, in my last few months here, that issue has really risen to the top of our list of one that I don’t think anybody can escape the opioid crisis.

I think it touches everybody in some capacity, some much more deeply and much more personally than others. But it is there. It is real. It is getting worse. I mentioned Eggs and Issues a few minutes ago. In December of 2015, we had the Police Chief. Chief Sauschuck presented Eggs and Issues. And he talked about the opioid crisis. And it was one of the first times that the business community had had this conversation. That was in December of 2015. And it’s not gotten better. And it’s gotten worse. And that’s heartbreaking too. I think everyone’s just struggling to figure out what’s the answer to that issue.

Dr. Belisle: What are some of the other issues that have risen to the top for you?

Quincy Hentzel: So one of the big challenged that the Chamber is trying to tackle right now is just the level of growth that Portland is having right now. And I think part of it is actual growth. We are growing. We are building. I know we’re sitting in a new building right now on Middle Street. There’s been a lot of development. People are attracted to Portland. Portland’s kind of made the world stage. People know about Portland, so we have tourism’s up. And you’ve got people of all ages who are moving to the city. And from the Chamber’s perspective, that’s great. We want to see a really vibrant community. We want to see a robust economy. We want more businesses for our businesses here to serve and more consumers for our businesses to serve, as well, so we want to see that growth.

But there are people … And I understand this … that are seeing that growth and that are getting really scared and that don’t know what this growth is going to mean for them. And they know change is coming. Change is here, and there’s more change coming. And they don’t see what’s on the other side of that change. And I can appreciate that. I think change is hard for everybody in so many different aspects of our life. But I think that’s the point where we’re at right now with the business community, really wanting to see our community to grow and then having a whole other sect of our community that’s pushing back on that growth and who is just scared for what that growth means. And that’s been showing itself. We had an election last November, where Portland had two really critical and extremely devastating referendum questions on the ballot. One was dealing with rent control. One was dealing with changing the way we do zoning. Both were citizen initiated referendums. And those were initiated really from a place of fear, fear of change, and fear of rents being too high, and people thinking that perhaps rent control might help the fact that rents are too high.

And so those are issues that we’re faced with at the Chamber and that we’re trying to figure out how to deal with. We opposed both of those referendums. Both of them lost. The zoning referendum did not lose by the largest of margins, which is really interesting and scary to us. But it’s just a real time and a place right now in Portland and trying to figure out how do we balance the new development, and the new condos going up, and then new development happening on the waterfront, which is wonderful but also very different from what people were used to. There’s now a moratorium on Munjoy Hill, because people feel really nervous and scared about the demolitions that are happening and the new buildings that are going up, so we’re in this place of change, and I think, with change, comes huge opportunity. I think we will definitely get through this. I don’t worry about getting through it. But we’re trying to help have a community-wide conversation with all parties about what this change is. And can we get to the other side while maintaining all the things that we love about Portland and Portland’s authenticity, but also being able to support more business and to build more housing?

How do we get there? We’re gonna get there somehow, we hope. But how do we get there, and how do we bring everybody along to get us there?

Dr. Belisle: Given that you describe yourself as a potentially perpetual student, this must be a really interesting opportunity for you, because you’ve had the chance to learn about lots of different areas, like the opioid crisis, and housing, and credit unions. Do you feel yourself continually challenged?

Quincy Hentzel: Yes, I do. I do. I have a hard time seeing this position not challenging me at some point in the future. Maybe we’ll get there, but there’s so many issues to be tackled. And there’s always new issues coming onto the horizon. So yes, I feel like I’m constantly in a place where I’m learning something new. I’m kind of bringing myself up to speed. I’m figuring out how have we done it before? Where do we wanna go with it? How do other cities deal with it? We’re not the only city that’s grappling with these issues, so trying to help and be a part of finding the solutions. So yes, I feel like I am a perpetual student in this role, and every day, I’m tackling a new issue. And I go home, most days, and I’m like, wow, I have a pretty amazing job. It’s just very cool to be able to have a role where my primary goal is to help build and support a vibrant Portland and a vibrant Portland region.

Dr. Belisle: You live in Cape Elizabeth now.

Quincy Hentzel: I do.

Dr. Belisle: It sounds like you put a lot of time in at work, because it sounds like a pretty big job.

Quincy Hentzel: Yes.

Dr. Belisle: But when you’re not doing that, what do you like to do?

Quincy Hentzel: That’s a very good question. I have struggled, as of late, to find time for myself, because it is. We’re trying to take on a lot. We’re tackling a lot. So there is a lot of work to be done, but when I’m not working, I’m trying really hard to read, not for work. I have a lot of reading that I do as part of this position, but I’m really trying to find time to read. I do love to read. I don’t often have the time to do it, so trying to carve out the time and trying to be outside more, especially in the winter. I don’t ski, which has been challenging. Everyone tells me every single winter, you’ve gotta start skiing, because it’s really a great way to embrace the winter. But I think I’ve passed that phase in my life. I’ve tried it a few years ago. It was not pretty to strap wood slats onto my feet and send me down a mountain, but still, trying to be outside more, and trying to just enjoy … I mean Cape Elizabeth, Portland, just to walk around, to walk around the trails, to head down by the lighthouse, take my poor dog for a walk, who I probably have not been giving my dog enough attention either, so I think just making time for myself.

Dr. Belisle: What are some of your favorite places in Maine?

Quincy Hentzel: Oh, that’s a tough question, because I think Maine is honestly, probably, the most beautiful place in the world, and I pinch myself driving to work those summer mornings over the bridge and just looking at the Bay and being like, I can not believe that I live here. I can’t believe I’m crossing this bridge. I live on one side. I work on the other side. But I would say probably my most favorite place and the place that I get to spend the most time is on Casco Bay. I love the Bay. We have a sailboat. Actually, we go back and forth between having a sailboat and not having a sailboat, but we love to be on the water. We have plenty of friends with boats, and that’s the best I’ve learned is if you’re not gonna have your own boat, it’s probably better to have a friend that has a boat.

But we also have a cottage out on Long Island, Maine, so we’re on the water a lot, whether on our own boat, friends’ boats, ferry boat. And I just find the Bay one of the most beautiful, beautiful places in all of Maine and particularly those early morning ferry boat rides, when we’re out on Long Island during the week, and we’re commuting into work in the morning. It’s pretty stunning. I used to do the rush hour commute in Chicago, which looks very different than the morning commute on Casco Bay.

Dr. Belisle: Yeah, it’s interesting, because we have had a lot more traffic in the last few years, leaving Portland. You probably notice on your side, going towards Cape but also going North.

Quincy Hentzel: Right.

Dr. Belisle: But then I’ve talked to other people, from California, who live outside of Los Angeles, and they’re like, you do not know traffic. This is traffic, but it’s not the way that it is elsewhere.

Quincy Hentzel: Right. Right. It’s all relative. I completely agree with that. I laugh sometimes, too, when people talk about the traffic at Portland, because you’re right. You could be stuck if you leave 15 minutes later than normal. Your commute has gone from 30 minutes to two hours, if you’re outside Chicago and other big cities. But it is all relative. And I think, for Portland, we’re a very small city, and traffic, it’s been creeping up there. And you do notice it, and if you’re driving to work, in the morning rush hour or the evening rush hour, I mean, there are a lot more cars on the road. I think that’s part of what I had mentioned, transportation issues, before, as one of our priorities at the chamber. And I think that’s something a lot of people are looking at. I mean, I know the city of Portland is looking at that too. How do we manage the traffic? How do we provide alternatives to people? Are there alternatives to driving a car?

There’s a lot of people moving to Portland who don’t wanna own a car. So to be able to provide them with other ways and other means to get to work, whether it’s people are on their bikes. There’s buses, perhaps different bus routes. Parking is always an issue, and I don’t know if the solution’s necessarily more parking, because then you just have more traffic. I mean, we do need a certain level of parking. You’re always gonna have those people who drive to work. I’m probably one of them. But giving people alternatives, and helping to mediate the amount of traffic that we see, and giving people other ways to get to and from work, I think is really important. And there are a lot of people, in groups, in organizations, that are really putting a lot of time, and effort, and energy into that right now.

Dr. Belisle: Yeah, and I don’t wanna diminish people’s observations about, I mean, if you’re not from Los Angeles. And it seems like there’s more traffic, that’s still a very legitimate thing.

Quincy Hentzel: Definitely.

Dr. Belisle: And we live in a city that really hasn’t been built for that. We haven’t been built for more cars. We haven’t been built for more cars leaving the city during … I’m still gonna call it rush hour. So how do we, I guess, retrofit? How do we figure that out?

Quincy Hentzel: Right.

Dr. Belisle: My last question is what has surprised you about yourself? If you were to go back, I don’t know, let’s say 20 years in your life and think about the person you were at that point. What has surprised you about who you’ve become?

Quincy Hentzel: Is a really good question. Gosh, thinking back to my 20 year old self, I think my level of resilience is much more than I ever thought. We all go through things in our life, and we all go through changes, and struggles, and challenges. And I feel like I’ve gone through a lot, probably not dissimilar from any people. You go through a lot of ups and downs. And I think I’m pretty pleasantly surprised at my resiliency. Sitting as a high school or a college student, where I had gone through nothing really difficult, or bad, or challenges, and to see what I’ve gone through up until today, I feel like I weathered it pretty well. And I consistently surprise myself, as to what I can get through. When you’re facing it head-on, you’re thinking, I’m never gonna survive this. I’m never gonna make it through this. And then you do make it through it. And you’re stronger. And you’re better. And you’ve learned a lot, so yeah, I think the resiliency piece. If I had to look back the last 20 years, I’ve weathered the storm okay.

Dr. Belisle: Is there any piece of advice that you would give yourself, if you were able to sit down and say, hey Quincy of the 20’s, this is what I’d like to tell you.

Quincy Hentzel: I would definitely say to be more confident. I think I’m fairly confident now, in my older age, but my 20 year old self, probably not so much. And I think confidence is just such a wonderful and important trait to have. I think confidence, it can get you through some really difficult situations. It helps to build trust in other people. And I probably was a lot less confident as my 20 year old stuff than I am right now. And that’s probably advice I would give any 20 year old person out there is just be confident. Carry yourself with confidence, and that will take you so far in life.

Dr. Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Quincy Hentzel, who has been the CEO of the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce, since July of 2017. Thank you for all the good work you’re doing and for coming in today.

Quincy Hentzel: Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is also brought to you by Aristelle, a lingerie boutique on Exchange Street in Portland’s Old Port, where every body is seen as a work of art, and beauty is celebrated from the inside out. Shop with us in person or online at aristelle.com.

Dr. Belisle: Paul Golding is the Executive Director of Family Hope, a mental health resource agency, located in Scarborough. He has served in a number of senior roles in the public health advocacy, higher education, and social services fields. Alexandra Sagov has a Masters in Social Work, and has worked in the mental health field for over 20 years. She has been with family hope since 2017. Thank you for coming in today.

Alex S.: Thank you for having us.

Paul Golding: Thanks for having us.

Dr. Belisle: Paul, I’ll start with you. You came to the United States in 1990, after getting your education and your early background in the United Kingdom. Why the United States?

Paul Golding: Why not? Let’s see. In 1989, I finished up a long-term contract in higher education, and I’ve worked doing a computer project for a library. And I was offered a chance to come to Seattle and set up a database for a biomedical research company. And so that gave me the opportunity to get a green card. But it took a little while, because bureaucracy. And by the time I got through all the necessary hoops, that startup company had gone under. But I got a green card out of the deal, and I went to the embassy. And they said, “Well, you got a green card. Find a job.” So it was a very different time. Anyway, so I took a job with the American Lung Association doing computer and database work, and then slowly evolved up the food chain to do marketing, development, and also some other roles, and then went into higher education with the University of Washington, Portland State, took a trip out to Boston looking for work, came up to Portland, fell in love with it, and have been here pretty much ever since.

So I took a job then with Day One, an adolescent substance abuse agency. I worked there for a while, then the Center for Grieving Children, then Stepping Stones. It used to be called Maine Adoption Placement Services, and most recently, landed at Family Hope, so yeah.

Dr. Belisle: How about you, Alexandra? You’re originally from the Boston area?

Alex S.: Yep, I grew up in Boston, and I came to Maine. My mother has had a summer home in Kennebunk for about, gosh, now it’s 37 years. And when she retired up here, I’m a single mom, and so my wonderful son and I came up here. And I spent a year as a volunteer in service to America with the United Way of York County. And that really gave me an idea of what I wanted to do, which was to be a social worker, both clinically and community oriented. So I went to the University of New England and got my Masters degree. And I’ve been here ever since.

Dr. Belisle: The work that you’re doing with Family Hope is very interesting and very necessary, also difficult. And the people that are coming in for services generally have complicated situations that you’re working with. So you’ve chosen to frame this as Family Hope. How are you able to continue to have that sense of hope in the midst of … Well, we’ll start with you Alexandra. Yeah?

Alex S.: I’ve always believed that, no matter how difficult a situation is and no matter how small you can move forward, it can always get better. The people who come to us are obviously in very difficult situations, but I find that even just having a place to come, to feel like you’re working with a seasoned clinician who really cares, right away, it makes them feel better. And my goal, when I’m working with people, is I don’t let them out the door unless they feel hopeful. And that’s really my goal. And in all the people that I’ve worked with, I’ve been overwhelmed by the gratitude and also the ability to make some changes, to connect people with services, to help them make difficult decisions, whether it’s with how they’re gonna structure their will, what they can and can’t control, and also if it’s about grieving, the child they wish they had versus the one they do. So it’s an extraordinary organization, and it’s a mental health service that has never existed in the history of mental health. And so it’s a concept that I think we’re presenting to society, that might take a while for people to actually grasp, that this can exist. So it’s very rewarding and exciting.

Paul Golding: Well, Alex tells exactly what we do. How we came into existence, our founder, Donna Betts, she went through this, as a parent of an adult. Her adult son was mentally ill, and she struggled to find the correct diagnosis for him, to get services in place, and because of the various challenges that we have, here in Maine, and we do it throughout the United States, in diagnosis, and accessing services, and working with adult onset mental illness, she found it extremely frustrating. And unfortunately, her son died to suicide. And so to try and make sense of that truly horrific situation, she founded Family Hope. And it was incorporated in 2012, and after five years at the helm, she stepped down and is now doing something else with her life. And so Alex and I represent, to some extent, the next wave of people and come in and pick it up.

It was an agency that was in good shape. We inherited it. And it had been in a testing and development stage. I mean, it was a strong program, and now, we feel like we’re the next wave of that, as we try to expand services, get the word out about who we are and what we do. And we’ve seen, I think, in the last year, we saw an eight-fold increase in the number of families that we serve, which of course, put pressure on us to find the funding, because we don’t charge for services, because we don’t need people who are struggling to navigate a poor city and services anyway, to then have to struggle to find the resources to access what we do.

So that’s how we came into existence, and so the next wave for us is to expand our board, expand our capacity to support the increase in services that we’re seeing, and try and break down the stigma associated with mental health, advocate for a greater understanding of it, work with families to navigate services, both for the identified patient … And the thing that Alex talks about, what is unique, I think, to Family Hope, is that we start by trying to address it on a family level. And the view that I say is if properly supported, families are then the natural supports of the mentally ill person, and if properly supported and educated, family members can not only not do the wrong thing when they’ve got someone but do the right thing.

And so the affected others, the families, they need the support, in order to best support their loved ones, because we’re dealing with a chronic situation. We’re not dealing with an acute illness, by and large. We’re dealing with people that have chronic mental health problems, so once that impacts a family system, it’s a permanent change, and families are very good at dealing with short-term crises. And they focus on the loved one. They may, in fact, get them services, and they begin to do better. But it’s impacted the family in a way that they now need support going forward. And so we are unique, in that sense, at least here in the States. It’s predicated on some good research that came out of Canada, and it’s embottled it. It waxes and wanes in Britain, depending on various government fundings for those kinds of services. But it’s the notion that we should support the family, not just the patient.

And so that means, of course, that every phone call is different. Every family situation is different. And one of the things that we’re trying to do at Family Hope, with the model that we inherited and the one that we’re developing is not to replicate the kinds of cultures that many social service agencies have, where the front-line staff get burned out. So you work closely with one family, from soup to nuts, and then move on. And we try not to have a heavy caseload, where you’re not doing very much for anyone. You’re just trying to keep things going for an hour a week, indefinitely. We try and work closely with the family until, as Alex says, suffering is reduced and relieved, and people feel hopeful.

And a lot of that is making referrals and suggestions, and connecting people to supports in the communities, and hearing back from whether that works or not, and then trying some other stuff, and then moving forward. So it’s intensive, but it’s not long-term. I mean, many of the social service agencies that we have here in town, they’ll open a client. And that client may be on their books for years, because great people are doing great work with them, but the family’s not being supported. They’re not getting connected to other resources. And so they’re moving them an inch at a time, and we’re trying to move people a mile very fast, I would say.

Dr. Belisle: I think about the need that we have in the state and really, across the country, maybe across the world. I just happen to know about our own state. And I wonder how possible it is to help people in this intensive way, in large numbers.

Alex S.: So one of the goals at Family Hope, what we’d eventually love, is to have this in every county. One of the unique ways in which we operate is they are welcome to come to the office and meet with us. I can meet them in the community. I can go to their homes. And I think one of the struggles and something that we wanna look at and would be great, if we could get funding, is to really be able to quantitatively and qualitatively be able to really document and tie it into how does this help, right? And so anecdotally, everybody that we talk to, I mean, not one person has ever said, oh that’s a terrible idea.

And so one of the things that Paul and I are looking at are, what are the barriers, right, that people are dealing with, that aren’t being addressed? And so when you have adults, and this is true I think in every state here, is that you have the right to be mentally ill. That’s a fact. And that’s often something that’s very painful for parents to recognize, that they don’t have any rights to information, to doctors, and so we have families who are literally help hostage for … I have one case … eight years, over 30, with probably the most serious case of OCD, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I’ve ever seen, I mean really. And so one of the things that I was struggling to try to do, because he can’t leave the house, is how am I gonna get a clinician to come in and have eyes on him and perhaps even be able to medicate him enough, so that his anxiety decreases? He can then go out into the community and get Maine Care and get on an Act Team, which is an intensive outpatient treatment.

And so I did talk to some psychiatrists, and I said, okay, what would it take, right, to be able to get you into that house? And it was money, because these people don’t have insurance. They wouldn’t be able to bill for their time there, and then if they had to travel. And so what I said to them is, what if I got a grant that would actually pay you to do that? And would you also be willing to do it on a sliding scale? So these are the kinds of concepts, right, they’re not out there in any way, shape, or form. I’m very excited and also a little fearful that people won’t get the value of it. And what we’re asking, right, is for them to suspend disbelief, to invest in it, and then see what the results are. So that’s an example of how we’re looking to address barriers that haven’t been addressed before.

Paul Golding: And so I think, as Alex says, you use the data and the experience of your clients, to try and bring about systemic shift in thinking. Providers are there. When I go out and talk to case managers and clinicians about who we are and what we do, the phone rings off the hook. I make a presentation, and my phone is ringing as I leave the meeting, people trying to access that, because they, themselves, know that I have a family. If you could just spend a few hours with them, that would help my client tremendously. So there’s a lot of buy-in at the executive level, when I go out and make presentations to various providers around town. They get it. But the traction to bring those services in-house really comes from front-line staff, front-line staff who are working with the clients. So those are the people that we try and go and educate.

Now the challenge, of course, is the more the phones ring, the more expensive it gets. And so funding is always a challenge. We have a fundraiser next week at the West Inn, and we hope that people will come and enjoy the night. We write grants. We do appeals. We have a board doing all those things. So we’re just like every other non-profit, but our view, I think, in the long-run, is that we’ll be able to take the quantitative and qualitative experience that we have and translate that into policy and to try and get the Department of Health and Human Services, or other providers, to partner with us and to find ways to ultimately bring about that systemic change. And I think that’ll come. I have faith in that, because I worked at the Center for Grieving Children for many years. And that was a new idea. That idea came along for peer support for kids.

This center here in Portland was the third such one in the country. There’s now over 350 such centers around the country. There’s a National Alliance. I had the distinct honor of being the president of that for a while. And one of the things that we used to hear when we get together for conferences and stuff was that we needed big funding in order to make that happen. And the New York Life Foundation got behind bereavement. There’s an organization that makes a lot of money, and many of their employees were tired of going out and giving checks to founders after being a horrible loss and not knowing how to better help those families. So the New York Life Foundation got behind the National Alliance.

We’re looking for that kind of, both here in Maine and on the national scene, looking for someone, some industry partner perhaps, who sees that. Maybe the pharmaceutical companies can take a step back and say, look it’s not just medication. Medication’s an important part of this. If psychiatrists and psychologists can step back and say, it’s not just our corner, I mean, I think that will come. I think that will come in America. And then when it happens, it’ll happen fast, and it’ll happen big. But that’s a big part of what we’re doing. We’re just trying, right now, to replicate the Alex’s of the world in every county here in Maine. And so we don’t need millions of dollars to do that. We need thousands of dollars to do that. But we always have our eye on the fact that we have something that’s unique here. It’s eminently knowable, eminently replicable, easily trainable. So I think, from that point of view, it will come.

And it’s to Donna’s credit, our founder, that she put something together that has that potential. And now we’ve gotta put our foot on the gas, bring in more money, get more people, and it will catch fire. I mean, I genuinely believe that. We have a passionate board. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of need. So if we can do things differently and it works, the word will get around.

Alex S.: I think there are some natural partnerships that we’re actually having trouble solidifying. And I’m not exactly sure why. So for example, adult services at DHS, adult protective services, I spoke to somebody there. And she was, I can’t believe we don’t know about you. This would be a great fit. But yet the referrals haven’t come in. One of the things that I will do with a family, where there’s a potential for either violence or suicide is I will call Crisis with the family, and I will also call the local police department. And I’ll say, listen, I wanna give you a heads up. We’re not in an eminent situation, but if we call you, I want you to be able to immediately go and know whether this person is aggressive, because sometimes the relationships with law enforcement and mental healthy have gone awry, although there is a lot of movement towards that.

And so I had a recent exchange with the York County Sheriff Department, and they hadn’t heard of us. And so what I liked about it was they invited us to come and speak, but what’s difficult is because when you’re a parent of an adult, if I was a therapist of that identified child, I can’t give you any information. And so I have to imagine that there are people that are serving the clients. And when I was a case manager, I would get calls from hysterical parents. I can listen, but I can’t respond. That would be a perfect opportunity, or a police officer that was out on a scene to say, here’s Family Hope’s card. Call them. And I have yet to have an experience where a family has come that we have not gotten them into a better place. So that’s my biggest concern is about how are we not partnering? How are we not becoming part of the fold?

Paul Golding: But an interest into that point, just last week, I was part of a panel discussion that South Portland Police Department put on, and they had people from the Crisis Team, from Opportunity Alliance, and someone from NAMI, who’s people we partner with, and the behavior health professional, Dana, who goes out with the police on those calls. And so Portland has it. Westbrook has it. South Portland has it. And that’s very much on the cutting edge. That’s not typical for Maine police departments, and it’s not typical around the country. But there’s something is beginning to happen. So as Alex said, the other day when she dealt with that family, said, that’s great. What’s cool about that is we can call their police chief or their sheriff, have them talk to their peer, at the Police Chief of South Portland. They will say, here’s how we’re doing it. Here’s why we do it that way. Again, it’s incremental. That’s great. What I would love is it’s great when you do it piecemeal like that, but I would love that that be part of the curriculum of the Criminal Justice Academy … When I worked at Day One, one of our colleagues from one of our programs was on the curricula there to talk about substance abuse … to get people to make referrals to the treatment network and into Juvenile Drug Court.

Because police officers have a lot of things going through their mind when they roll up on any scene, whether it’s an accident or a crisis, but the more it’s part of their thinking of diverting people into treatment, the better it is, so it’s common, but you can tell we’re impatient. [crosstalk 00:50:08].

Dr. Belisle: I don’t blame you for your impatience, because I feel the same way. I mean, I’m seeing more rather than less violence directed towards self and other, with people who are traumatized, with people who are grieving, with people who have some sort of biologic mental illness. And it can’t come fast enough, from my standpoint, as a doctor, as a member, as a member of the community. And we have not solved this problem. And I don’t know what we’re waiting for.

Alex S.: Money, really.

Paul Golding: Well, I mean, that’s always the easiest answer. And I’m not going to disagree. If someone wants to come down with a huge bag of money, we’ll make a huge difference. But I also worked in public higher education for many, many years. And that was the joke there. We used to sit around the room. And of course, I worked in development, because we didn’t have enough money. But it was this idea it was the last thing in America that people would throw lots of money at in the vague hope that it would change things. So resource is important, but will is incredible … and smart thinking and joined up thinking and resolve to make changes. I mean, if you look at the recent issue around the gun debate, which is a natural discussion to look at … So you’ve got people on one side of the argument, they’re looking at the constitutionality of it. On the other half, they’re looking at access to weaponry and the scale of carnage that can be done by weapons. And then, it just comes polarized, and then it goes away. It becomes a stalemate.

And the thing that’s interesting to me there is whether the issue’s around who accesses guns and stuff, there has to be a point where the country transcends that and says, we have to break out of what we’ve been doing. And I do feel, I do feel that potential is there in the mental health field. Some of it is coming out of the opioid crisis, that people have realized, how did we get to this point, where we have an incredible number of deaths here in Maine? How did we get to it? How do we get out of it? And suddenly, people change the way they think. And then that leverage can happen. So when it comes back to our mission, I mean, to have three police departments, in fairly close proximity, have behavior health work, to go out on those kinds of calls, and to connect to services, and to hold community forums is great. How do we do that on a state-wide level? How do we join up? Well, it would be great if we had a Governor that thought about things in those terms, if we had a Commissioner of the Department of Health and Human Services, who thought about it in those terms, rather than just purely in budgetary terms.

And I’ll give you a little editorial. There is a wonderful study being funded by the Lunder Foundation, looking at a similar program, not the same, but a similar program to ours, that Maine Behavioral Health is doing, in which they are looking at how do those support families of folks. And they’re tracking all the reduced costs in medication, in hospitalizations, and incarcerations, and stuff. And the Department of Health and Human Services has a great interest in what the outcome of that data is. There are specific questions, as I was given to understand is, will these people be off welfare. Will these people go back to work? If we support the families of the mentally ill people, will those mentally ill people go back to work? Will they get off welfare?

And that’s an interesting question, but it’s one question. And I think it’s not the most interesting. And I think it tells you what the agenda is. So there has to be a change in values too. And one in five, or one in four people are gonna experience mental health issues in their life, here in Maine, across the country, so we have to think about it differently. We have to view it differently. And many, many people are mentally ill and live fully functional lives. They just have to take their medication, got to treatment. Alex can talk about all that stuff, but yeah, we have to have a shift in values. And that will come. No one talked about childhood bereavement 30 years ago. Now, it’s a commonplace thing, when the kids experience bereavement differently. Mental health will be dealt with differently. It will come. I mean, it’s a cool country, because it reinvents itself every generation. It just needs to pick that as a priority and get on it. That’s my soapbox right there.

Alex S.: Another thought that I had was Portland, wen I first came here, the diversity level was zero. And now we have a huge refugee population. Actually, I volunteer at the Boys and Girls Club, every Wednesday, and it’s 90% African or immigrant children. And I also had a conversation with a friend, who they’re refugees, and they’re a first break schizophrenia. And I thought, here’s another area, where culturally, language-wise, so these are the kinds of things. Paul and I are not exactly sure where we need to have this conversation. We know that we can write grants. We know who natural partners may be. And always in organizational training, especially in non-profit, when it’s connected to budgets and political ideas. I mean, and I am impatient. I am not a process person. I am a vision person. And so I’m just brimming with hope and ideas, and yet, I’m hoping that us talking about it today, maybe it will really inspire people to say, you know what? These are great ideas. And it’s not just about money. It’s about support. It’s about when you’re at church or when you’re at a coffee shop.

I mean, if I overhear people in a restaurant, that are talking about this stuff, I will approach them and say, I’m sorry for overhearing it, but I hear your pain. And I just want you to know. I mean, even in a dentist the other day, somebody asked me what I did. And I said, do you know of anybody, where this might be appropriate? And so even just that, even just being able to refer your own friends to this, I think the more stories and the more people that we’re able to touch and the more opportunities we’re able to tell real stories, my job is to get you where your heart is, to imagine, like you said, I’m a mother. I’m a citizen. I mean, I believe that that’s really what motivates people, whether we’re Republicans or Democrats. We’re parents. We’re neighbors. And this is the Love Show, and I do believe that love is really what keeps us motivated.

Dr. Belisle: I’ve been speaking with Paul Golding, who’s the Executive Directory of Family Hope and also with Alexandra Segav, who’s been with Family Hope, since 2017 and as a social worker. I really believe in the work that you’re doing. So I hope that people who are listening are going to ponder how they might be able to help out with this, because I think that this is really the time. And I appreciate all the efforts that you are putting forth.

Alex S.: Thank you so much, Lisa. I so much appreciate it.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by grownupgirl.com, where you can get personalized guidance and encouragement for growing a simple yet vibrant life through free advice, workshops, and mentoring programs with local experts. You deserve to shine. Go to grownupgirl.com now to learn about available programs and classes designed just for you in the Portland area.

Dr. Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show 342. Our guests have included Quincy Hentzel, Paul Golding, and Alexandra Sagov. 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 Radi” Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter, as Dr. Lisa, and see our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. 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 pleased that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for sharing this part of your day with me, and may you have a bountiful life.

Guests

Carol Schoneberg

Anne Heros

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #341: Carol Schoneberg and Anne Heros

Speaker 1: You are listening to Love Maine Radio, hosted by Dr. Lisa Belisle and recorded at the studios at Maine Magazine in Portland. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician and editor in chief of Maine, Maine Home and Design, Old Port, Ageless and Moxie magazines. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.

Dr. Lisa B.: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 341 airing for the first time on Sunday April 1st, 2018. Today we speak Carol Schoneberg who has worked as a hospice educator in Maine for the past 25 years. Anne Heros is the executive director of the Center for Grieving Children, an organization providing support to grieving children, young adults, teenagers and families. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1: Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the Old Port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in its newly expanded space, including Ingen Jorgenson, Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaie.com.

Dr. Lisa B.: Carol Schoneberg has been a hospice educator in Maine since 1992. She has served as an end of life educator, bereavement services manager and grief counselor at Hospice of Southern Maine, Maine’s only freestanding not for profit hospice since its inception in 2004. Thanks for coming in today.

Carol S.: Happy to be here.

Dr. Lisa B.: The work that you do is what many would consider to be difficult and yet it’s your chosen field.

Carol S.: It is.

Dr. Lisa B.: Tell me about that.

Carol S.: Well one of the things I hear often is, “How could you do that? It must be so depressing.” And if I found it depressing, I could never do it and I couldn’t have done it for this long. It’s often sad, but there’s a big difference and it’s very … for me, extremely meaningful. It’s always been good to help me prioritize what I think is important in life and it gives me joy to do this work, which sounds strange to a lot of people.

Dr. Lisa B.: How did you make the decision that this would be your focus in your life?

Carol S.: I think it found me. I really feel … I came to feel that it was a calling and I often feel I’m sort of embarrassed to say that. It seems sort of pretentious in a way, but I realize looking back over my life that there were things that happened, starting around five years old and throughout my life that were leading me in this direction. I was always the person in my family, in my circle of friends that for whatever reason was comfortable. It wasn’t something I turned away from. I had a friend in San Francisco when I was in my early 20’s who took his life. He jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and I remember sitting around at the funeral with my friends, my peers, people my age and how stunned we all were, and it was for many of us our first experience with the death of a friend. And there was something about it that really stayed with me in the sense of grief and how people didn’t wanna talk about it.

Dr. Lisa B.: Why don’t people want to talk about grief?

Carol S.: It’s amazing how many of my clients will tell me they think grief is negative and they don’t wanna talk about something negative. They think dying is negative and part of my role is I hope to be able to help people see that grief is neither positive or negative. It’s grief. It’s a true emotion that is central in our lives. It happens to everybody and it’s painful. So of course we naturally wanna turn away from anything that’s painful and when someone has experienced maybe for the first time, the death of a central person in their life, they have never known a pain like that before.

Dr. Lisa B.: When you say that it’s something that brings you joy, tell me a little bit about that, because it’s easy to make assumptions as to how we would all feel in your situation.

Carol S.: Right, right.

Dr. Lisa B.: But you have your own experience of it.

Carol S.: Right. It’s not joy-like, the joy I felt when I found out when I was gonna have children or the joy I felt when my grandchildren were born. It’s a kind of joy in witnessing … for one thing, witnessing people and the resiliency that we are all capable of as human beings. So when I see a bereavement client who I witnessed them going through their journey and then at a certain point, our time together comes to an end. And then I might run into them in the grocery store or I run into them somewhere and they look full and alive and they’re living their life and I know how deep their grief was and how the things that we tend to say at the beginning of our grief. Things like, “I don’t care if I go on or not. I don’t care if I wake up or not. My life will never be the same.” Which it won’t, that’s a true statement but that doesn’t mean it has to be a pejorative statement and so seeing this capacity for resiliency is I think part of why I do the work. And in working with a family where someone’s dying and meeting with them maybe before they decide to come on to hospice, I sometimes do informational visits for families.

It’s inspiring to meet with a family that is able to speak openly about what’s happening and typically it’s because the patient is willing to go there and so that is very fulfilling to work with that family. And then to see a family where they start off not able to talk about it but it’s still coming, death is still coming. They sign on to hospice and if they have enough time between when they sign on and when the person dies, sometimes there’s a transformation that happens and a family might be able to have healing that they didn’t have before or have conversations that they didn’t have before. And often it’s brought about because the members of the hospice team social worker, the nurses, everyone that’s involved, chaplains, volunteers, they can help in that process of gently guiding someone to a point where they can make that change. So that’s very satisfying and fulfilling to see that happen.

Dr. Lisa B.: How does the team help to guide that process?

Carol S.: Well when somebody signs on to hospice, they are saying that they want this interdisciplinary approach to care and it means that they will let a hospice nurse come in, hospice social worker, hospice aid, chaplain, volunteers, and we also have medical directors that work closely with their doctor. So every member of that team is … we like to think of everyone’s on the same level, no ones job is more important than the other and each person as they’re in there working with the patient and family, they are having their impressions of what’s happening. It might be that the patient feels most comfortable with aid and they might really open up to them in maybe a way that they’ve not opened up to their family or to anyone else. And they might talk about their fears or their wishes of what they wish could happen before they die and because everyone on the team is educated, trained on end of life care, they’re tuned in to listening for these that people might say that someone else might miss. So it might be to say, “Tell me more about that.” And then it might be to say, “Is this something you’ve talked with the social worker about because she might be able to help you have these conversations with your family.”

So it’s that kind of everybody working together, everybody having their eyes and ears open and coming together to see how can we better serve this family, how can we help them the most. So there’ve been studies done that have shown that if someone can be on hospice for a minimum of 60 days, that it can make a great difference in the way they die and the way the family’s able to have some possibility of healing and it also makes a difference in their bereavement.

Dr. Lisa B.: As someone who has referred patients to hospice before, it is always tricky because there’s no way to accurately determine when someone is going to die. It’s always just a best guess.

Carol S.: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: And it’s un … It’s always … It always feels unfortunate to me when a patient just barely gets into hospice and then they pass away.

Carol S.: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: Because it feels as if it were a missed opportunity.

Carol S.: Yes, there was when that happens. You know lots of times we get a patient sort of the 11th hour and there’s not a lot that can be done when you get a patient who … maybe you have them the last day of their life. Some people end up at the Gosnell House four hours before they die and often I will hear in bereavement or in a support group or individual grief counseling, “I wish we would’ve come to hospice sooner. I wish we would’ve known about it sooner.” And I would agree with you yes, it’s very hard to prognosticate a terminal illness when somebody … how much time they have left and yet you probably know, it’s the question everybody that’s been told they have a terminal illness, “How much time do I have?” When a hospice nurse gets to the house the first time, “How much time do you think he has?” It’s that piece that most people wanna know, not everybody, some people, “Don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know.”

I’m a big believer that for instance, when somebody is told they have a stage four cancer and I would say cancer is an illness that as a relative term, it’s a bit easier to prognosticate because of the stages and typically what is seen. I would hope we would reach a point some day and I hope it’s while I’m still here to see it when a physician and an oncologist would have that conversation with their patient when their cancer becomes stage four, to introduce hospice, “Here’s what it is, let’s talk about. Would you like to meet with somebody who could tell you about it. You’re not ready for hospice now and I hope it’s going be a long time before you are, but I …” This would be the words of the oncologist, “But I’ve learned that educating about it sooner makes it easier for when the time comes to access it. You’ll already know what it is. You know the difference it can make at the end of life for you and your family.”

So I’d like to see that become routine and I would say to all doctors, if your gut is telling you this person has a prognosis of probably six months or less, or even if you look at this person and you think, “I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that they’ve died in the coming year.” That’s the time for a hospice referral and use us. Use hospice professionals to help you have language to do that, to be able to have somebody that could come in and talk to that patient, that family if they’re open to it. Once again, that piece of people coming sooner rather than later is really important, very, very important.

The other thing I’m thinking of is there’ve also been some studies done to show the negative impact of over-prognosticating, of giving false hope and the studies point to it is of no benefit and in fact, what I see in my work as a grief counselor, is at least people really angry. If a doctor says, “Because it’s hard to say.”, and maybe they say it because they’re uncomfortable. They say, “Well, I don’t know. It could be two weeks, it could be a year.” So what that family and patient holds on to of course, is the year and then when death comes three weeks later, they are stunned as people are anyhow when they lose someone they love. But they’re angry, they feel lied to and that is a hurdle for them to overcome in their grieving process before they can even begin to focus on their grief.

Dr. Lisa B.: Because death has for many people, such a negative connotation, it is something that many people feel uncomfortable talking about at all.

Carol S.: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: And even if you are not someone who has a family member in hospice, you may not know what to say to be supportive of a family that’s dealing with the possibility of loss. What type of language do you suggest that people use? What are things that can be said that individuals or families might find helpful?

Carol S.: So if I heard you correctly, you’re talking about the person who maybe they have a friend or a family member or somebody who-

Dr. Lisa B.: Yeah.

Carol S.: They’ve heard is terminally ill. The thing that we all … that I hope people will do is to say something to acknowledge in some way. For people who are facing the end of their life, one of the common things they feel is a sense of abandonment by … often by the medical community and by the people who love them, who they are hoping will check in or be around. It might be to say, “I don’t really know what to say or do, but I know that I wanna support you and I wanna be with you.” That’s a huge thing. It might be to say, “Is there something I could do to help you at this time?” Depending on where the person is in their dying process, if they’re on hospice, it might to say, “Are there … Is there a project that I could do to help you to complete that might be meaningful for you?” Not to be afraid, which is hard to do to talk about it, because we talk about death, doesn’t make it come any sooner and that’s often what I … when I’m doing education in the community about hospice, that’s what I’ll say. When I’m meeting with a new hospice family, I always say that.

It’s about being present to someone, much more than any clever words we might say and there are ways that we let somebody know that we’re present with them. It might be a touch, it might be a hug if they want it and just to say, “I’m gonna … I’ll be here for you throughout this journey, however long it may be.”

Dr. Lisa B.: There are for some people unresolved issues.

Carol S.: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: I guess you’re laughing and smiling ’cause maybe it’s all people have some level of unresolved issue.

Carol S.: I think so. I do. Some people very little. Some people, they live their life in that wonderful way of saying what they feel in the moment and saying I love you and saying I’m sorry when they’re sorry, doing those things as they go through life, and they’re just maybe a family where they’re just more open. We say in the hospice the easy part is dealing with the body, the physical body, the pain and symptoms that we … our hospice people are very skilled at. The difficult part is typically family dynamics. If you have five adult children, rarely are all five on the same page. They have five different relationships to the one who’s dying, they don’t all have the same relationship. Some may have a particular ease in being present to death, others not at all. Some wanna talk about it, some don’t and every bit of that family’s dynamics from day one, are gonna carry into the dying process. We say in hospice we tend to die the way we’ve lived, which is what we see. Somebody who’s been open and shares everything, they’re gonna be open and sharing they’re dying, talking about how they’re feeling, and the opposite is true and the same is true of grief. We only are who we are. We can only manifest in general, unless we have a transformation in that way.

So that family dynamics piece is really tough and that’s where hospice can be very helpful as well. Hospice doesn’t come in and tell people what to do or what to feel, but once again, that sense of is there that something that can be done to help people be able to heal their relationships before they die. Sometimes it happens and it’s very wonderful. Sometimes it happens 10 minutes before death. Sometimes it takes place over the weeks and months and sometimes it never happens. We have had patients who might have a loved one who they’ve been estranged from, maybe an adult child estranged 20, 30 years and as the social worker is exploring this piece of their story, they might ask them, “Would you like me to try to locate your daughter?” And typically the person that says this is what I’m struggling with will say, “Yes.” They might not, but often they say yes, and sometimes the team is able to track down, locate the person with the help of the internet and everything else we have today and sometimes the person is … when they’re called and said, “Your mother has given us permission to call. She’s a hospice patient. She’s very near the end of her life and she would very much like to see you.”

Sometimes the person says no, just … and it’s not ours to judge. Whatever the wounds were may be too great for that person to be able to overcome and some people have said yes and have come from great distances. Had a kind of reconciliation and healing and very soon after that, maybe within minutes or hours, days, the person lets go and they can die peacefully.

Dr. Lisa B.: Is there a difference between the way that younger people in … who are dying in hospice and older people who are dying in hospice experience that process?

Carol S.: In some ways no, in that it’s more about our type and nature than it is our age. So I see some people who are in their 70’s, 80’s, 90’s who are able to touch everyone around them, inspire everyone around them as they go through their dying, and I see younger people who are able to do that and those who may not be able to. One of the things when we have a younger patient and we don’t have pediatric hospice, so our patients are generally over the age of 18. We have very, very over our 10 years of the hospice house being open, the Gosnell House in Scarborough, very few, handful of patients I would say in their 20’s and of course, what we see more often with a young patient, is often their parents are living. So that’s a loss that any parent hopes they never have to hear about or deal with and as staff, it has a different impact when there’s a mother or father who is … they are in that room with a person who’s dying, and of course, we witness it in the home as well. So I don’t know if that responds exactly to your question, but those are some of the things we see regarding the ages of people who are dying.

There’s always the person who’s dying, who their approach because it’s their nature is why me and then there’s the person who’s dying who says, “Why not me? It’s gonna happen some day.” So neither one of those approaches is right or wrong but it is definitely a very powerful rich experience as a hospice worker with that person who is why not me, and also who is able to share their dying process. That’s how we learn, I certainly learned most of what I feel I know or understand through the people I’ve worked with.

Dr. Lisa B.: Have you found that people are very similar in the way that they die or that they are very different in the way that they die?

Carol S.: I think they’re quite different. Some of the deaths we see are very peaceful, very quiet. A person might just sort of slowly shut down and obviously this type of a death is really relative term easy, but it is the least painful in a way for a family to witness and watch. We all hope for a peaceful death for ourselves, for the people we love. Some people have what I would think of as a more traumatic dying experience based on their illness. They might have more things that as the body gets near death, whether it’s more symptoms that manifest, some symptoms that might be very distressing for a family to witness. Hospice does everything it can to help manage and control those symptoms. The nurse will also help prepare a family if they have a particular type, lets say of cancer that this could occur, so that they might not be as shocked. We see people who are fighting death until their last breath I would say and people who have made peace and have if will, acquiesce to death. We see people who might have a smile on their face when they die, who look beautiful and peaceful. They might even have a glow and others that have been a much harder death.

Dr. Lisa B.: What do you think it is that people fear most about dying? I-

Carol S.: Fear of the unknown.

Dr. Lisa B.: That’s pretty straightforward.

Carol S.: That’s … If I had to just … If I just had to reduce it to one sentence. There’s a difference too between fear and sadness. I think the fear … Largely, I always think of Woody Allen who said, “I’m not afraid to die. I just don’t wanna be there when it happens.” And I think there’s so much truth to that. Many people, if I have an opportunity to ask them, “What’s the scariest part about all of this for you?” Typically, what people say is fear of dying in pain, fear of dying alone and fear of being a burden to the people I love. Those are the kinda universal pieces that people talk about with fear. The other thing that a dying person is … once they get that terminal diagnosis, no matter how much time they have left that I find people wrestle with is sadness of leaving behind the people they love. It always comes down to that and people who might say, “I can do this, but I can’t imagine leaving my children.”

Dr. Lisa B.: Are there ways that hospice supports families once an individual has died?

Carol S.: Yes. Hospice … One of the things that distinguishes hospice care from a regular medical model of care is the families, the unit of care. So we very much are there to provide care and support to the patient and the family. After the patient dies, we provide bereavement support to the family, anyone who wants it in the family for one year following a death. It’s part of the Medicare guidelines and regulations. So any hospice program in the country is required to offer bereavement support. What that support looks like varies widely from program to program. We’re very proud of our bereavement program in that we offer individual grief counseling during that year. We have between eight and ten, eight week support groups every year that are run for an hour and a half each week for eight weeks. They’re generic groups, so anyone over the age of 18 who has lost a central person in their life can attend. It’s open to the community as well and our individual grief counseling is open to the community as well. So it’s no cost.

Sometimes a doctor’s office will call me and say, “I met with one of my patients today and his wife died some months ago and he was crying and is really struggling with that, somebody that you could see.” And then yes, we will and we do. Not everybody wants bereavement support. We also … Part of our services are we do a monthly mailing with some bereavement literature that we mail every other month and with that packet, they also get notices of all the groups that are happening. When I was saying not everyone wants … formalized professional support, we know that around 40 to 50% of people will heal well on their own and typically it’s the person who has a strong support system, really important. You might be connected, family, friends, workplace, faith community and somebody who is the person who tends to approach their grief rather than avoid it.

And there are people that … A very small percentage of people might end up having what we call a complicated grief, where they might be best served working with someone who specialized just in complicated grief to help them be able to … It’s a … I think a simple way of thinking of it is somebody who is … gets extremely stuck in their grief process and isn’t able to really begin to move forward in their grief, and in my view, our grief doesn’t go anywhere. It just hangs out, whether it’s for a few months or 50 years, an unreconciled grief or a grief that one isn’t able to actually mourn, does not diminish and it has a really negative impact on our lives. I think of it as kind of a life half lived.

Dr. Lisa B.: I’ve learned a lot from our conversation today and I appreciate your coming in and sharing your insights and also all the work that you have been doing for decades. Really … I’ve been speaking with Carol Schoneberg who has been a hospice educator in Maine since 1992. She has served as an end of life educator, bereavement services manager and grief counselor at Hospice of Southern Maine, Maine’s only freestanding, not for profit hospice since its inception in 2004. Thanks for coming in today.

Carol S.: You’re welcome.

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Dr. Lisa B.: Anne Heros serves as the executive director of the Center for Grieving Children, an organization that serves grieving children, teenagers, families and young adults with peer support, outreach and education. Thank you for coming in again.

Anne Heros: Thank you. Good to be here.

Dr. Lisa B.: You’ve now been doing this for … I guess this is your 31st year. Right? With the Center for-

Anne Heros: The center’s 31st year.

Dr. Lisa B.: Yes.

Anne Heros: They started in 89 … or sorry, 87. I’m thinking of when I came to the United States. Sorry, 87 is when the center started and our founder, Bill Hemmens started it because in his own life, his only sister who was a single mom, she was 39 and was diagnosed with terminal cancer and she had a nine year old daughter. So when his sister died, he was devastated himself, with less trying to support his niece and he looked around Portland at that time and there were some groups for adults. There was nothing for children and he thought this was a real need and around the same time he saw something, I believe it was on 20/20 that just listed this new place that had opened out in Portland, Oregon called The Dougy Center. And he thought, “That’s what we need here in Portland.” And he was a stock broker, so he [inaudible 00:33:54] his job, tapped into his savings, went over there to see what they were doing and then came back and adjusted what he had seen and created his own center. We were the third in the U.S., so he made a really special effort to the model.

It was very important to him that the model was a family model, which again given that time back then Kübler-Ross was only beginning to write about grief. There was hardly anything getting written about children or even the acknowledgment that children grieved. So this was very important to him that it would be a family model, where the whole family could come. But also what was important was the fact that it would be facilitated. These groups, which are age appropriate would be facilitated by people from the community, who had gotten through a 30 plus hour training and then they themselves, volunteered would be supported by staff and clinical consultants and all of that to make sure that this was … as I said, it was a test back then. Obviously now, going on 31 years later, a lot more has been written to in turn … actually confirm that this approach does work. So he had a great vision.

Dr. Lisa B.: You are originally from Ireland.

Anne Heros: Correct.

Dr. Lisa B.: Do they have things like this back there?

Anne Heros: I was not … Again, you don’t really think about that at that time back then. I mean now they do, but it’s not done the way … What I’m involved in is a very different kind of model. There and in some other countries, it either is a church related type model, but not something that’s done by volunteers and it may be a clinical model, but nothing to the same degree as what I’m … what we’re involved in here. So it’s … I think what we have here in the United States is pretty special. As I said, we were the third and there’s now over 300 in those 31, so.

Dr. Lisa B.: What is the benefit of involving community members?

Anne Heros: Well it is … It’s … To me, ’cause I’m somebody who actually also benefited from attending the center, it is … The fact that it is other people from the community, it is like a gift of unconditional love that’s the gift from like what I would see from being an adult and being aware of being the facilitators in my group. But the other magic is the fact that it is peers. You’re gonna have other people in your group who are your same age and therefore you’re breaking down the walls of isolation, you’re helping children to see that they are not alone. There are others experiencing the same kind of situation and that there’s hope. There’s other people there and they seem to be doing okay. I mean our program is a year round program. So you could be the newest child in the group but then you could also be aware of another child who’s there a couple of months. So it is … It’s giving you that sense that wow, each day … This … I’m going to be okay and I think that’s pretty special.

Dr. Lisa B.: You benefited from this because of your daughter’s death.

Anne Heros: Correct. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: And it seems as though it would be hard to know when one is grieving something that large, when or how to reach out for some people.

Anne Heros: Well I think that’s where awareness of our existence is very important. For me, I became aware of the center because they actually responded to the school because it was a sudden death and that’s how I became aware that they existed. And then also, there was somebody in the school who actually volunteered at the center and I volunteered in the office of the school. I guess I had an ulterior motive because I wanted to keep an eye on my kids and you know, ’cause you are very protective at … particularly at very pivotal times like this. You are overly protective and so I got to know her and she told me more about the center and so it kinda was there in my mind that in a way, even though I’d had a lot of education behind me around children, ’cause I was in education back in Ireland. But this aspect of a child’s life, how could you make it through and also for me, as a parent, how could you make it through and be a healthy parent to parent these kids going forward.

Dr. Lisa B.: Your daughter was 12?

Anne Heros: She was 10-

Dr. Lisa B.: 10.

Anne Heros: And it was a sudden virus that attacked her. We did not realize that she was sick. We thought she had a stomach virus, so.

Dr. Lisa B.: And she had … has siblings.

Anne Heros: Yes. She had two brothers. She was the middle child, she was 10. Her brother was 11 going on 12 and her youngest one was eight. So she was … We used to joke and say she was the Oreo or the white part in the cookie. You know what I mean? She just was the glue, she really was.

Dr. Lisa B.: So I also wonder, it would be devastating enough I imagine to lose a child, but then to continue to have to parent your other children.

Anne Heros: Absolutely. It was a double edged sword in the sense that you really just wanted to curl up in bed and pull the covers over your head and come back out a month ahead. But you didn’t have that luxury when you have got children to parent and in that sense, there was a bit of a saving grace in it too, that I had that … that demand on me. I think the other thing for me was the fact that I was only here two years from Ireland. So I didn’t really … I hadn’t really built up that network yet of friends and obviously no family and whatever. So being able to reach out and find a place like this really helped me, but I mean again, they were boys. So again, a little different but for me, it was a case of well you know what? This is did not come with a rule book. It’s there, I’ll try it because having as they say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

I knew that this was a … as they’re calling it now, an adverse childhood experience and to make … And having moved to a new country to … So you take these experiences that children experience throughout their lives and some of them can be very, very traumatic and it can severely impact the development of that child. So I was very aware of that and so I knew … I became a voracious reader to learn all that I could about how kids experienced this and as I said, there wasn’t a lot written, but the little bit that was out there, I managed to access. And actually somebody from the community, what she did was she actually went to the library and got about six books and took them out and brought them and dropped them off and just left them there. But the challenge at that time is my ability to concentrate in those very early days, was very small. So really articles were something that I could really just concentrate on for a short moment of time and get some information from them, and I … There were some important pieces that I gleaned back then and one of them was children saying how a bereaved parent kind of idolizes the one that has died and the two are … the ones that are left behind are kind of relegated.

So that was something that I wanted to make sure, as much as possible was not going to be felt by the kids and also that you didn’t become overly protective and not let them experience their childhood. And I have particular, kind of moments when that piece that I picked up kind of came back to me in very … in front of me in the sense … The first time was when my oldest boy got his driving license and he’s driving off in the car with his brother and it’s kinda like I’m standing there looking at my future just driving away in a car and it’s like, oh my goodness. But again, you gotta hold back on that. The other one was when my older one came home from college and said he wanted to join the marines and I thought oh, wow. Talk about wanting to hold yourself back and not want wrap them [inaudible 00:43:56]. But those were important things for me to know that you had to release and let your children experience the world in spite of the fact that it seems like your world has fallen apart and how do you start to build some comfort and some assurity around what’s going to happen, which I mean in the big picture, you have no control over. But in your naïve way as you’re parenting, you think you can control it all, at least I thought anyway.

Dr. Lisa B.: I’m … One of the things that I over the years have become interested in as a doctor is that we never really let go of grief completely. I mean someone who was in our life that we lose is always with us in some capacity.

Anne Heros: Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa B.: And the more years I have been a doctor, the more I’ve seen that this … it goes on for decades, maybe forever.

Anne Heros: It does. It does and I think that’s what’s becoming … people are beginning to get that message now, which is good because again, going back to Kübler-Ross, she said there were four or five stages in grief and people … I think maybe naively, we wanted to think well, five stages and you were done and it was wrapped up in a bow and that was it and of course it’s not. Of course, it’s not.

Dr. Lisa B.: And not everybody goes through the stages-

Anne Heros: No.

Dr. Lisa B.: Not only at the same pace, but in the same order perhaps.

Anne Heros: No, not at all.

Dr. Lisa B.: And it makes it difficult I think for people who are trying to be helpful-

Anne Heros: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: To know what to say or how to act.

Anne Heros: Right. Right. And again, going back to the work at the center, what we train our facilitators in is how to be reflective listeners, because really it’s about getting your voice back. It’s about hearing yourself think in a way and having another person reflected back. It may not be the facilitator that reflects it back, but it could be another participant in the group and that is so helpful. I know from the … Sometimes it felt like you could be going crazy. Right? So that can have its own aspect to it and how do normalize to a degree, something that’s happening to you and that it will be okay by certain supportive factors that are going to help you heal. Whether it is physically, making sure you’re going to your doctor and you’re staying healthy and you’re getting that input and doing all the right things for your body. Two, whether it is one on one counseling for awhile or in our case, you come to a group setting and experience meeting other people who are walking the walk. So you need to look at all of these aspects. We do a piece on quadrants, what about your physical, your emotional, your spiritual health, those are all aspects of an individual.

Dr. Lisa B.: It has … It was just occurring to me, me sitting here now, maybe I’m just slow on the uptake, but in a sense you can be a grieving child really at any age.

Anne Heros: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: It is your … I believe your inner child that is the most impacted by loss.

Anne Heros: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: And I have spoken to adults who’ve told me that they’ve benefited from going to the Center for Grieving Children because they lost a parent at an early age-

Anne Heros: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: Or a sibling at an early age and they were adults-

Anne Heros: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: That went to the center.

Anne Heros: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: So it’s interesting that you are absolutely serving an entire spectrum of physical ages, but you’re still dealing with the emotional impact on the inner child.

Anne Heros: Yes and particularly our volunteers, I think are the ones who would speak to that because people will say, “Oh, to be a volunteer do I have to have experience at death in my life?” You know, part of your life and we kinda say, “No. There are different things that can happen to you in your life that will impact your emotional well being.” And so that’s kind of a hidden gift I think that happens at the center and probably part of the reason our volunteers stay for a long period of time, is that is what they’re getting from that, because they wish the center would’ve been there when they’d had that experience. So it’s an inner part of all that’s happening at the center. I mean for us, our groups are as I said, a family model but what … As we were working through the years, the children’s grief journey happens in age developmental stages, but the adults experience it differently. They’re in this timeline and so when the children were ready to leave the center, the adults were saying, “Oh, I really still could do with a group.”

So as the center got more … I guess sustained in its work and its support, it started adding extra adult groups and also at that time, research was showing the better the adult does, the better the child does. So even though we might’ve added a bereave parents group or a widow/widower’s partners group, we were still indirectly helping children.

Dr. Lisa B.: I have a patient who is a writer and puts things out on his blog. So I feel comfortable talking about his grief because he’s very open about it. He’s an older gentleman and his child died I believe when she was in her late teens and she would’ve been my age, which was something that struck him-

Anne Heros: Of course. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: I believe within the last year or so, that this wasn’t a child that was still whatever age she was.

Anne Heros: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: This is an entire life that had been lost.

Anne Heros: Exactly. Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: And as a writer, he’s been able to process this.

Anne Heros: Right.

Dr. Lisa B.: One of the things that has come up … So that’s sort of one thing and I’m guessing you might have had similar thoughts on that because your daughter is my sister’s age.

Anne Heros: Exactly. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: They knew each other at Yarmouth.

Anne Heros: Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: So there’s that piece.

Anne Heros: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: And then there’s also, which is a second piece, the fact that men and women even process death differently. As a father, I think he processed death differently than his then wife. What are your thoughts?

Anne Heros: Yes. You have … I try to explain to people that … that horrific pain that you have in the beginning subsides, it gets easier. It gets easier and then there are … A long period of time, you might not think about it at all as having happened to you, but then something in a life event, an incident of some kind and the flash comes back. Whether it is the day my son was getting married or then you’re … my daughter’s best friend getting married, that was a hard day for me because again you’re thinking, “Wow. That’s a life event I will not experience with her.” And then the same when my son had his first child, which turned out to be a girl.

So those are things that … yes, but they don’t bring you down. They don’t bring you back to where you were, at least I feel that’s because I’ve done so much work and I guess embrace sounds like you welcomed it. I’d trade places in the morning but it’s all the time processing. You’re a human being, you are a process. You cannot stand still. You’re not a … You’re just gonna experience these things and some people … it will bring them back to a … Maybe it will be the thing that will pull the rug from under them and so therefore then they need to get the support and that’s part of the reason the center does outreach to schools, because we’re asking teachers on the frontline to help these students. To do something for these students that in turn might trigger in their lives, something that happened and there, they’ve got to function and be there and support the kids and yet inside, this flashback is happening for them for their own loss. So that’s why we also behind the scenes try to … want to support the teachers ’cause they’re the ones who are going to be there day in and day out to work with the students.

Dr. Lisa B.: And is there a difference between the way that men and women process grief? Is it-

Anne Heros: Yes.

Dr. Lisa B.: Can you easily go along gender lines or is it just every individual is different?

Anne Heros: I think there’s definitely an individual part of it but I think there’s different permissions that are given to the genders. For men, there is that piece about crying makes you look vulnerable, being in touch with your feelings, you’re expected to be strong. The old sayings of, “Well now you’re the man of the house.”, when the father dies and mom is left behind. What a ridiculous thing to say to a 10 year old boy and mom is 30 something or 40, and now to the 10 year old, you’re the man of the house. So those are unfair expectations that are put there. The girls on the other side of it are kinda give that permission to cry and probably do experience more … Their feelings are very much I think to the forefront in a lot of cases, but then there’s other things that they’re not given permission to … like to be angry, to be physical.

That’s why we at the center have a … we have a room where you can be rambunctious and be safe and being physical, whatever that might be. That’s an important thing too for a girl to have ’cause these are all things that are healthy for your body, but they have to be done in a safe way. And we will have male volunteers at the center who will say, “I was … Everything was taken away. We were not allowed to talk about it.” The same was happening for girls too. Thankfully, nowadays we’re trying to educate and help people understand … I know we had one experience where this volunteer having gone through our training, started to reflect on the death of his own mom and how his dad kind of managed to … or didn’t manage to kind of parent the family and how it created a fracture really in their relationship later, and so he hadn’t seen his dad in a long time. So having gone through the training, there was that light bulb that went on that had him think, “I need to go back.” And so he booked a flight to go visit his father and so there was that reconnection, because he began to see it from his father’s side and his father trying to do the best. So that was a nice story to hear.

Dr. Lisa B.: Anything that you would like our listeners to know about the Center for Grieving children, anything that you think is particularly interesting or that you’d like to share?

Anne Heros: I think sometimes when people hear the name, Grieving Children, that they think it’s a sad place and that is not … Yes, what brings people there can be sad but children in a lot of cases experience for the first time, it’s okay to be happy again because when there’s so much sadness in a house, how can you be happy again, how can you … By coming to the center, there’s also opportunities to have those conversations and I think the other piece is that we provide a lot of services. So I encourage people to go to our website and see all the work that we do, because I think that’s one of the pieces people will say to me, “Wow, I didn’t know that you did so much.” And I think one of the other pieces is that we are there, okay, we’re not there 24/7, but we are there either on the phone or on the website to answer your questions and help you. There’s an awful lot of work that we do that does not mean you actually physically come inside the walls of the center, but we do a lot of work with a lot of different kinds of populations. We have a big refugee and immigrant program. We have a tender living care program, where we work with families who are dealing with a life threatening illness, and then of course, there’s our bereavement program.

Dr. Lisa B.: I appreciate all the work that you’ve done-

Anne Heros: Thank you.

Dr. Lisa B.: Over the last several decades now.

Anne Heros: Yeah.

Dr. Lisa B.: It must be a little hard to believe.

Anne Heros: It is hard to believe actually that there’s more behind me than there is ahead of me.

Dr. Lisa B.: Well I’m glad you’re still here.

Anne Heros: Me too!

Dr. Lisa B.: I hope you still got a few decades ahead of you still. I’ve been speaking with Anne Heros, who serves as the executive director of the Center for Grieving Children, an organization that serves grieving children, teenagers, families and young adults with peer support, outreach and education. Thank you so much.

Anne Heros: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is also brought to you by Aristelle, a lingerie boutique on Exchange Street in Portland’s Old Port, where every body is seen as a work of art and beauty is celebrated from the inside out. Shop with us in person or online at aristelle.com.

Dr. Lisa B.: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 341. Our guests have included Carol Schoneberg and Anne Heros. 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 e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa and see our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. 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 happy that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. May you have a bountiful life.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Maine Magazine, Aristelle, Portland Art Gallery and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music are by Spencer Albee. Our editorial producer is Kate Gardner. Our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy and our executive producers are Andrea King, Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.

Guests

Marshall Taylor

Paul Cousins

Transcription of Love Maine Radio #340: Marshall Taylor and Paul Cousins

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 physician and editor and chief of Maine, Maine Home and Design, Old Port, Ageless, and Moxie magazines. Love Maine Radio show summaries are available at lovemaineradio.com.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 340 airing for the first time on Sunday, March 25, 2018. Today we speak with Marshall Taylor, artistic director of Quisisana Resort. We also speak with meteorologist Paul Cousins who is the founder, principal, and CFO at Atmos Forecast. He has been analyzing weather in the northeastern United States for more than 40 years. Thank you for joining us.

Speaker 1: Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the old port at 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in it’s newly expanded space including Inken Georgonson, Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Marshall Taylor is the artistic director at Quisisana Resort, a summer resort in western Maine that specializes in musical entertainment. Thanks for coming in today.

Marshall Taylor: Good morning.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You actually had a little bit of a journey to make it in to visit with us.

Marshall Taylor: About an hour and a half on 302.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It’s a strong hour and half. You can’t rush that.

Marshall Taylor: It depends who you get behind. It wasn’t too bad this morning.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You’re not originally … You don’t live in Maine full time.

Marshall Taylor: I wasn’t gonna tell.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: We consider you a Mainer anyway because you’ve been coming here for how many years?

Marshall Taylor: It’s been almost 30 and I feel like a Mainer, certainly all summer long. I’ve been here four months of the year for 30 years, so you do the math. That’s a few years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I think we’ll count it.

Marshall Taylor: But I’ve never seen the winter. I think that’s what makes me a damned out of stater.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I guess, although, you live in New York.

Marshall Taylor: I do, I do.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You get winter down there too.

Marshall Taylor: I see your snowfall up here and I get a little jealous.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You originally are not from New York.

Marshall Taylor: No.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You’re originally from a snowier place.

Marshall Taylor: Wisconsin, farm country.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It’s probably smart of you not to move up to Maine full time because you know what the snow is like.

Marshall Taylor: I think I would like to try it once.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Anytime you want, we’re here.

Marshall Taylor: Thanks. Thanks.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You know where to reach us.

Marshall Taylor: I’m glad I’m welcome. Thanks.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Tell me about the resort. It’s a very unique place.

Marshall Taylor: It’s a very old … it’s a throw back. Our guests come and stay a week and they’ve probably been doing it many, many years. Some of our 10 years guests consider themselves as newbies. A lot of people come as children and grow up and bring their own children. They come a week, they stay the same week, they sit at the same table, they stay in the same cottage. It’s a bit of a home away from home. They can pretend they’re Mainer’s too I guess. Every night we have entertainment. That’s really my area of involvement. I hire the staff, I audition them, and I put together the shows. But, they all work jobs too so I sort of have my finger in the dining room and the maintenance department, the dishwashers. All those people are performers. I find myself overseeing that too, but you asked about the resort, not about me.

It’s on a beautiful lake, Lake Kezar is one of those fortunately still very clean, clear bodies of water. It’s in the mountains, almost New Hampshire. We’re Steven King’s neighbor. We have great food. What else? The entertainment is often surprising. Here I get back to my own area, but I think the guests who come are surprised at the quality. A lot of our kids have either been on Broadway or find themselves working fairly soon after they’ve been with us, which is a blessing. I often worry how will we find a cast to top the last year’s cast. Fortunately, it’s never been a problem.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: When we went out to visit, it was really wonderful to be talking to a very pleasant member of the wait staff who brought over some sort of blueberry dessert and then not too long after see them up on stage doing incredible things musically and theatrically.

Marshall Taylor: They can really turn it on. You imagine how pleasant they are, that is key. They’re a family for themselves and for the week that the weeks are there, the guests are part of that family as well. It really does extend beyond the service relationship. Once they step on stage, it’s kind of unforgettable. For little people, young people, it makes it even more exciting when they see their friend, their buddy up there singing an opera or something they never dreamt they’d want to see.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: That was something that did surprise me was the opera piece. You’re not just doing Broadway show tunes, which is also great. You’re doing really a full spectrum of I guess we’ll call it entertainment.

Marshall Taylor: The opera is more traditional to the resort. The Broadway is the part that’s grown. That’s the new kid in town. The original owner, Ralph Burg, had a music store in Boston and his friends were classically trained musicians and they would come up and entertain. There was a long heritage of opera and art song, a lot of Boston Conservatory students and alumni would come. As times have changed a bit and we’ve gotten our productions to be a bit more lavish, I use that word lightly, the Broadway part is new, but I remain committed to the opera. I have that background myself. I love to introduce people to that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: The day we were there, there was … I think it was interesting because 207 was out taping, our local TV show. You had brought in different people to represent different types of work that are done throughout the week. There was a couple that had partnered together to sing opera and I could’ve been in Boston. I could’ve been in New York listening to the highest caliber performance and it was in this nice little lodge on the shores of the lake.

Marshall Taylor: Right. We were very lucky to get that couple. They came as a package deal. Jeremy, the tenor, had worked for us last year and did the tenor lead in Carmen. He met Samantha and she wanted to come back this summer. We were thrilled to have them. Their home is New Jersey, so I was going to say you might have even been in New Jersey hearing that opera. It’s nice to have people of that age level too. Younger singers, college age kids are just not as developed. They’re wonderful, but we’ve sort of found a niche of young, emerging performers who are beyond college and beyond the young artist programs. They also need to have experience and make some money.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: The way that I understand that it works that throughout the course of the season, you are offering a different type of performance every night-

Marshall Taylor: Every night.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Of the week. The beginning if the season, you start the practicing and the performing of a certain performance say on a Monday. By the end of the season, you’re still performing that same thing on a Monday.

Marshall Taylor: Every Monday. We’re a repertory. Every Monday night is our musical. Every Tuesday is our piano concert. Our opera night is Wednesday. We have about 10 days of rehearsal before our first guests come. Those are crazy days. We have to get the resort ready, so everyone is working their day job until 10:15 when they have to run to rehearsal and learn some choreography or some French aria. Then they have lunch and they are back to twigging and raking until their next rehearsal is scheduled or costume fitting or whatever is on the docket for the day.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: In addition to being the artistic director, you actually have other multiple day jobs. You run the gift shop.

Marshall Taylor: I have a little gift shop. I do all the things that an artistic director might do. I’m not a designer, but I have my hand in the cabins and picking the fabrics. I worked with owner of Court and Honor for a long time on trying to upgrade the cabins before I was artistic director. I’ve sort of kept that in my bag of tricks as I’ve gone on.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: When we had lunch with the current owner, she told us you spent a significant amount of time buying for the gift shop-

Marshall Taylor: That’s the great fun.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Down in New York.

Marshall Taylor: That’s the great fun. Winter is my slow season and I can scout out things and shops and I go to gift shows. There’s a New England made show that is in the spring up here. At this time in the year, it’s down in mass. I may go down to that because I do like to have local artists represented. It’s a luxury to have that kind of time because the store is only open for 10 weeks. I’m not in it year round like some shop keepers have to be.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: When you were growing up in Wisconsin, did you ever think that this would be your job and your life? It seems like a pretty nice combination of things that enable you to do things that you love.

Marshall Taylor: When you grow up and you want to be a performer, there are so few pictures of what success are. You imagine yourself as a big star or working on Broadway. I think originally wanted to be a country singer, but I’ll let that go for now. No, I didn’t image this and I can’t imagine a better balance for myself because I do get to do a lot of things. I run the payroll. That doesn’t fit with an artistic profile in any way in my estimation, but I love to do it and I love to interview the kids and hire them. I love the guests. I spent a lot of time, a lot of the days during the season are just spent listening and talking with them and finding out what their year has been like and keeping them in the family and letting them know what the new kids are up to and what their backgrounds are in case that would spark an interest. It’s a great fit for me. I guess I have a short attention span.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Family is very important to you, because the current owners of the resort are a family.

Marshall Taylor: They are a family. They are the Orans family. I am not an Orans, but family are the friends you make along the way. They’ve adopted me few years after I started there. I felt very much a part of the family. Jane has one son who works there fully, but most of the guests assume I’m her son as well. It’s a family.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It’s an incredible thing to think about her story because she was a young woman when her husband died and she had children. This resort that they had been coming to up here in Maine and she was a preschool teacher.

Marshall Taylor: She had no experience at all. What I had never realized when I busboy there all those years ago was how frightened she was. She had been doing it just a few years and really didn’t seem to think she knew what she was doing. From my point of view, she had all the answers. She was very firm about her opinions. She started out with several partners and little but little, they fell to the side and she emerged as the one. It became her life when she needed it most and it kept her going and she kept it going as well. The place wouldn’t be there without her. It’s a bittersweet time of year because it was right after their week at Quisisana, the last week of August when he went home and her husband died very shortly thereafter. The summer ending brings a lot of feelings for her I’m sure.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: She’s a pretty strong lady.

Marshall Taylor: Yeah, refiner’s fire. She’s had to struggle through a lot, but she’s always able to keep giving. She doesn’t take anything for granted and she loves the staff. She is so concerned about their experience for the summer. In her mind, it’s a lot like going to summer camp even though their working. She wants them to make the most of it and have a personally great summer. Each year, she manages to make it even a better experience for them. The living conditions are better, the work is probably a little less hard, the money is better. Each year, we sort of have a better group who are more cohesive and can foster each other in a better way. That’s all her doing. She’s made that the priority.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You go to various places around the country to find the people who work at the resort with you. Most of these places are places that you actually have a personal connection to.

Marshall Taylor: It’s true. I go back to my alma maters. It’s nice to have a connection at a school, so I can find out a bit more about each student that I hire. That’s not saying I won’t hire someone that I can’t investigate that way, but it’s a great advantage when I can speak to their teachers as my colleagues and friends. I also go to schools where some of our alumni have gone on to teach, which is great. They’re at great schools, Cincinnati Conservatory, it’s very nice. My alma maters are so illustrious, but I’m loyal.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: What do you look for in a performer when you’re auditioning for someone to come who’s really going to play, again, multiple roles. Maybe they’re raking up the water front or maybe they’re life guarding or maybe they’re wait staff, but they’re also going to be singing opera or performing Broadway, show tunes or … What do you look for?

Marshall Taylor: You have to see the talent first, otherwise, the door isn’t open at all. Close behind the talent is the person. They have to be flexible. They can’t take themselves too seriously. Obviously, they have to be very friendly. Somehow I’ve developed a sense … I’m not always right, but I do manage to get a lot of kids who are pretty perfect for us. That sounds like I’m full of it, but either they come to Quisisana with a great attitude or it’s in the atmosphere and that’s set by their peers. Everyone knows that they’re not above picking up trash or picking up sticks or washing dishes. There’s no job that is too low. There were many years when she and I cleaned cabins together and she insisted on doing the bathrooms. She said that was her department. When the management or when the owner is setting a tone like that, it’s hard for the staff not to pick up on. In auditions, I find myself trying to picture this person who is probably dressed to the nines because it’s an audition. Kinda picture them in a uniform or kinda picture them with a rake or worse. I am looking for all of that, but if they don’t have the talent, we never even get to that step.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I don’t want to make Jane uncomfortable or out her in any way, but she’s got some years.

Marshall Taylor: 81. She’ll be 82 very shortly.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: When we were out there and she said, “Hey, hop on this golf cart and I’ll show you around,” it was impressive because she was taking her time out of her busy schedule and driving us all around and showing us the place. She was a pretty funny lady.

Marshall Taylor: She’s very funny. I think the Boston Globe referred to her as a salty whit or something like that. I’m just glad you were in her golf cart and not her car. That can get scary.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: she didn’t offer us that. She did say she was stealing the golf cart I think from her granddaughter.

Marshall Taylor: Right, that makes sense.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It’s not normally her golf cart to show us around.

Marshall Taylor: She loves to show the place off. It’s her baby; she’s created it. Even though it has a long tradition, I think anyone would admit that she’s had a huge impact. The lake in the mountains, she won’t take credit for, but everything else, she’s-

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I know her son and her daughter-in-law are there, along with you, full time for the entire summer.

Marshall Taylor: Right. They are indeed. It’s her life. I don’t know what she’d do in the morning. Even 12 months of the year, she wakes up thinking Quisisana. The office in the winter is in her home outside of New York City. The phone rings and it’s, “Good morning. Quisisana,” every day of her life. It takes that kind of dedication I guess, any family business. I’m not sure how many others would have stuck it out because I don’t think there’s much money coming in, not as much as goes out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It really is a labor of love.

Marshall Taylor: It is, yeah. Yeah. She said, “I don’t buy jewelry. I don’t buy fancy clothes. This is my hobby.”

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Her son and her daughter-in-law actually met there.

Marshall Taylor: Yes, Natalie started as a soprano. She’s still a soprano. In the early mid-90s and her first job was in the office. She was a bubbly little thing in college at Hartford, Connecticut, in their school of music and an opera singer. Although, at her age, she found herself mostly in the musical theater stuff for a while. She and Sam hit it off right away. They had a long engagement. I believe in 2000, they got married at the end of the summer at Quisisana and now have two great kids.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: One of the things that I think is really nice about the location of the resort is the sense of openness and also this lack of wireless access. You go there and your phone probably isn’t going to work. You can get onto the internet, but you have to go to the main lodge.

Marshall Taylor: You have to seek it out.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: There’s only a few places.

Marshall Taylor: Right. Even then, I would say it’s not the world’s fastest system. I think when cell phones were new, it seemed just awful to everyone that they couldn’t get on their cell phone and call out. We’re going so far in the direction that you can’t hide anywhere, that it feels better and better as the years go by to find a place where you can unplug for real. There’s no TV. There’s a TV in the lodge, but there’s no TV in the cabins. There are no telephones in the cabins. The last thing you want to do is hear somebody standing next to you who are having one of those loud conversations. We’re lucky we don’t have to make the announcements before the shows, “Make sure your cell phones are turned off.”

Dr. Lisa Belisle: In fact, I think it was only pretty recently that you even had air conditioning.

Marshall Taylor: That’s very true. The nights used to be cooler I’m afraid. At some point after watching somebody walking on stage sweating, they decided to put an air conditioning in … At first, it was the public areas, the dining room, the theater area. Then one year Sam just said we’ve gotta put it in all the cabins. The only downside is people close their windows and night and don’t hear the loons. They often say to me, “I don’t hear the loons anymore. What’s happened?” They’re still there.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It also used to be that people would bring their boats to the edge of the water.

Marshall Taylor: Right, we do close the windows in the hall now and we’ve lost part of our public audience. It was quite a tradition. You knew which people loved which kind of music because you’d see their boats out there every night. That was a real sight. If it got boring, you knew when they left.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: After you’d been doing this, how old were you when you started as a busboy?

Marshall Taylor: I turned 25 my first summer.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: This has really been-

Marshall Taylor: This is my life.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Your life. And you keep doing it year after year.

Marshall Taylor: Because it’s my life. For a long time, I had an off season job, things that were more on the school calendar. As my process at Quisisana evolved, I don’t have to … I have a full time employment by them now, which is a blessing. I’m in my early 50s and I’ve had one job. I’m so lucky, but I think who would look at a resume when it has one job for all that time. That’s not the world. I guess I’m a throw back too.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I think that there are people who do things for that amount of time. Maybe not as many nowadays, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

Marshall Taylor: No, no, I don’t think it’s a bad thing either. I think it’s a wonderful thing; it’s just not the norm and it doesn’t make for great cocktail party conversation.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: What was your favorite performance this summer?

Marshall Taylor: We did a wonderful children’s piece called Dear Edwina, a musical. I have a real love for children’s theater and music I think because I didn’t have that as a kid. Literally, my music classes were on the radio because we were so remote in Wisconsin. I think it’s so special to reach kids. We had this, like I said, Dear Edwina. There’s moments of truth. It was a questions and answer, people were asking her advice. It’s all a musical. It just has a sweetness and an innocence that always captured me, and the cast was incredible. That was my favorite for the summer. Thrilling moments and other things, we did sometime Into the Woods. We had some great voices in our operetta. My heart always was won by that first Monday morning every week.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Do you know what you’re gonna be doing next year or is that still in the works?

Marshall Taylor: That’s still in the works. I take the fall to listen. I do consider things that are a little bit far off field. I try to stretch myself and think, “Would that work? Would that work?” Then I listen to the former cast members to see what they’re thinking about for the next summer. I do like to have a few aces in the hole when it comes to casting. I don’t commit until January 1 every year. Now I put it on Facebook. Soon thereafter, we send a postcard to the guests. I have a bit of time to consider it.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I appreciate your taking the time out of your schedule to come in and talk. As we’re speaking, the resort has just finished up, and you’re still there for a few more weeks before you head back to your other home. I’ve been speaking with Marshall Taylor who is the artistic director at Quisisana Resort, a resort in western Maine that specialized in musical entertainment. Thank you for bringing this wonderful joy into the world.

Marshall Taylor: Thank you so much for spreading the joy. It’s been a pleasure.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is also brought to you by Aristelle, a lingerie boutique on Exchange Street in Portland’s old port where everybody is seen as a work of art and beauty is celebrated from the inside out. Shop with us in person or online at aristelle.com.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Paul Cousins is the founder, principal, and CFO at Atmos Forecast, a meteorologist consulting company based in Portland. He has been analyzing weather in the northeast for over 40 years. Thanks for coming in.

Paul Cousins: You’re quite welcome. I’m still analyzing, and I hope to get I right someday.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It seems a little bit like my field of medicine where you’re always going to be learning new things and technology is going to change. It’s probably never a place where you’re gonna get to say, “I know everything about this.”

Paul Cousins: That’s right. The learning curve, there’s no end in sight.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Which is excited.

Paul Cousins: Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Why weather? Why were you interested in this in the first place?

Paul Cousins: I’m sure it had to do with my youth and my large family, many brothers. The myth is I was baptized in my crib during Hurricane Carol. I’m dating myself again, the 50s. My grandmother’s house, the roof leaked. I was baptized by a hurricane. As a very young child, my mother was always kicking us out of the house because she needed some space. We were always playing outside, any sports or on the beach. When the weather turned inclement, my father would rope us in to get us out of harms way. I recall as a very young sprite, he would sit us on his knee, and we’d watch storms roll across the bay on the south shore of Massachusetts and watching lightning strikes pink the surface of the bay and everything just turned white, the oriel of charged water. I thought that was fascinating. Every time there was a thunder storm, we’d say, “Dad, porch, view.” That’s where it all began. Then of course everything we did outside was weather dependent, summer sports, winter sports, skating, you name it. I was very highly attuned to the local day to day weather.

I was I think in junior high school, I was a budding, young science nerd. I was fascinated with the weather, and I took a mentor in commercial television. The boss his name was Don Kent. He was one of the first broadcast meteorologists in the country, and I took quite a liking to the way he presented weather. To make a long story short, I struck up a relationship with him, and he became my mentor. I would visit him once every year in the studios of WBZTV in Boston. We talked shop, and we became really great friends over about a 10 year period. He said, “Paul, what are you gonna do with yourself? You’re gonna graduate from high school.” He said, “Go into solar energy.” Back in the day, that was a crazy thing to do. That was almost heretical. It was a concept. I said, “No, I want to do what you do, Don. I want to be a television meteorologist.” He said, “Paul, it’s crazy. It’s 40% and 60% show biz.” Of course, I thunderstruck, pardon the expression.

I went to Middlebury. I was a geophysicist and enjoyed it, but I graduated and worked for the US geological survey for a year or two. I said, “I miss weather too much.” I went back to school and got a degree. The circle became very short within a few years of obtaining a degree in meteorology. I was contacted by the news director at WBZTV in Boston and they wanted me to come down and audition because Don can’t. My mentor was retiring. Low and behold, I got the job. Here, my childhood mentor was retiring, and I was going to make an attempt to fill his shoes, which was virtually impossible. We had a ball for two weeks and his retirement party. He and I were on the air together every day. Talk about a dream come true. The rest is history. I just stayed in the industry, never regretted it for minute.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Geophysicist, that’s sounds like quite a hefty scientific major.

Paul Cousins: It was. The calculus just about killed me, but there’s a lot of math in physics. I was working for the geological survey at the time when the United States was considering leasing the eastern shelf to oil companies for exploratory drilling. You can imagine that environmentalists were quite concerned at the time, still are. We were charged by the Bureau of Land Management to do a lot of research out there to see how stable the continental shelf was because they’re gonna put oil rigs out there. What are the waves like? What’s the bottom like? We found out it was a very turbulent area. There were sand dunes 20-30 feet high that would migrate across the continental shelf. Can you imagine what that would do to an oil rig? To say nothing about 100 year storms, which turned out to happen every couple of years. Sandy was not that unique. That was five years ago. It was cutting edge science back in the 70s. Fascinating. We’d spend weeks at sea doing exploratory drilling to find out the stability of the strata and monitoring currents and waves. Work with a lot of redneck crews from the bayou. They were hoots. I learned a lot from these crews from the deep south at sea for weeks at a time. Anyway, it was a fascinating time with the US geological survey, but weather was still burning a hole in my back pocket, so I left and went back to school.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It seems as though weather, at least broadcast weather, has changed a lot in the last 30 years.

Paul Cousins: Absolutely. Absolutely. I couldn’t speak with total accuracy as how it’s changed, but when I was in the business, we had two and then three news casts a day with hours in between. I multi-tasked. I did a lot of radio work on my own volition. Now from what I understand from my associates who I still chat with from time to time, you have five or six news casts a day. You’re working for two or three television stations. You’re blogging. You’re maintaining other websites, doing radio. It’s non-stop. I guess it’s 9 or 10 hours straight, barely enough time to tie your shoes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You were with WCSH?

Paul Cousins: Initially.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Initially.

Paul Cousins: Then I went to Hartford and Boston and then came back to GME.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Why decide that you wanted to do something so different for yourself with your current position?

Paul Cousins: My consultancy?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah.

Paul Cousins: Actually, when I began my stint at GME in the 80s, I launched a large radio clientele. I launched the weather column in the Portland Press Herald. No one was doing it. I was enjoying the freelance work. I was also advising a lot of municipalities and large construction companies and Bath Iron Works, Central Maine Power, weather sensitive industries. It became quite a full boat. It was fascinating and I was an entrepreneur. I was my own boss. I thought, “You know, this television industry, it’s great, but it’s changing. I think I should make room for some young blood.” My consultancy was certainly well fleshed out, so I could pursue that as a sustainable profession.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: What about the broadcasting piece of it do you miss?

Paul Cousins: The comradery, without a doubt. Miss that a lot because I work for myself in my own office with a very simple broadcast studio. There’s no one there but me, the microphone and I. The bulk of my work is really consulting for industry, and the energy companies and our litigious community. I do a lot of consulting for attorneys and insurance companies, which I never thought would be so engaging.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Tell me about that. What does it mean to be someone who consults on the weather?

Paul Cousins: The term is called a forensic meteorologist. A lot of it is weather event reconstruction. Let’s say someone slips on a sidewalk. Was someone negligent in not sanding or salting or plowing. The far more interested cases I’ve had, I think it was when Hurricane Floyd passed through Maine 20 or 15 years ago, a fellow had a deer herd up in Jefferson. The allegation was that lightning bolts struck a pole near where all the deer were congregating, and they were electrocuted, and they died. The owner quickly buried all the deer in a mass grave so that it would not infect the rest of the herd. The insurance company say, “Nah, just wait a minute. First of all, was there lightning that struck your yard, deer yard?” I was charged with determining with whether or not that happened. They also brought in a veterinary. They exhumed the deer and found out the deer had some illness prior to the date of this storm. It turned out that this fellow was actually trying to collect insurance proceeds for something that was not a natural cause. The deer were sick and died from this disease. That was an interesting case. There have been many others, but that happened in Maine. I testified in superior court in Vermont. There have been a lot of very engaging things that have happened.

The funny story when I was in superior court in Vermont. This high powered row of attorneys from Boston were representing the [inaudible 00:38:25] and I was representing the defendant, a small construction company in northern Vermont. They’re laying out their grand case, and the judge is sitting there. He turns to me, and he looks at my resume. “Would you happen to know this professor at Middlebury?” I said, “Yes, he was the greatest guy.” He started talking to me in sidebar. The attorneys from Boston were flabbergasted, “What’s the judge doing talking to this witness on the stand?” Many, many funny things have happened in and out of court and on and off the air.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I’m interested in this person that attempted to get his dead deer paid for.

Paul Cousins: Insurance fraud. Pure and simple.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: But the idea that in this day and age, you could actually claim that something weather related occurred and think that nobody else is going to know whether you’re right or not. Is that a common thing or do most people accept that with the technology we have, we can reconstruct things?”

Paul Cousins: That’s an excellent question. There are skeptics who don’t want to believe the data. Then you can say the data can be interpreted in a number of different ways.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: There’s still … Even if you testify that for example there was lightning strike or there wasn’t a lightning strike, you can still have people who can question whether you are accurate in your statements.

Paul Cousins: Right. Did that gauge really catch every lightning strike within a 10 mile radius? Anything can be questioned.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Why forensic meteorology? Why that as opposed to other types of meteorology?

Paul Cousins: That’s probably one third of the time I spend. Most of what I do is push a very sharp pencil for a lot of utilities in New York, Connecticut, and Maine. Energy providers, they need to know heat and degree information. That’s the day to day gist of what I do and Maine Public Broadcasting. That’s the entertainment mouthpiece.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: What types of things do these energy companies need to know?

Paul Cousins: For example, Bath Iron Works when you have 5,000 employees and they’re looking to shift changes and so forth, they have to plan ahead both in terms of maintaining their physical plant, when to call in shifts early, let them go early, water levels on the Kennebec. They need to know about that. Occasionally they have sea trials they want to ping on me to determine sea state and so forth and visibility ranges. It’s fascinating. For Central Maine Power, it’s wind, lightning, icing, all the concerns that have been very real this winter again.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: How accurate are you able to be?

Paul Cousins: I would be disingenuous if I said I was better than 90%.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: But that’s still pretty good.

Paul Cousins: I hope so. They renew my contract from year to year, so I guess that speaks for itself. I’ve been doing this now for 30 years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: There’s some amount of looking at the information that you have access to and then there’s-

Paul Cousins: Oh, it’s phenomenal.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: There’s also some amount of your experience that enables you to translate that information, correct?

Paul Cousins: I would like to think so. I think the biggest challenge for a modern day meteorologist is to decide which information to review and digest because there’s a plethora of data out there, simply overwhelmed, on a 24/7 basis, which is marvelous. One thing I do miss are a set of eyes to actually see the weather and record it. We used to have thousands of weather observers that were a part of Noah’s Cooperative Observing Program. There’s still several dozen out there, but most of them have retired. Now we rely on telemetrics, sensors. Never as good as a pair of eyes, but that data network is actually more robust than the actual physical observer decades ago. Nothing replaces a pair of eyes and observing what is actually transpiring at any given location. I use that data a lot for weather event reconstruction.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: We recently spoke with Robin Alden who worked for 40 year with fisherman off the coast of Maine. One of the things that she talked about was this idea that people with their eyes could make observations that really nicely complemented the science that was out there.

Paul Cousins: Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It seems as though we could find benefit from both. Do you think this will ever come back?

Paul Cousins: I highly doubt it for two reasons. Man power is expensive and the technology for these remote transmitting devices continues to improve. We have a dozen buoys out on the gulf of Maine that transmit wave heights, wind direction, speed, gusts, sea water salinity, currents, a plethora of data. They’re really good.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You’re saying that we might not actually need these eyes?

Paul Cousins: Well, I just don’t see it happening. I would love to see observers return. We used to have ships out there who’d report in every hour what the sea state was and how much freezing spray there was. Now we have to make an educated guess based on the telemetry that radioed in, in some cases every 15 minutes. It’s really quite remarkable.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You have an interest in the water. You actually … When we asked who you think we should recognize for the job they do in our community, you said the Friends of Casco Bay.

Paul Cousins: They do a terrific job.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Why in particular that group? You must work with so many groups around the state, but you think that they are worthy of recognition in particular.

Paul Cousins: I think it’s probably an area, which I really cherish having been boating on this bay for 30 years. It’s really a jewel. Every time I sit out there quietly at anchor, nothing’s moving, nothing’s turned on and just see the splendor really how fortunate we are to have this 15 minutes from my doorstep and people travel across the country to see this beautiful body of water, which now is burgeoning with agriculture. It’s wonderful. It’s wonderful. My concern is now with climate change and the warming and the green crab invasion and the acidification of the water, we’re losing soft shell clams. These are all manifestations of climate change.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: When people out there say that climate change is not real, I’m not one of these people but I know it is being said, how do you kind of mentally work with that?

Paul Cousins: First of all, I gauge the tenor of this individual, how malleable are they or impressionable? Believe it or not, 30 years ago, I was a skeptic. As a geologist, I had seen through paleo-climate logical records the climate on this earth change dramatically over millions of years. We’ve known about ice ages coming and going for millions of years. All of North America was under ice millions of years ago. I thought, “Hey, it’s a natural change. It has to do with the sun’s radiant energy and the tilt of the earth and all those other pieces.” Over time, listening to professionals who know much more about the intricacies of our global circulation system, I said, “There’s just no way I can deny this anymore.” Just look at the carbon dioxide trace in the last 40 years. We’ve been on from 360 to 400 parts per million. That’s not natural. That’s purely anthropogenic forcing, burning fossil fuels. There’s no question in my mind.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Does it ever frustrate you when you hear people suggest that we shouldn’t pay attention to this because it’s just pretend?

Paul Cousins: Certainly, but if they don’t believe that climate change is occurring, I’m not going to take up that argument. You pick your battles, right?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You and I share a connection in that your family from many generations ago was actually responsible for founding or at least being an early of Cousins Island and I live off Cousins Island. That’s a really special connection that you have with the state of Maine.

Paul Cousins: Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You originally … You told me that it was a great-grandfather-

Paul Cousins: Eight great-grandfather.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Eighth great-grandfather was originally off of Cousins. His last name is obviously Cousins and somehow was too friendly with the Native Americans and sent up the coast and originally landed in Ellsworth, but then found his way to Bar Harbor. Is that right?

Paul Cousins: That is correct. He was booted out of one town from another. First in Plymouth colony, Mass Bay colony, he was too friendly with the Indians. “John Cousins, go.” Settled in Cousins and the locals said, “John Cousins, go.” I think when he got up to Ellsworth, he decided, “Hey, this Bar Harbor’s a pretty nice place. I’m heading down there.” Then he stayed and then the family generations rippled on and on and on.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Isn’t that a strange thing to think about that one could be too friendly with the Native American population?

Paul Cousins: I think he must have been some sort of ambassador or he’s trying to strike up commerce. Who knows what his agenda was?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It was some sort of a threat to people who were coming in later to settle the land.

Paul Cousins: Maybe he was just trying to pave the way for colonization. I don’t know. No one has ever written the history or the treatise of John Cousins and his ambassador tendencies.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I find this all very interesting because I just wrote a story for Maine magazine about Turner Farm, which is located on North Haven. They found evidence of the group they’re calling the Red Paint Indians from 7,000 years ago. We have this very interesting and old history of our state that I think a lot of us don’t often ponder.

Paul Cousins: 7,000 years ago, these preceded the Norwegians and the Vikings then, the Norseman?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Absolutely.

Paul Cousins: Wow.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: This about the extent of my background. I just thought it was very interesting that this is … We think of colonization as going back a few hundred years, but there were colonies that already existed. They just were before the people who came over on boats.

Paul Cousins: Didn’t you wish you had bought a couple of acres back in the day?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Well, I’m happy to …

Paul Cousins: You’re in a great spot if you’re near Cousins Island. That’s spectacular. As I told you, I think Casco Bay is a jewel.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: It is a jewel, yeah. Are you happy that you ended up coming back to the state that your family was originally from?

Paul Cousins: I’m happy to be here because of the quality of life. It’s just [inaudible 00:49:41] that none of my relatives … Actually, I think I have a great-aunt who lives near Southwest Harbor, but otherwise, I don’t have any living relatives in the state any longer.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: How is the quality in life different here than in where you’ve lived in other places?

Paul Cousins: When I grew up outside of Boston … I grew up outside of Boston, came back to Boston as a professional. It fun to think that I was actually coming home. I just found the intensity of the lifestyle and the congestion unpalatable. I couldn’t get from my home outside of Boston to the water in 15 minutes nor could I get from my home to Sugar Loaf or Sunday River in 15 minutes. It’s a lot closer in Portland that it is outside of Boston.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: You’ve been skiing you said in Sunday River from …

Paul Cousins: When they had T bars and one tiny little base lodge.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: That’s a few years ago.

Paul Cousins: Absolutely.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: How have you seen Maine change? You talked about living outside of Boston. Obviously there was a lot of changes over the years as a result of the people coming in and living and working. How is Maine changing?

Paul Cousins: It’s certainly becoming more populated. I used to be able to zip downtown in 10 minutes, now it takes half an hour. Obviously everybody wants a piece of the pie. You can’t blame them, spectacular. Fortunately where I live, it hasn’t changed much. There are neighborhoods going around, but the schools are still pretty much the same. In fact, I occasionally substitute in schools. Some of the teachers that taught my two children are still there, which is just phenomenal.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Tell me what your favorite I guess weather activity has been over the last we’ll give it five years. Just must have some weather activity I mean, events, things that we have all been impacted by.

Paul Cousins: Oh boy. Well, we missed Sandy here. That was a near miss for Maine. I think Irene was pretty impacting, even though, again, that affected western New England more than Maine. That was a pretty significant storm. Of course, when these storms are approaching, I’m on DEFCON 4, full alert. My clients just can’t get enough of me, which is great because I feel like I’m contributing to storm preparation and so forth. I’m mitigating loss of property and so forth. Obviously, the major storms are a rush. Is that the question your asking?

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I guess even as I said it, I realized saying your favorite storm is probably kind of weird because a lot of people are-

Paul Cousins: People’s least favorite events.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: A lot of people really are impacted negatively by these storms.

Paul Cousins: Absolutely. I don’t discount that for a minute.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: What is it about these major storms that energizes you in some way?

Paul Cousins: I mean just to see the atmosphere throw us such a curve ball and to see all of these elements come together in concert to create such a dramatic natural environmental calamity. You gotta think that the forces of nature are just insurmountable. We really are at the mercy entirely of mother nature.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Is that something that you think we forget?

Paul Cousins: In our very technologically advanced and insulated life style, I think a lot of people have lost touch with the fact that weather events are significant. Due to climate change, they’re going to become more extreme and more frequent and we should prepare for that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: We are just coming off of what was called I believe it was a bomb cyclone, a major weather event.

Paul Cousins: Mm-hmm. Bombogenesis. We’ll see more and more of those.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Talk to me about that.

Paul Cousins: As the climate warms, air temperatures rise, sea surface temperatures rise and ocean temperatures rise, we’re enabling the global climate to harbor more energy, more potential energy with these higher temperatures. When we have the right, what’s the word, collusion of weather elements, you’re gonna get a bigger play.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: This is something that impacted not only our part of the world, but really was all the way down into Florida where they got snow.

Paul Cousins: Snow in northern Florida this last week. That’s pretty rare. It’s snowed in southern Louisiana, what did I see, the first time in two decades. Weather extremes are going to become more prevalent, both hot and cold, wet and dry. Look at all these fires in southern California.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: That would make it very hard for us to stay prepared if you are in northern Florida and you haven’t really needed to have snow plows or sanders. Now you’re going to have these extremes of weather. That could be a very costly and difficult situation.

Paul Cousins: I can only imagine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: What do you see the next phase of your life looking like? You’ve done so many things over the past 30 years in this field. Is there anything new and interesting that you’d like to tackle?

Paul Cousins: I’d like to have more time playing the piano. I used to play daily, but now when you work for yourself, you’re 24/7 even though I don’t work non-stop. I have less time that I know that I’m going to have free and clear. I’d also like to learn how to play the saxophone. I think that’s one of the most sensuous instruments out there other than the piano. I couldn’t be a three man band on the drum, the saxophone, and the piano. I really enjoy music and I enjoy both jazz and classical piano. I used to play in the piano bars here in Portland years ago. I’d just walk in and say, “Is someone taking that piano?” They say, “No, go ahead and play.” I would play until the patrons would come in and sometimes they’d start to tip me. I’d say, “No, no. Don’t bother.” That was fun.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: I hope you have the chance to do that.

Paul Cousins: I do too. It could happen.

Dr. Lisa Belisle: Yeah, it could happen. I’ve been speaking with Paul Cousins who is the founder, principal, and CFO at Atmos Forecast, a meteorologist consulting company based in Portland. He has been analyzing weather in the northeast for over 40 years. Thanks for taking the time to come in and for all the work you do.

Paul Cousins: My pleasure.

Speaker 1: Portland Art Gallery is proud to sponsor Love Maine Radio. Portland Art Gallery is the city’s largest and is located in the heart of the old port, 154 Middle Street. The gallery focuses on exhibiting the work of contemporary Maine artists and hosts a series of monthly solo shows in it’s newly expanded space including Inken Georgonson, Brenda Cirioni, Daniel Corey, Jill Hoy, and Dave Allen. For complete show details, please visit our website at artcollectormaine.com.

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Dr. Lisa Belisle: You have been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 340. Our guests have included Marshall Taylor and Paul Cousins. 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 our Love Maine Radio photos on Instagram. 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 hear. We are pleased that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for sharing this part of your day with me. Now, you have a bountiful life.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Maine Magazine, Aristelle, Portland Art Gallery, and Art Collector Maine. Audio production and original music are by Spencer Albee Our editorial producer is Kate Gardner. Our assistant producer is Shelbi Wassick. Our community development manager is Casey Lovejoy. Our executive producers are Andrea King, Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. For more information on our production team, Maine Magazine or any of the guests featured here today, please visit us at lovemaineradio.com.