Guests

Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle, recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture, and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.

Abigail: I always grew up with this belief that you could launch yourself into something and learn it and become successful at it. Also I found that it’s often your shortcomings in life that actually turn out to be your big gift, the thing that makes you actually a little special or different.

John: I wanted a book that any lobsterman could read and say that this is true to the place and to the industry. Every lobsterman I know that has read it has thought so.

Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors: Maine Magazine; Marci Booth of Booth Maine; Berlin City Honda of Portland; Apothecary by Design; Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage; Harding Lee Smith of The Rooms; and Bangor Savings Bank.

Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 198, “Making a Living on Maine Waters.” Many Mainers make their living on the water. Today we speak with two individuals who are doing so in quite unique ways. Abigail Carroll is the founding farmer of Nonesuch Oysters which is located in a nature conservancy in Scarborough. John Keller is a writer whose latest book “Of Sea and Cloud” was inspired by years of experience working in the secluded lobstering culture of rural Maine. We hope you enjoy our conversations with Abigail and John. Thank you for joining us.

As someone who has lived most of her life basically on the coast I’m fascinated by other individuals who are doing interesting things with the coastline and maybe in ways that I hadn’t necessarily thought of before. Today we have with us Abigail Abi Carroll who is the founding farmer of Nonesuch Oysters which is located in a nature conservancy in Scarborough. Abi is also a third generation Maine entrepreneur. Pretty interesting background you have here Abi. Thanks for coming in.

Abigail: Thank you for having me Lisa. I’m really delighted to be here.

Lisa: You have a wonderful, wonderful background. I’m loving that you have undergraduate degrees in French and Spanish Literature from Barnard, you have a master’s degree in international affairs from Columbia and you spent a decade in Paris. You’re back.

Abigail: I am.

Lisa: And you’re doing oysters.

Abigail: I am.

Lisa: Tell me a little bit about that path. It’s quite varied but I bet there’s a story behind that.

Abigail: Well I have to admit I did not expect to become an oyster farmer. It was probably the farthest thing from my mind. I was living in Paris and I had a personal disruption in my life. I broke up with a long-term boyfriend and came back to Maine for the summer and wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do. Was I going to go back to Paris, was I going to go back to New York where I lived before I went to Paris.

I stumbled into somebody who wanted to start an oyster farm. As I was feeling a little bit purposeless I thought, “Well, I can get my head around in a business plan and write a business plan for this person.” Unfortunately that got a little complicated and I wound up owning the farm. What was originally intended to be a consulting project wounded up and my earning was a four acre farm in Scarborough. I wasn’t quite sure what to do because when I engaged to consult for this person the last words out of my mouth were, “Okay, I will write you a business plan, but I’m not getting on the water.” Of course these were famous last words.

I dried my tears, went to Cabela’s, bought a pair of waders and just got my hands dirty. It’s been five years since then. It’s been rocky, turbulent road. Farming’s really hard. You got to figure things out. It’s very hard to ask somebody else how to run a farm in a certain area because farming is really site dependent, so there are nuances on every different field I imagine, just like there are in every little different co for you might do oysters.

While there’s certain standard procedures that everybody follows you always have to tweak them, when do you bring the seed in every year, when do you plant the oysters, how do you configure your gear, what are your predators, all of these things make farming oysters in different locations very particular. We’ve been learning as we go.

Lisa: I want to talk to you about the oyster farming process, but I also want to talk to you about the impact of an entrepreneurial family on you and your decision to say, “Sure, I can do this.”

Abigail: Yeah, absolutely. I definitely owe a lot of this to my dad. I mean I think there’s a spirit in the family in general, but my father really is somebody who’s reinvented himself many times in life. I always grew up with this belief. I just never even questioned it that you could launch yourself into something and learn it and become successful at it.

Sometimes also I found that it’s often your shortcomings in life that actually turn out to be your big gift, the thing that makes you actually a little special or different. In farming it’s been really … Learning to farm has been really hard, it’s been really challenging. Actually some of the most important hardships have been things like keeping motors running, keeping pumps running, a lot of the sort of like just mechanical stuff is actually what’s holding us back. It’s not actually the farming.

Struggling through a few seasons that weren’t as productive as they might have been, because I’m trying to learn it, learn how to be a boss, learn how to be … Teach other people how to help me build this farm. I’ve had to reach out in some other different directions, which have been new and exciting and fun for the oyster community I think in general which is last year for example we started an oyster tour program.

Now had my farm been humming along like it’s supposed to have been by now maybe I wouldn’t have done that. The oyster farm tour was a good way for me to work some of the assets that I have, which is I actually really love talking about what I’ve learned and sharing that with people. People seem to like to hear about it. People want to know right now how their food is grown. They want to know what it’s like to live on a farm. They also want to know how hard is it to change your life and still a new one in a new way, like you’ve done, like I’ve done.

I think people are drawn to the farm for a variety of reasons. By doing the tours we’ve really been able to create a new revenue stream for the farm which has helped us get through some tough seasons. It’s built our brand a little bit more. It’s built a real loyal clientele. People have come from all over the nation to Maine for vacation, they come on our farm and then they go home and they want oysters. I think in certain respects the farm not just being super productive right away has been an asset. We spent some time building the farm in different ways which have been really fun.

Lisa: You mentioned that sometimes the things that are your difficulties can end up being your greatest asset. Tell me about that. For you what does that mean?

Abigail: I think the fact that I had no experience in this sector made every day special and new and exciting for me in a way that it might not have been for a lobsterman who becomes an oyster farmer or for a scientist to become an oyster farmer. For me every day, one, it was a miracle that I got through it, and two, it was this adventure.

I started sharing this adventure online with people and telling the story. The beautiful thing about having no experience and really very shallow expectations for myself was that I was never afraid to share the bad things. The day I clipped the snow bank with the trailer and the boat slipped off and fell into the middle of the Route nine, that wasn’t an ideal thing to happen. But you know what? It ended up on Facebook and it’s ended up in almost all of my slide presentations when I do a public talk.

People laugh. They get it. I’ve done other things in life where I had more some personal stake, personal investment, or I felt like I trained in something and something needed to work because I thought I knew something about it, and I wasn’t as free. It’s been incredibly liberating doing something and throwing myself into something that I never expected to be in, or I never thought about and I didn’t really know anything about.

I’m not afraid to ask questions. I go to UNE all the time. Can you help me with this? I call the scientist. I’m just not afraid of looking stupid or acting stupid and it’s so liberating and it’s been really helpful. It’s been fun because I get to share more with the people who are listening, the Facebook fans and things like that, people following the journey. It’s been liberating because you can’t do anything in life without falling. If you don’t fall it’s like growing up skiing in Maine. I always said, “If not you’re falling, you’re not skiing hard enough.” It’s the same thing. If you’re not stumbling, if you’re not tripping, you’re really just not making big enough effort.

I know it became a big enough effort because we trip up all the time, but things smooth out. It’s been really incredibly eye-opening on a lot of levels. Of course the stakes are high too sometimes. I mean I’ve put a lot of personal investment in this farm and I really need it to work. Let it be clear, it’s not a game. But figuring it out and rolling with the punches and just accepting the hurdles and the failures along the way has been just really eye-opening and I think we’ll be stronger for it.

Lisa: Has it helped that oysters seem to have become more popular? Eventide moved in a few years ago, just down the street. They are just huge and more and more people are doing raw bars. What has that done for your business?

Abigail: Well it’s great. I mean the joke is that I kind of landed accidentally in one of the hottest markets in America. It’s been fun to be part of that process. I would never have chosen to be in aquaculture, I would never have chosen to be in the food industry. I’ve always been a big fan of food. I spent so much time in France that of course all the food culture there wore off on me. But it’s just been incredible to be part of this really pressing, important movement.

It’s important to Maine. It’s important to the country. In America we import 91% of our sea food. We need more of these local producers. It’s really hard. Small farms are not working. In 2013 the average farm operated at a net loss of $1400. Big agriculture is filled with problems. Small agriculture is filled with problems. Everybody is struggling. We need a new model in farming. That’s clear. But we also need to bring it home.

We are a net importer of the New England scallop from China. Come on. It’s not just patriotism. This is about the environment. This is about the carbon footprint. In the early 20s if you’ve read Mark Kurlansky’s book “The Big Oyster” he writes on the early 20s the average American ate about 600 oysters a year. Then we polluted all the waters and all the oysters died off and then we became a nation of Thai shrimp eaters.

It’s really wonderful that the oyster is coming back because it’s symbolic of so many things in the country right now. It’s sort of a new twist on the back to land, back to the ocean movement. It really reflects a much more thoughtful approach to how we’re living our lives, and how we’re eating, and how we’re thinking about our food and the environment in general.

The crazy thing about oysters I was never particularly an environmentalist. My carbon footprint was terrible flying back and forth from France. I spent my whole life traveling around the planet. That’s a terrible carbon outlay for a single person. But what I’ve learned being an oyster farmer is just how sensitive the earthly creatures are to our impact.

On my farm I grow one type of oyster, the Crassostrea Virginica, which is the oyster that everybody along the eastern seaboard grows with very few exceptions. What makes these oysters different from Florida to the northern Maine is the environment they’re growing in. You can call that terroir, you can call that meroir, because the oyster farmers created their own word, their own French word actually which is even better. But what that really refers to is the huge impact that the environment has on that one single creature.

When I give these oysters towards at our farm we start at the nursery and I show them the little baby spat, everybody cooes and caws because they’re adorable. Then we go out to the farm and I show them that we have oysters growing in bags and some that are growing on the bottom. Now we are pretty a shallow site, so the difference between the bag grown oysters is and where the bottom dwelling oysters is, it’s a matter of a few feet. But the bag oysters are pure white. They’re white as now. The bottom oysters are this deep lush green. That is just a small shift in where they’re lying in the water column.

What I always tell people on my tours well think about the impact of when we put overboard discharge, think of the impact of our septics, think about the impact of the carbon we’re all putting into the air that’s coming down as acid rain and changing acid levels in the ocean. Just these little impacts have such a big consequence for our sea life, marine life that it’s incredible.

You never live too far away from the ocean to care about your impact on the water because the Watershed for the Gulf of Maine extends all the way into Canada. You can’t. You’re never too far away from the ocean to have this concern you.

That’s been another big part of my becoming a farmer. It’s like, “Oh wow, this really matters.” Before global warming, well, it was kind of convenient because it meant I could come home in September from Paris and would still be beautiful, you could catch a swim. But now I’m like, “Wow,” the acidification of the ocean doesn’t really affect us so much, but it really affects the clammers.

The green crabs that have migrated north from warming temperatures in the water, on the one hand I’m like, “Warming temperatures are great because they’ll make my oysters grow faster.” On the other hand they’re bringing all these diseases in Maine that we’ve never had before. The green crabs are here and the green crabs are going and they’re eating up all the little crab spat in the sand. Spat is the babies. So we’re really seeing a real shift in our coastline that it’s of concern to a lot of people. It should be a concern to all of us because it’s going to impact all of our lives. If we can’t have clams what’s a lobster dinner in Maine. There’s lots of people making their livelihoods from clam digging. These things matter. They really matter.

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Lisa: I had noticed recently where I live in Yarmouth that the clam diggers are back, and it made me think where do they go. I mean I guess there was the winter but I know that we have problems with Red Tide in this part of the world. As a non-meroir person, I’m not a farmer, I’m not an agriculturist, I really don’t spend a lot of time wondering about this sort of thing until something appears that wasn’t there before, or something disappears.

Abigail: Right. I think that’s the problem where we’re always reacting to natural disasters. I mean there’s oil spills. We need to do more to think about how we can prevent them. But I think I don’t know where the clammers went. It was very cold this winter so many people probably weren’t out digging. I know that we weren’t out much for the oyster farm, and I know that the lobstermen really had a hard time getting out.

But what did really shock me when I was first writing this business plan and looking along the Maine coast for a site I was shocked, absolutely shocked to see how much of the Maine coast is not open to shell fish harvesting because of fecal contamination. It is shocking.

I think that was just the beginning of this huge shift in my own thinking. Just all these maps are public information. You can go to the Department of Marine Resources and you can look up pollution closure maps and you can go check out your neighborhood.

Now where we harvest shellfish the waters are very, very clean. The state does an incredibly thorough job making sure that nothing is pulled out of sites that have a potential to be contaminated. It’s really thought provoking to go and look at those maps and think here we are in Maine which is supposed to be this wonderful clean pristine state and we really have just a huge amount of coastal waters that we can’t use for certain types of aquaculture, notably shellfish, because the water quality is not good enough.

Lisa: Just to be very clear fecal contamination that’s poop?

Abigail: Yep that’s poop.

Lisa: So we’ve got that kind of contamination. I’m also interested because my father’s family grew up in Biddeford, Saco River and in fact two of my father’s uncles drowned in the Saco River. That was at a time when it was massively contaminated. There was mill run off, there was actually feces poop in the water, there was just all kinds of disgustingness. We’re now on a time where thank goodness we’ve cleaned all this stuff up. But does that also make you wonder, the industrial background of the state, does that also make you wonder like in the long term what kind of an impact it’s had on the habitat that maybe you’re farming oysters in or other sea creatures being …

Abigail: Well in Scarborough we are lucky because we’re in one of the few great A classified rivers in water classification rivers in Maine. But the Saco River is closed for shellfish contamination. I can’t really speak to the past pollution that’s happened and the impact today from the mills in the early part of the century, but I can speak to a new generation of young people that are much more contentious about how we treat our waterways and how we think about our own waste.

I think we need to just keep bedding on the future and keep proselytizing and keep getting the message out that everything we do has an impact. Hopefully there’ll be positive change moving forward. I think a lot of people are interested in renewable energy, I think a lot of people are interested in composting and being much more efficient about the way they buy things so they don’t have as much waste. Everybody complains about buying electronic products because you get so much plastic. I think there’s going to be a whole new generation of thinking about all of this stuff that’s going to be really helpful.

Generations before just didn’t have the information I think that we have now, and they didn’t think about it. I think people were so excited to get things going, the Industrial Revolution, wow we can send trains to places, we have cars now, that was so exciting and we got such benefit from that. But like everything there’s a new invention that needs to be refined a little bit.

What’s really interesting about Biddeford though was that those Biddeford mills were all hydro powered. It wasn’t hydroelectric, it was hydro mechanical power. If you go to the basement of those mills, there are all these tunnels and the river used to run right through the basement of those tunnels, and the pressure of the water would move these mechanical rods and they would be upstairs moving more rods and those would all power soy machines.

Then we replaced it all with electricity and now we’re like, “Gosh, how could we harness that hydro power in the river to produce electricity, to now produce to help power the mills?” It’s funny, because we’re coming full circle. We’re looking at hydro in a different way.

All of it it’s just so interesting. I think a lot of what’s going on today is actually that we’re looking kind of backward and saying, “Okay, well what worked back then?” Hydro power actually worked. Having your own farm or your own garden worked. After World War Two it’s my understanding that everybody planted a victory garden, and that was just part of the popular culture. My grandparents had a victory garden. He was a lawyer, my grandmother was a professional. But it was part of what you did as an American, you planted food in your back yard and you had some self-sufficiency. That’s just what America was about.

We’ve kind of lost that, the 80s, globalization. Trust me, all I ever wanted to do as a kid was travel the world, and I did a lot of that, I’m all about getting out and going elsewhere and travelling the world and world markets and things like that. But I do think there was something special about this American spirit which is we are self-sufficient, not totally self-sufficient but we still have a responsibility to ourselves and to our communities to be somewhat self-sufficient. I think it’s a good lesson.

I think our grandparents knew it and I think my parents … My parents grew all sorts of animals, but that was not something I enjoyed. My sister was into forage, my father was a gardener, I was the urban rat in the family. It’s the great irony of my family that I’m actually the farmer now. I love pavement but I still love cities. I have to say if I were making carrots it just wouldn’t be the same.

I am making oysters, and oysters are a luxury product, and they’re elegant and it’s fun to shuck them. I love going to events and shucking them for people. I love the sort of culture around the oyster. When people come out in our tours we can take up to six people under my coast guard license. I have this beautiful porcelain plate that my brother and sister in law gave me and I shuck the oysters on it, I make up a little mignonette sauce on the boat. There’s a little pump. We’re on a dirty work boat but there’s still a little pumping circumstance. I have to say that makes it a little bit more fun for me because it feels a little elegant and kind of not too far from home.

Lisa: I know that I now am intrigued and would like to go out on the boat and have some oysters on some mignonette. How can people learn more about Nonesuch and the tours that you do? I’m imagining you have a website.

Abigail: We do, nonesuchoysters.com. I think it’s also important to note that I am perhaps the precursor in Maine, but what we’re hoping will happen is that this will inspire other farms to start doing tours as well. The big idea is to support a Maine oyster trail, much like you’d have a Napa Valley trail, like a wine map. The hope is that we’re going to establish lots of little farms up and down the coat were you can either have oysters at their location or actually get on the water with them like we do, and people can … So it’ll be a whole new tourism avenue for Maine. People think of Maine as a lobster state but oyster connoisseurs think of Maine as oyster state. Maine has really good shellfish so cold waters.

Lisa: Thank you very much for doing the work that you do and for jumping in and taking a chance and becoming the founding farmer of Nonesuch Oysters. We’ve been speaking with Abigail Carroll who has been farming Nonesuch Oysters out of a nature conservancy in Scarborough. Enjoy.

Abigail: Thank you so much for having me.

Lisa: As a physician and small business owner, I rely on Marci Booth from Booth Maine to help me with my own business and to help me live my own life fully. Here are a few thoughts from Marci.

Marci: When was the last time you took a break from what you were doing, from the work that was piled up on your desk, and just looked up? I know that during the course of my days I often forget to take a moment or two to just breathe, look up at the sky, and dream. Terrible that I have to remind myself to breathe, but when I do, I feel energized because in those moments I’m able to let go of the daily grind and think more about what I want to accomplish, how I want my business to grow. Sometimes those are the Aha moments. If we all took a few moments out each day to stop what we were doing and dream a little about our business futures, not only would we feel a great sense of calm, but we may come to realize that these dreams can in fact come true. I’m Marci Booth. Let’s talk about the changes you need. Boothmaine.com.

Speaker 1: This segment of Love Maine Radio is brought to you by the following generous sponsors: Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of RE/MAX Heritage in Yarmouth, Maine. Honesty and integrity can take you home. With RE/MAX Heritage, it’s your move. Learn more at rheritage.com.

Lisa: I’m sure I’ve said more than once that one of my favorite things to do is get into a good book and especially to get into a good book of fiction. Today we have with us the writer of this wonderful book of fiction, “Of Sea and Cloud.” This is John Keller. John Keller actually is an interesting individual you’ll learn more about. His latest book “Of Sea and Cloud” was inspired by years of experience working in the secluded lobstering culture of rural Maine.

Keller now lives year round on a sail boat off the coast of Maine but he typically returns to the Montana back country to guide each fall. Between the mountains and the sea he’s made a lifestyle out of working and writing about traditional labors and the disappearing cultures that surround those labors. Thanks so much for taking time to come in off your sail boat.

John: Thank you.

Lisa: Now you live in Addison?

John: Yes, not full time now. Right now I’m in Portland, South Portland actually on my boat.

Lisa: Okay, so wherever the boat takes you, you are?

John: Yeah, I spent the winter in Portland, at DiMillo’s marina and then moved to South Portland this summer during the spring. I’m here for a little while.

Lisa: So you’re here for a little while. Why Portland?

John: I wanted to be around more people for a little while. I’ve been living down east for eight years and just decided it was time to be around people on activity and bars and restaurants, so Portland seemed like a good place to try.

Lisa: You have an interesting background in that you’ve not only worked within the lobstering community, work as a guide, you also have a master’s in fine arts and creative writing. You’ve written books and articles. How do you combine those aspects of your life?

John: It’s pretty difficult at times and easy at times. At best it’s a good balance. I spend a lot of time in my head as it is, so working outside like working on a lobster boat or digging clams or even guiding is a good way for me to get out of my head and to experience the world in more physical sense instead of sitting by myself by the desk writing, or reading, or thinking about stories. It’s really almost a meditative thing for me to work outside. Clam digging especially is that way because you’re alone and it’s quiet and really beautiful. I get a lot of peace of mind from it. Also a lot of energy I think from the people I meet doing that and that where’s all of my stories come from.

Lisa: As I was reading your book you have an interesting way of writing dialogue. Actually as I was reading and I could almost hear, and I’m assuming this is what you’re going for because you’re trying to write to what you know. I could almost hear the guys that I know are doing lobstering off the dock where I live in Yarmouth. I mean really there’s a very specific way, there’s a very specific way that people speak, there’s a very specific usage of words.

John: Oh yeah, for sure.

Lisa: Did you spend a lot of time listening to the way people were talking in order to get to that place?

John: Yeah. It’s funny actually somebody did a reading at Longfellows the other night and somebody asked that question as well. Really working on the lobster boat I was a sterman, so I was just spending all my time stuffing dead fish into bags, bating big bags that would go into the trap. We didn’t have a radio for music or anything on the boat and so the captain played the … Or just had the radio on, the two-way radio, the lobstermen all talking. That would be on all day every day and just all the fishermen just going back and forth about whatever it is, whatever is going on with lobstering or if it’s about food. They talked about food or just gossiping and stuff.

When I first started I couldn’t even understand what they were saying. So the guy I worked for he’d have to translate it literally because of their accents. But it wasn’t just their accents. It was their speech patterns and the way the words would actually be ordered. It was like the syntax was different than anything I’d ever experienced before.

It took me a long time to really start processing and be able to … Even after years of working there I still had trouble sometimes understanding what some of them said. So just spending so many long hours on the boat with that being the only thing going to my ears is these guys talking just for 12 hours every day, is just these guys talking over the radio. I’d go home and write down a lot of lines. I took a lot of notes. Most of the notes I took were lines, just quotes from these guys that I could remember. I’d have notebooks of this stuff.

Slowly that just got into my head I think. That’s what I really wanted to come out in the book, was this pattern of speech, not just the lingo but the syntax if that makes sense.

Lisa: It does make sense. It’s interesting because you also have written, “After each day aboard the boat he took copious notes on the people and dialect that amazed him. These notes eventually evolved into a novel but he was hesitant about writing that novel because he felt that to write about a world so new to him would be a form of trespass. To Keller fiction writers have a serious responsibility, especially when writing about something that others view as sacred, and on the coast of Maine lobster fishing is sacred.” I’m assuming actually somebody wrote this about you and talking to you.

John: Yeah that’s taken from several interviews I’ve done in the past.

Lisa: Tell me about that. I think that that is something that many people worry about when they’re writing, is accurately representing an individual or group of people or culture.

John: Yeah, when I moved to Maine I didn’t … I moved here to work on a boat. I was done with school and universities and so forth and just wanted a bite from it. I always wanted to work on a boat so I moved here to do that. I didn’t have any intentions writing about it, but yeah, I just finished my MFA and my mind just works in stories. I’d write down these lines just because they’re great, not because that I was planning to use them.

It took me quite a while. I’d worked on a boat for a couple of years before I actually started writing. I wrote just the first chapter of the book which is now actually the second chapter of the book. Then I stopped because I didn’t feel comfortable writing about it because I was so new there. All these fishermen down east, they’re eighth, ninth, tenth generation fishermen and I’d been there for two years and I just didn’t feel like I was … It just didn’t feel right. I was still kind of tourist in that world.

But after more time went by I just slowly realized that none of these fishermen are writing books about this stuff because they’re fishermen. That’s what they do, they’re full time, they’re lobstermen and I was a writer. There weren’t probably many writers, if any that I … in the way that had spent that much time working on a boat and spending winters working in the lobster pound and digging clams and stuff.

I talked with the lobstermen that I worked for. I remember one day he said, “You’re not a lobsterman. You’re a writer so write.” That winter I just sat down and took that chapter and just went with it and I wrote the whole book in like five weeks or six weeks that winter, just all, just kind of spilled out. Then I spent the next like five years editing it. Yeah, I still, even so I still do feel a touch of that’s not where I’m from. But I kind of mediated that by making the main characters first generation fishermen instead of ninth or tenth generation. I hope it works. I wanted a book that any lobsterman could read and say that this is true to the place and to the industry. Every lobsterman I know that has read it has thought so.

Lisa: Give us a little background about the book itself, about the story, describe it for the people who are listening.

John: Early on the first chapter there is murder that takes place and the rest of the book is kind of the follow out after that murder. The larger context is that it’s this very isolated fishing village way down east that is being confronted with these huge global forces, economic forces, as well as cultural and social. The price of lobsters has really crashed and there is a fisheries guy from Boston who has a market in Japan. He’s looking to move into the harbor, this one small harbor and raise the prices of lobster and create a market there.

So between the murder and the price of lobsters dropping and then this new guy moving into town it becomes this whirlwind of social and economic upheaval in this really small, small village I guess you’d call it, this one harbor. The wharf, the local wharf which is the community center in that area is changing hands and the lobster pound that these guys run is changing hands. So it’s just a lot of change at one time. The bigger context like I said being the global forces that these people aren’t really even aware of, and that’s really affecting them.

I simply put like the price of lobsters goes up in Japan and it affects a guy on the coast of Maine who isn’t even aware that his lobsters are being sold in Japan. It’s just kind of these strange, strange forces I’d say.

Lisa: There’s also a bit of a macabre element to this as to where the body goes.

John: Yeah.

Lisa: I don’t want to ruin anything for people who are going to want to read this. Here’s a spoiler alert for you but why did you decide to go in that direction?

John: Well a lot of that’s because I wasn’t sure what I was doing when I was writing the book. I wrote the book really fast and I wasn’t very good at thinking through plotlines. My writing is, it just comes as it comes. I can’t make notes ahead of time. If I sit down and think about okay this is where I want the book to go tomorrow then it’s not going to work, it’s not going to go that direction. It’s unfolding each day as I wrote. What I ended up with was this plot, this huge book with a lot of pretty central characters. I mean there’s not really one main character. From there I had to carve out a plot.

Through all these revisions the body ended up in different places and it wasn’t found and then it was found and I moved it around quite a lot. Then I just arrived at how it is now with a lot of … I don’t know if it’s mystery or not, but a lot of uncertainty. I wanted that. I mean the whole book has got a lot of uncertainty in it.

Lisa: Yeah. It feels like there is that uncertainty even at the end. Even at the end there was a murder but it doesn’t feel like things ever completely get resolved with all of this.

John: Yeah, no, it’s not a firm resolution. That’s one thing some readers have commented on, is that the end is definitely vague. I think the whole book is vague in a way. Again, for me that was how I saw life down east in a way, is like this … One of my friends down there who’s lived there forever, after she read the book she made the comment that the book was like living there and that if you talking to some people like say you walk up on a conversation you don’t know what people are talking about unless you know ahead of time what they’re talking about, because everything references something else and it’s just such an old place that it’s really hard to understand what’s going on in a way. I don’t know if that makes sense but it’s …

The book to me is that way in that you really have to pay attention. Most of what’s happening is under the surface and everything has got a meaning that’s under there. The reader has to really pay attention in order to pick those meanings up. I think that was, for me that was what echoed my experience there. Also I think the voice, the voice in the book it’s hard to step out of that voice in order to explain what’s going on. I tried to several times to step back and try to explain because I knew there’s a lot of diction in the book and a lot of things that happened just about commercial fishing and about boats and the ocean that people aren’t going to know. But in order to explain those things you’re going to have to break from the voice of the book, and I just wasn’t willing to do and so people have to tolerate the ambiguity I think.

Lisa: Is there a part that you like that you’d like to read to us?

John: I like actually the first couple of pages probably. I think the first few pages are the only time in the whole book where we see a lobsterman just going, just doing his own thing without any of this upheaval going on around him yet.

Ebb tide and fog and three slashes with wooden oars. No land left only the fog and the oars like bones creaked in their locks. A single gull rode the skiff’s bow. The tidewater drained fast and the lobster fisherman named Nicolas Graves leaned his shoulder and spun his skiff and rowed stern-first together with the tide and he and the gull both squinted into the fog.

He told himself that his boat was moored here and somewhere. He told himself that after a lifetime on the Atlantic he could not be lost in this one small cove. He shipped the oars and ducked his head. He lit a cigarette. Water dripped from the oar blades. His sweatshirt hood was beaded with moisture and his hands were cold and raw. Fog like frost spread atop his gray beard and condensed on his glasses and trickled from the lenses to the coin-size patches of skin above his beard. From behind him the gull watched and Nicolas turned to the bird and released a lungful of smoke and said, “You tell me.”

He smoked and allowed the ebb tide to draw him toward the mouth of the cove and when he was finished smoking he dropped the butt into the water. The gull circled and landed. Nicolas took a plastic bag of crackers from his sweatshirt pocket and removed one. He turned fully around on the bench seat to face the gull and held out the cracker in his cracked palm. The gull batted its wings and craned its neck and hopped on one foot. “Come on,” Nicolas said. “You like them quite well.”

The bird flapped its wings in place and jumped into the air and hovered overtop Nicolas for a split second. It landed again on the bow. Nicolas rested his knuckles on the wooden gunwale. He wiggled his fingers. The gulled stepped hesitantly from the bow to the gunwale as if understanding this beckoning and it walked the rail and in a quick lunge it took the cracker and returned to the bow. Nicolas smiled to himself and turned in his seat and took up the oars. The gull disappeared into the fog then reappeared like apparition that hovered six feet above the surface of the sea. A few more slashes with the oars and he saw that the gull was perched on the bow of his moored boat. Then the entire hull shape of the boat emerged like the body of a centaur beneath a gull head.

Lisa: There is something that is very I don’t know like the calmness of the sea I guess while you’re reading this. Just a sense that there’s action but it’s the kind of action that happens, and I can just imagine exactly what you’re describing. There’s just a little bit going on but that you can sense the fog, you can sense the quietness of it, you can sense the conversation that the guys are having with the seagull. There’s a lot that goes on in lobstering and in fishing. There’s a lot of quiet moments that happen.

John: Yeah, yeah, definitely. It’s a lot of … especially in the down east stretch of the coast, yeah, there’s a lot of fog. Just it’s all there is, it’s fog and water and rocks. I think the voice of the book is really what I wanted to give that feel. The book is really written in a different voice than anything I’ve ever written before. Hopefully it echoes that, the place.

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Lisa: Now that you are living in the Portland area you’re still living in your sail boat?

John: Yep.

Lisa: What type of voice are you? What’s coming through to you at this point? What types of dialogues and conversations and …

John: I’m not sure yet. I’m at somewhat of stance. I’ve been working on essays, mostly essays about down east area still, so about digging clams and working on the mussel jargon and lobster boat and stuff. I’m still working with that same stuff. I’ll go back there at some point. I’m just only here for a while and enjoying myself and trying to be social after … Writing is a lonely thing, and when you live in a lonely place it’s, they compound each other, so I just wanted to come up and get a breath of air I guess.

Lisa: You live by yourself on the sailboat?

John: Yep.

Lisa: Tell me what’s that like?

John: Here it’s really it’s a great way for me to live in a city because I can come into town and do the city thing and see people, but I can also walk down the dock and step onto my boat and be on the water and look out the window at the harbor and it’s quiet and it’s beautiful. I really need that. It’s a good way for me to step out of everything. I have a woodstove on my boat so I can sit by the fire and be on the water. It’s something I need I think and I enjoy. That’s where I do all my writing, I write on the boat and it mediates the urban lifestyle for me.

Lisa: How does this contrast with the time that you spend in Montana?

John: Well what I’ve been doing for the past few years is I go back in the fall so clamming season has ended for me, I’ve stopped clamming in September and I’ve gone back to Montana and guided [inaudible 00:51:55] in September, October. It’s worked out well seasonally because the clam, firstly clams goes down in September and the big summer push is over. It’s nice to finish that season up and then get on an airplane and go to Montana and go up in the mountains and see a lot of my old friends.

I’ve lived out there for 12 years so all of my friends are still there. It’s a nice, nice way to just get out of Maine and get up in the mountains, because like I said earlier I never leave the coast when I’m in Maine. I stay south route one. So yeah, my mountains and land based activities usually center round Montana.

Actually until this year Montana has also been like my big social time. I go back and spend a week or two in Missoula, and coming from down east to Missoula that was like going to a big city. I could see all my friends and go out and be social for a couple of weeks. Then go back to down east and haul up at the end of this peninsula where I lived in this little cabin. But now I don’t need that one. Probably the only guy that ever goes to Montana for the urban life but it’s a good mix.

Lisa: How did you decide that you wanted to be a writer? What was your background? Where are you from?

John: I grew up in New Hampshire and it’s just, I don’t know, I decided, I think if I could decide on something else. My sister is a writer as well. Her name is Abby Maxwell, and two of us talk a lot about that that if either of us felt like we had a choice we would do something else, like looking at people with real jobs and nine to five job and it just seems so nice.

I love the freedom of my lifestyle but it’s a constant struggle and writing it’s not an easy thing to do. I meet a lot of people that want to be writers. My attitude is if you can do something else do it, but it’s never really been a choice for me. It’s what gets me out of bed in the morning. Every time I have a job I save up enough money until I can take time off and write. It’s just how my brain works and what makes me feel good at the end of the day. So yeah, it’s not really a choice for me.

Lisa: How has it been to do things like reading at Longfellow Books or this interview here or some of the stuff that’s around the business of actually selling your book?

John: I’m not very good at it. I’m really more used to the readings and stuff but the first few it’s really hard to come out from being just alone at a desk for so many hours and alone in a lot of ways where I was living. I’ll do what I can do but, yeah, that’s …

Lisa: You’re hoping it’ll sell itself I think is what you’re saying.

John: Yeah, oh yeah, it’s just I’m not a self-promoter at all. It’s just …

Lisa: Well somehow you got Anthony Doerr to write a little a quote on the front of your book. He says, “It’s a gorgeously written exploration of faith and loyalty, love and dishonesty. I will never forget these characters, these waters, the harrowing dramas that unfolded upon and beneath them.” It’s pretty great. He’s a National Book Award finalist and I read his book also, “All the Light We Cannot See” so somehow you got somebody to believe in this.

John: When I went to Boise State he was a teacher of Boise State of mine. He and I, he did an independent study with me when I actually wrote the first novel I ever wrote. He went through my first novel with me and we just maintained correspondence ever since. Yeah, so when the book came out he read it and really liked so that was really great.

Lisa: How can people find out about “Of Sea and Cloud” and the other works that you’ve done John?

John: I have a website, it’s jonkellerauthor.com. Tyrus Books has a website as well. The book is on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and hopefully at local bookstores as well.

Lisa: Well I’m very appreciative of the time that you took to listen to the people around you, to capture them, put them on the pages of this book. I wish you all the best as you continue to do your writing, as you write. You’re correct, it’s not an easy task, but that seems like it’s something that brings you great joy.

John: Yeah, oh yes. It’s what I’m doing.

Lisa: We’ve been speaking with John Keller who is the author of “Of Sea and Cloud” and people who are interested I think that this is most likely available in local bookstores including Longfellow Books.

John: Yep, they have it.

Lisa: Well thank you John, thanks for coming in.

John: Yeah, thank you.

Lisa: You’ve been listening to Love Maine Radio, show number 198, Making a Living on Maine Waters. Our guests have included Abigail Carroll and John Keller. For more information on our guests, and extended interviews, visit lovemaineradio.com. Love Maine Radio is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week’s show, sign up for our e-newsletter and like our Love Maine Radio Facebook page. Follow me on Twitter as Dr. Lisa, and see my running, travel, food and wellness photos as Bountiful One on Instagram.

We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also, let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle. I hope that you have enjoyed “Making a Living on Maine Waters.” Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.

Love Maine Radio is recorded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Our executive producers are Susan Grisanti, Kevin Thomas, and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music by John C. McCain. Our content producer is Kelly Clinton. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See www.lovemaineradio.com or the Love Maine Radio Facebook page for details.

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Transcription of Making a Living on Maine Waters #198