Transcription of Feeding the Soul, #99
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Dr Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you’re listening to the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast show number 99. Feeding the soul. Airing for the first time on Sunday August 4th, 2013. Our guests today include Peter Behrens, author of the Law of Dreams, and the O’Briens, and Susan Grisanti editor-in-chief of Maine Magazine, and Maine Home and Design magazine.
What is it that we are hungering for? My grandmother’s parents came to the United States during one of Ireland’s great famines. They settled in Boston along with many other immigrants from that country. Their family, my family, experienced very real poverty associated with very real physical hunger. They journeyed to a new land so that they might feed themselves. Many of us find ourselves journeying for that same reason. We wonder purposefully so that we may feed our souls. It could be argued that in the absence of famine, true hunger is obsolete but the desire for nourishment takes many forms.
Vietnamese Monk, Tic Nat Han, suggests that Americans are like hungry ghosts seeking spiritual nourishment in a land of relative abundance. Sometimes we don’t realize how spiritually starved we are. We seek to feed our bodies rather than our ravenous souls. Once we recognize that our souls are in need of replenishment we can feed ourselves with that, which we actually need. Our life’s journey becomes a joyful exertion celebrating the bounty of our surroundings rather than an attempt to escape the scarcity we once heard knocking at our door like the scarcity of the Irish famine experienced by my great grandparents, and so many others like them, before and since.
Today on the Dr. Lisa radio hour we speak with novelist Peter Behrens whose books, the Law of Dreams, and the O’Briens, describe the journeys taken by individuals whose families were impacted by the Irish famines of the last century. We also discussed journeys taken by the staff of Maine Magazine, over the course of 48 hours with Maine Magazine and Maine Home and Design Editor-in-Chief Susan Grisanti. What is it that you are hungering for and how can you feed your soul? We hope this show will give you food for thought. Thank you for joining us.
Dr. Lisa It’s always my great pleasure to meet the people who write the books that I love to read, and last fall, I read the books, the O’Briens, and the Law of Dreams, and I said, “Oh my goodness, I have to meet this guy”. And I realized he lives in Maine. How fortunate am I? So, today we have in our studio, Peter Behrens who is the author of the O’Briens, The law of Dreams, and also of Night Driving. Thank you for coming in and talking to us today.
Peter: Thank you for having me Lisa. It’s fun to do something in Maine and not have to travel.
Dr. Lisa: Yeah well you’ve been all over the place. Most recently I think you spent some time in the Netherlands.
Peter: Yeah I had a fellowship in Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, which sounds very tedious but it was actually fabulous. Six months to just work and write, and the whole family over there it was great.
Dr. Lisa: What’s your advanced study in?
Peter: I was kind of the token artist there. Everyone else was in academic working on very scholarly projects but they usually bring in one or two fiction writers to kind of stir things up a little bit, or a poet, or a translator, and I just happened to be the fiction writer they invited. It was lucky for me because I’m working on a book right now that’s set in Europe, and I really needed to be breathing European air, and looking at European light. It was very fortuitous. So, we all just packed up last August and moved over there. It was great.
Dr. Lisa: As I was out running this morning and I was thinking about the time I would spend talking with you today I was thinking of the word, peripatetic. You have this very interesting peripatetic sort of air about you and the books that you write.
Peter: Well it’s funny. I’ve just been kind of having a kind of whining, sobbing, breakdown week over moving around too much. Like too much. I just can’t bear opening another suitcase or going somewhere else, or thinking about going somewhere else, so we’ve been overloading. It’s been piling on a little too much lately and we’re now going to cool down and I love those periods when I can suddenly think to myself, “Gosh, you know, I have not been out of Maine for five months”. I love that. That’s a good time, and it’s a good time for work, and I’m hoping, and I’m superstitious enough to knock wood, that we’re entering one of those phases right now.
Dr. Lisa: Well it’s a good time to be entering one of those phases given the weather.
Peter: Exactly yeah you don’t want to be doing that in November, but yeah. Maine is a great place to come home to.
Dr. Lisa: And this is where your wife, Bosha is also from.
Peter: Yeah Bosha is deeply from Southern Maine. She grew up in Portland and Yarmouth, and Cumberland. Her family is from South Freeport. My family is Montreal-ers. I grew up in Montreal. We all spent our summers in Maine going back a couple of generations in my family. So, Maine, within my family, always felt like a sort of home too.
Dr. Lisa: I think you and I have some sort of familial similarities in that my family was from Canada. I came down to work in the mills. Not quite as glamorous as spending the summers in Maine because we just came down and they worked in Biddeford. But there is still that interesting …
Peter: Oh I’m so fascinated with that world. I was just speaking of that when I was up in the New Brunswick at this folk festival I was saying Maine is really ethnically a Canadian State so largely. I think if we joined Canada we would no longer be in the same country as New Hampshire, we’d get an hour extra daylight. We’d have health care right. So, it sounds like a plan as far as I’m concerned. You know Maine is ethnically deeply Canadian. I mean many people came down from Quebec and Lac Agis to work in the textile world, so the river valleys are very largely French Canadian. In Maine and the coast when you talk to anybody in the fishing industry, if you’re a Canadian you will always be told right away that, “Oh my Grandmother’s from Prince Edward Island, or Newfoundland or Nova Scotia. You know the maritime’s influence on the coast is really, really strong, so it always feels pretty homey in that way. So we got that ethnic thing going right.
Dr. Lisa: Yes, and the publisher of Maine Magazine, Kevin Thomas is from Presque Isle and his family actually had a farm in New Brunswick, so you’ve got the sort of border crossers.
Peter: One of the reasons I moved back to Maine was I wanted to be near Montreal my home town, which I kind of write about and has a kind of radiance for me. But I also wanted the experience of borders and the meaning of borders is something powerful to me, so it’s useful to be in Maine. Close but not there.
Dr. Lisa: In your book the Law of Dreams, this idea of borders, actually in both of your books, the Law of Dreams, and the O’Briens, the idea of borders being somewhat fluid, is very present. You start out the book talking about a child who becomes part of the ‘bog boys’ in the Law of Dreams. Talk to me about that character and why did you start with a child essentially?
Peter: The boy? Well I know I started with him I kind of stayed with him. I mean he is that story. The whole book, other than the prologue, which is a couple of the pages at the beginning, that whole story is told from point of view … sort of from behind the eyes, and inside the head of a 15 year old boy, who doesn’t know a lot about the world. He hardly knows he lives in a country called Ireland until he leaves it. When he’s going to America, he’s not entirely sure what or where America is. He’s not stupid he’s just grown up in a very remote set of circumstances in County Clare in the 1840’s. He doesn’t know a lot; what he does know, he knows deeply. He knows all about animals, he knows all about horses, he knows about how ground and light work. He’s very sensually inclined I mean he can really smell a landscape. But I wanted to try to see that world of Ireland’s catastrophe through the eyes of someone who didn’t know they were living in history, and who wasn’t tugging you through, and giving you little history lessons along the way, but was just living through it. He had no idea he was living in the Irish Famine, capital I, capital F. He was just living through his life, and I wanted to stay within that point of view. I think I pretty much did most of the way.
Dr. Lisa: So, you have a family that lived in Montreal? They came to Montreal but at least a large part of your family is Irish.
Peter: That’s right. My Montreal family is the O’Briens. My mom was Frankie O’Brien. I’ve actually used a lot of their names in the novel the O’Briens. The story of the Law of Dreams, the first novel is essentially the story of this boy Fergus O’Brien coming out of the famine and ending up in Montreal. He’s really my great, great, grandfather of whom I know very little other than he was an O’Brien, and came out of County Clare during the famine era. I basically had to invent his story because none of it survived. Hardly anyone has famine family stories. I think that was an experience of such poverty and struggle and shame, and horror, that those people were so poor, that no things came down. A few stories came down; I invented it. The second book the O’Briens is a fiction deeply but it’s also to a considerable degree based on my own family the O’Briens, they’re the inspiration for some of the characters, and there are events in kind of the family lore or family mythology that become significant events within the book, which I have to repeat this also in a novel. I made a lot of it up.
Dr. Lisa: Which you told me on the phone, became easier to write once the people that were kind of connected, really intimately to the story, passed away.
Peter: Yeah. My mother’s generation particularly in Canada, but I think in the United States as well, you know, they’re private people, and there were things within the family to them, needed to stay within the family. It’s tough having a writer, a novelist, in your family, because he’ll seize onto those events of which you only know from one perspective, or one dimension and you turn them into scenes. You turn them into chapters. You turn them into stories. I think that’s a difficult process if you were part of the real thing. No one else is ever going to get it right. No one else is ever going to know it the way you knew it. So, it wasn’t a conscious thing, but I realize I began writing these books as my mother and when that generation began dying out, I began digging in doing the research not knowing where I was going, but in a way, I suppose it just freed me in some kind of way that just was natural. I didn’t have to, I wasn’t writing for them, and I’m certainly not ashamed of anything I’ve written, and I don’t think I’ve done anything bad, but I also respected their desire to keep things within the family.
Dr. Lisa: My grandmother was Pearl Mary O’Brien.
Peter: Oh really?
Dr. Lisa: Yes. She came over.
Peter: I know a Mary O’Brien. My aunts were Mary, my mom was Mary Frances, Mary Patricia, Mary Althea, Mary Margaret, you know, Mary is very popular. There’s not too many Mary’s around these days.
Dr. Lisa: Well my mom is Mary Patricia, and she was Mary Patricia Emery, so I think this is the kind of thing we hear a lot in Maine actually and a lot of my family came through Ireland during the second big famine, to Boston and Boston up to Maine. I felt as if I was reading possibly about my own family, and I think that’s the beauty of these books is they’re novels, and yet they belong to all of us. Well that’s what I’d hoped. I mean I don’t think my family as my family, should be of interest to anyone other than me, and my family. That’s why I didn’t really write a memoir or a piece of history, I used their experience, and investigated their experience and know more about their experience than maybe they did, because I know about the context and stuff like that now. It’s a story that I think rings a lot of bells for a lot of people, particularly in our part of the world.
Dr. Lisa: In the Law of Dreams, you talked about pain as being a kind of food, and your main character, Fergus talked about eating pain it was a kind of food, it made you dizzy. This is the theme that runs throughout is pain, hunger, and it’s so fundamental and foundational to what we know as human beings.
Peter: I think it really becomes part of the larger theme, which is survival. He develops this notion of eating pain, which is really just absorbing pain and punishment, and difficulty, consuming it, and moving beyond it. I don’t know where he got that kind of analogy, or where I got it I guess, but like it was all he had in his life, he’s going to chew his way through, and still stay alive, and keep going. It was going to make him stronger not weaker, all that he had to do to survive, and he’s not quite right about that, because it does in some ways make him stronger. I think too though that some of the harrowing experiences that he goes through damaged him and damaged him permanently in some ways, that he will never be able to be open or trusting. He’ll survive, but maybe at some cost.
Dr. Lisa: Trust is a big issue when it comes to the famines. As you were talking to me the other day, you were reminding me that there was food present in Ireland during the famines, it just was being sent off in boats to other places. So, the idea that people were living often on farms that their families had essentially sharecropped for generations, but this food is being taken away from them and sent to other people. They weren’t even valued enough. That must have created this tremendous sense of inability to trust those who had always been there as farm owners.
Peter: Yeah. It also created a sustaining kind of rage that really fed into the forces of Irish Nationalism through the 19th Century, the sense of that basic inequality. The fundamental fact of what happened in the famine was, okay, the potatoes went down. The potatoes went down in lots of parts of the world lots of parts in North West Europe in those years. In Belgium its common people didn’t starve to death. In Ireland they did, and there’s a complicated set of reasons why, but they all finally come back to the notion of Ireland really being a captive nation and decisions on the Irish economy, and structure of land holding in Ireland, were made not in Ireland, but elsewhere, by people who really fundamentally did not have the interests of the Irish people closest to their hearts. You know, colonialism. It had these disastrous unintended, but disastrous results in Ireland.
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Dr. Lisa: You were recently asked to be on a panel that was discussing the Irish Famine. So, this is something that is still very much alive in the culture.
Peter: It’s very alive in Irish culture. I was made aware of that when I was in Ireland doing some research a long time ago, mid ‘90’s. I woke up in my hotel room in Dublin, the clock radio went on, and there was a story that had just come out in the Western media about a famine that had been happening in Ethiopia. The famine had been going on for quite a while, but I think the situation was that some big news media people had just gotten in there, and suddenly, and some of our listeners may remember that particular famine. It was everywhere in horrifying images in magazines and on television a lot of stories. In Ireland, I mean in Dublin the next morning there were kids on every corner with cans collecting money for the famine victims. The President of Ireland flew to the United Nations a few weeks later to address the United Nations on behalf of the famine victims. The whole country, you could just see famine touched a raw nerve still in Ireland. The whole country was in this nervous twitter about this famine, so you could see that memory is scored pretty deep in Irish ways of being. The Irish to their credit, a large part of their foreign policy has to do with alleviating famine in other parts of the world. Alleviating the direst effects of poverty. They’re a small country but they more than pull their weight in some of those global forums like that. It’s impressive and I think it’s because of its own experience.
Dr. Lisa: Famine as a notion is not new it’s been around for as long as we’ve had people on the earth and the need to eat, which is always, and it continues. I mean we are still having problems with famine in various parts of the world. Because you’ve written this story, has this impacted the way you have moved forward in your life and viewed current events?
Peter: I have always seen current events with a sort of historical dimension. I’ve always been interested in the past behind the now. And yes, knowing what I know about Ireland … Here’s the way it really worked was that I when I was looking at contemporary events and contemporary famines in parts of the world like East Africa or West Africa, and Sierra Leone, I saw what was going on in those cultures and societies, and cities, and towns, and country sides, was probably very similar to things in Ireland that would have been happening in the 1840’s. So, weren’t really noticed or written about you know. What was happening to the kids who worked? There was no social net in Ireland in the 1840’s in rural western Ireland. What was happening to the kids of these families that the parents were starving to death, or dying of dysentery, or just leaving everything, even their homes. That stuff never got written about.
I began to get a sense of what was happening when I looked into the famine experiences in other parts of the world. Particularly one morning when I saw a picture of a kid in Sierra Leone walking down the main street in the town, an eleven year old boy, African boy, wearing ‘camo’ fatigues and carrying an automatic rifle over his shoulder, and I thought, “Oh that’s what happens when societies breakdown because of famine. Kids are abandoned. Kids do what they need to do to survive. Kids form gangs. Kids join armies”. And I thought, “I know that was happening in Ireland. I know that was happening in Ireland”. I happened to read a sergeants report from West Cork in the 1840’s, one line of it. He was writing to his superiors in Dublin Castle, one line of his report stuck out. It was, ‘lawless children are infesting the highways”. And that suggested a whole hidden, unwritten about world to me that I’d brought back to life I think with the ‘bog boys’ in Law of Dreams.
Dr. Lisa: In the Law of Dreams there is the sense that Fergus is living through history but he doesn’t know that he’s living through history. So, is this something that could be happening to us right now, that we don’t know the outcome, we’re living through something and we don’t know what the other side is going to look like?
Peter: I’d say that’s about wraps up the essence of the human conditioning. Right? It is. Yeah we’re staggering blindly towards what end we know not, you know? And we’re dragging this history behind us like kind of gauzy roots of a plant, and half the time we’re not even paying attention to what’s behind us, we sure don’t know where we’re going. Yeah that’s who we are. That’s who we are.
I think sometimes by paying a little more attention to our history, we can get more of a sense of you know, place ourselves a little more carefully. Place our time in history a little more carefully, and perhaps sometimes even make as a country, as a nation, as a power in the world, make wiser judgments. But yeah it’s unavoidable. It’s the essence of history. We’re all on this blind stagger to who knows where. That’s kind of part of being human, kind of fun, and dangerous, and spooky, but it’s deeply what we are.
Dr. Lisa: You have a seven-year-old son. You’ve explored your own family history. Is there something that you are hoping you’ll be leaving as a legacy for your son?
Peter: Well you know when I think about it, I think really in some ways the person I wrote those books for was Henry. I am an older father. My father was an older father. He doesn’t have a lot of cousins. He’s got extended family considerably, which is really lucky, and he’s got great grandparents here in Maine, but he’s not that close to my family, my family tradition. I think partly I wrote those books to tell him who he was. Not who he’s going to be or really who he was, but at least tell him where he came from. You know, I wasn’t really conscious of that because I’d begun the books before I began the idea of Henry. But, he was fortuitously born the same year that Law of Dreams my first novel, came out. That is a big part of him. I hope, I’d like to think of him reading those books and understanding that they’re fiction and all that but also these are the legions. This is the lore. This is the humus soil that you come out of, here it is. Good or bad here it is. You got it kid. I may not be around to tell you. I’m this grumpy 85-year old, but the books are there.
Dr. Lisa: It’s been a pleasure to speak with you today. There is nothing I like better than reading a good book and specifically fiction. I must say that this is one of my greatest pleasures. I mean there are other things of course. Eating is good you know.
Peter: Eating is good.
Dr. Lisa: Eating is good. But I find myself so impacted by particularly good works of fiction. So, it’s really … I thank you for the work that you’re doing putting this out there into the world and also enabling people to think about things from the point of view of story, but also more globally from the point of view of history.
Well, we’ve been speaking with Peter Behrens who is the author of the O’Briens, the Law of Dreams, and Night Driving, and he lives with his wife Bosha and his son Henry here in Maine.
Peter: Well thank you Lisa. It’s a pleasure to be here. It’s always a pleasure to do things in Maine particularly it always feels like it is being home, so that just feels wonderful.
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Dr. Lisa: Well it’s taken about two years to get this person to sit with me in the studio and have a conversation about something that we both hold very dear, and that is the state of Maine. This individual is the Editor-in-Chief of Maine Magazine, and Maine Home and Design, and one of the cofounders of the Maine Media Collective. So, I’m glad that you’re here to talk to me today about feeding the soul, because I think you and I have many shared views on the subject. Thanks for coming in Susan.
Susan: Thank you. Thank you for having me it’s a pleasure to be here.
Dr. Lisa: And if I didn’t mention, this is Susan Grisanti, that’s the Editor and Chief. You’ve been here for fourteen years now.
Susan: Coming up on my fourteenth year that’s right. I returned 2000.
Dr. Lisa: So, you’re a Mainer but a Mainer by choice lets say.
Susan: I’m a Mainer by choice. Am I a Mainer? There’s a whole question to that whether I’m a Mainer or not. I feel more at home in Maine than I have in any other place that I’ve lived. I grew up on the West Coast my whole life in California. I went to school at USC. But I honestly feel more at home here than I have, and I lived in Seattle for a couple of years. I attribute that me feeling so at home here I was raised by Easterners. Both of my parents are from upstate New York, and something about that I think being raised, even though we were in Las Angeles, we were really a little bit more of an island. All girls’ Catholic schools and things like that, and really instilled with some values that I think, feel much more at home here in Maine.
Dr. Lisa: I was struck, I think you and I were both at a wedding last summer, and I was struck by the fact that you’re a West Coaster, and I’m an East Coaster, and we’re both at heart these two Catholic girls. You know, we both go up for communion and we’re both … there is something really interesting and kind of spiritual I think in both of our backgrounds. I think that feeds into the love that we both have of place and of Maine, and I’ve seen this in some of the journeying that I know that you’ve written about for Forty-Eight Hours. So, talk to me about what is Forty-Eight Hours and what does that mean to Maine Magazine? What has that brought to you, the Maine Media Collective?
Susan: Forty-Eight Hours, I mean that is a big question multifaceted question there. I think the first reaction I have to what you say is about this whole spirituality and kind of getting out in nature. So, the whole idea of us, I think what we’ve discussed many times, this kind of need to be outside, to kind of unplug and disconnect from computers, and phones, and things, just to create a little space. A little time a little quiet for our selves. So, the first of my answer would have to be, that I always do work in very naturally into my life, and into my weekends away, that we do officially, and unofficially, sometime outside. Whether it’s winter and hiking, and summer there’s all kinds of things to do, and so there’s a lot of time in all of our trips to Forty-Eight Hours, that our staff is pretty connected to the outdoors.
On a larger scale just getting away for the weekend. That we really live these lives that if we can move out of this regular routine in order to, you and I talked about, jump in the car, and from Portland, in 45 minutes or less, you’re in Brunswick, to stay for the weekend. And some of the really great restaurants that are there, amazing art scene that’s there at the Mill and then boating. I talked about that town being bookended by the Mill on one end and the University on the other, and how lovely to be and all the culture on that main street in between. The idea of really just enjoying the weekend and not having a schedule and following your nose, and it’s been super gratifying to have the question, which was, I always used to joke, the number one question was, where do I go and eat? Well, from friends and from different readers, now the question is, where do I go for the weekend? I’m getting that quite a bit this idea of giving people this inspiration to get out, and jump in their car, and have a really easy weekend away right within the state. And all the different personalities we talked about, the really luxurious inns down to the kind of rickety little whole in the wall places, and each of them kind of having their own guests that they can give us.
Dr. Lisa: Now, Forty Eight Hours began from something very different where one person who I don’t believe was on staff, went out and did an admiral job spending 48 hours in the town, came back, said this is what I did.
Susan: Right.
Dr. Lisa: But it really progressed from there.
Susan: It really did yeah. Well, I think it was inspired and in our Forty Eight Hours guide that we have on the news stands right now, we have a compilation of many of the staff of Forty Eight Hours are written. You and Kevin write the opening note to that and it was inspired on the trip. You could probably … actually would you answer that question?
Dr. Lisa: What we were noticing is that everybody on your staff has such a visual sense. Obviously you have two magazines that you create, and some people really gravitate more towards photography than others. Some people have more of a professional background than others but everybody really likes to sort of see what’s out there, really experience, really be part of wherever it is that they go. So, it seems as though it was almost inspired by Instagram in an interesting way. You know, that you have the ability to sort of take not only a snapshot, a written snapshot, but also a visual snapshot, string these all together and create something that is a little bit more inspiring I think in a way.
Susan: Absolutely right. We’re talking about feeding ourselves and when you think about how gratifying it is for our staff to kind of go out and have the freedom to express themselves and to share what’s going on, and share what they’re discovering with readers; and to creatively express themselves through something like Instagrams is so much fun for us. Again, it’s a real compliment to the gorgeous professional photography that we have throughout the magazine. These are snapshots and these are more of a story telling in a different way, and I think that you really compliment each other nicely.
Dr. Lisa: And it’s also what I notice is just a sense of pride. And know that Maine Magazine, Maine Home Design, our Brand company, Art Collector Maine, everybody has a real sense of passion and pride working on. People really do believe that Maine is a wonderful place to be and the things that we do, we mean it. We go to events we mean it. When you put together the Forty-Eight Hours issue, and it came together within how much time?
Susan: Are you talking about the first time that we did it?
Dr. Lisa: No I’m talking about this issue that’s sitting on my lap right now.
Susan: Oh, literally this is going to be hard to believe but between the two issues that we were working on, it came together in one week. Some very long hours and very dedicated staff that we have, but we pulled this one together in a very short amount of time.
Dr. Lisa: So, your Forty-Eight Hours issue was created over the course of maybe three forty eight periods. Really. But it’s just as beautiful as any of the other magazines and people were so proud of it. People really loved to be able to open it up and say, this is my picture, these are my pictures, these are my words; these are the connections that I’ve made in the State of Maine.
Susan: We have 21 of the most exceptional people on the staff and you alluded to it, this wide-eyed curiosity. I think this is a common trait that makes people successful here that want to work here. They really do have an open heart, and open mind, are curious, and open to what’s going on, and love to hit the streets. We have a competition for whose going to go on one forty-eight hours trip, instead of, would you spend your weekend working. We’ve got a long list of people saying, “Can I please go. Can I go and experience these things, and I’m more than willing to take photos, and document what I’m doing and come back and write it, edit it, and work with it in order to put that out there and share that”. That is something that absolutely does feed our soul. Just like putting this issue together in such a short period of time, there was a real energy about that. Like, lets just do this. Lets put this guide together and lets get it out there before the summer’s over. Lets get it out there so that people can do it in a timely way, so people can really enjoy this during their summer vacations.
Dr. Lisa: I remember reading one of the editor’s notes I guess, and it was by Sophie Nelson, and it talked about her desire to go out there and say, “Look at this, look at this, look at this”. And I know that there’s a way that I’ve often felt in my life, that I want to say, “Look at the clouds, look at the flowers, look at all these beautiful things that are around us”. And when I pick up this issue, this is really the sense that I have, that everybody who’s writing for this issue is saying, “Look at these things that I’ve found, and I want people to know about it, because I want them to be there too. I want them to experience it, and I want them to be fair to themselves.
Susan: True. By the way one of my, if not my very favorite editor’s notes that have ever been written for either of the magazines that note is really special and we got a lot of feedback and people can genuinely feel Sophie’s desire to share these things. It’s such an addition to what we have in Maine Magazine. I love that note. I think it was from our July issue. I have to double-check that but it’s such a great ed note. That wanting to share is absolutely prevalent and I think what it reflects also is people really want to live in Maine. When you choose, I would say that the stories that we create in Maine Home and Design, and Maine Magazine, Maine is the filter that makes my job so rewarding and kind of in a guilty way, very easy, because I feel often times like the lucky dope that gets to turn the lens on what’s happening out there. It is a place that is hard enough in certain ways to make it really interesting. Like, why do you want to build that house here when there are climates that are easier and nicer to deal with than here? And a number of other reasons that it really makes it an interesting choice for people, there is a passion, not just from the staff of this magazine that wants to share these stories with people, but with audience that is tied to Maine. There’s something there. This interesting thing that makes all that we do just that much more interesting.
Dr. Lisa: The other thing that I notice is exactly what you’ve said, that because you’re out there connecting with other people who choose to live in Maine, there’s just this sort of heightened enthusiasm often, and they’re such creative people that live here, and the connections that are made. I’m constantly amazed. I go to many events with you and see all of the people you connect with, and that’s another thing that feeds your soul, these relationships that you’ve built up with the people on Maine. It’s almost hard for me to believe that you’ve only lived here fourteen years.
Susan: Yeah it’s a very good thing. I couldn’t agree more. It is incredibly gratifying to me the folks that we work with. I’m thinking also of the people that we meet on our travels, short connections long connections. We have a circle, a community that has kind of risen up around these magazines to support them. We have people that really take pride readers who say it’s theirs. That means the world to me. I think that has so much to do with the kind of energy and success that we’ve had with the publications, is the people that kind of rise up around it, our readers, and our community. It’s incredibly gratifying to be doing this work absolutely yes.
Dr. Lisa: The goal of the Dr. Lisa radio hour is to help make connections between the health of the individual and the health of the community. The goal of Ted Carter inspired landscapes is to deepen our appreciation for the natural world. Here to speak with us today is Ted Carter.
Ted Carter: One of the things that we all think about as we get older and we age is, we want to make a difference in the world. We reach the calling part of our life. We start with a job, and we go into a career and then we move into our calling years. One of the biggest things we can do is be a good steward. A good steward of the land, a good steward with your estate and your family, just be a good steward. And stewardship is something that many of my clients over the years have taught me, and I’ve learned by example through them. I have a friend who I’ve worked with for a number of years, and we’ve sort of rebuilt our childhood village together slowly, piece by piece, starting with the community center and then the park in front of the town, and the church, and her husband who died several years talked about stewardship, discussed stewardship and was very passionate about that. I go through that town now and I see the trees maturing, and the planting’s mature, and I say, “Wow, this is what Dave meant. This is exactly what Dave meant. This is stewardship, and through their generosity, they’ve improved the lives of many people. I’m Ted Carter, and if you’d like to contact me, I can be reached at Tedcarterdesign.com.
Male: We’ll return to our program after acknowledging the following generous sponsors. Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists in Falmouth Maine. At Orthopedic Specialists ultrasound technology is taken to the highest degree. With state of the art ultrasound equipment, small areas of tendonitis, muscle and ligament tears, instability and arthritic conditions, can be easily found during examination. For more information visit Orthocareme.com or call, 207 781 9077.
Dr. Lisa: This Dr. Lisa radio hour on podcast. We believe we are helping to build a better world with the help of many. We’d like to bring you people who are examples of those building a better world in the areas of wellness, health, and fitness. To talk to you about one of these, fitness, is Jim Greatorex, the President of Premier Sports Health a division of Black Bear Medical. Here’s Jim.
Jim: During the summer months we all want to get out and enjoy the outdoors and all that Maine offers. At Black Bear Medical’s Premier Sports Health Division, we want you to be able to take full advantage of a great Maine summer. I recently hiked Mount Katahdin, and wore some of the new compression hiking socks. Anyone who has made this climb knows that it’s an exhilarating but grueling climb. I was amazed that by wearing the socks and then the recovery compression sox the next day, I had little to no soreness and my legs felt fresh. My 22-year-old son on the other hand, didn’t wear the goofy looking sox and he was sore. These products really work and I invite you to check them out for your selves. I’m Jim Greatorex, President of Black Bear Medical. Come on in and see our trained staff down at 275 Market Way, and at www.blackbearmedical.com.
Dr. Lisa: So I know that in Forty-Eight Hours, it’s the places that people can stay. That’s discussed. The places that people can eat and what people can eat. We also have people, who have done rock climbing, and running, and biking, and hiking, places for people to shop. Also, the things that come up for me are things for people to look at. Art. Art becomes this really interesting and important part of Forty-Eight Hours, Maine, but also in everything that is done in these magazines, why is art such an important piece of the Maine Media Collective?
Susan: I think that like so much of what I’ve already said since we’ve started talking, what’s happening in Maine. And my answer to the question of why is art so important? The art that’s happening, people working in the contemporary art world, let alone the history and the legacy of what’s happened in Maine art. From the beginning I honestly knew very, very little about art before we started Maine Home Design, in late 2006. It was something that I just caught the bug. I stayed up until two in the morning, just searching websites, and on the different galleries, and learning about the artists. It’s a passion. Passions are what keep life interesting for us, and the Maine art scene has really added so much to my life.
When I go to openings, I get to talk to these artists. We have the ability in Maine to go to openings and stand with these artists that are of such an extreme talent, that we can discuss their work with them one on one. I do it nearly every opening. I try to go every first Friday, and wander around Portland, or in different towns. They’re great first Fridays. That is such a wonderful thing that I would invite all of your listeners to go and do. To just kind of get curious, and ask a little bit, and then or, just go and stand in front of the art and look at it. I find myself like a common ground when I first run into some of these openings or different shows at the museums, and I have to just give myself a minute in front of a piece of art and I watch it transform, and have an effect on me. That’s one of those connections for me spiritually. I really feel like these artists are kind of messengers for us. They challenge us, they get us to think in a really non-linear way, how to feel. Channel some kind of higher meaning whatever that is for you, and I really think that artists are among the leaders on kind of telling us where we are politically, and where we are and this is just through the air, this feeling when you look through time, what’s happening in the world, you can really document that through art. That’s really what art history is about, and something that I would love to learn more and more about. But we have unbelievable access here.
The Colby Museum of Art is just opening up the largest physical art space with the largest collection in the state. That is free seven days a week open to the public in this beautifully designed, and newly constructed addition, that the lenders so generously donated 500 million dollar collection I believe, 500 pieces. Just absolute amazing transformation you can have. Talk about unplugging in a short period of time and just walking through and seeing these masterworks is one of the very enriching things in Maine to do.
Dr. Lisa: It’s easy for us to talk about places like Kennebunkport, Camden Mid-coast, and those places do have great people, great restaurants, great places to stay, but other parts of Maine do as well. And you spent time I know, you mentioned Brunswick, that’s another one that kind of already comes to mind, but you spent time also in Bangor and you spent time in Aroostook County. You’ve kind of broadened your circle. What kinds of things did you bring back from those other trips?
Susan: I love to get in the car and drive. I think that my life runs at a certain pace that there’s something really meditative to me about literally separating and kind of giving that time. So, I absolutely love a road trip. I took that trip to Aroostook County with my son Jack, and that drive going and watching the state change, just the topography of the state up there is so different than it is here, its just wide-open spaces; such natural beauty all around us. All those different personalities, all those different places are again, I’m going to go to these really posh, some of these beds you sink into, but some of the more interesting experiences come from these more unexpected places that really get us to kind of feel differently, and think differently, and come back to maybe the comforts of home in a renewed way.
Dr. Lisa: What do you remember most about Aroostook County?
Susan: The thing I remember the most were the people without question. There is a sense of interdependence among them. There’s a sense of community. I talk about my story going out with the groomers that go out and groom the snowmobiling trails. This is a huge volunteer base of organization, and then those few that really do this work to create … they know that they’re bringing in people. They’re bringing in tourists that come and really sustain these businesses; sustain the restaurants, and the inns and the different places. I was riding around in the snow cutters, they’re grooming them, and they brought a second groomer because they didn’t want Jack left behind. And there’s only this little jump seat. So, I’m holding on to this little jump seat and my then eleven year old is holding on to his little jump seat, going through these private properties that people kind of out of the goodness of their heart say, “Yes we’ll support this trail system”. That was really striking to me. That’s something that I think I’ll always remember.
Dr. Lisa: The cover of your Forty-Eight Hours issue which I believe is out now, is a Ford.
Susan: Antique automobile right?
Dr. Lisa: Antique automobile with it looks like either a surfboard or possibly a paddleboard on the top. But it all just screams adventure.
Susan: Yeah and it says your adventure awaits.
Dr. Lisa: At yet Maine is also simultaneously the place where we adventure and where we lay our heads down. It’s an interesting thing when we have everybody has family camps or they have these places that have become sacred spaces almost. And somehow that comes across in the magazines. How is that you manage to do that? To simultaneously put across this notion that yes, you can adventure, but you can also go somewhere and find a secret space?
Susan: Well I think even in our adventures there’s a very genuine spirit throughout the state. I think that there’s this kind of ‘win me over’ Maine attitude among real Mainers. There isn’t this phony, glitzy, really I’m from Las Angeles, which is the entertainment world, and there’s this big smile and the hug at the front, and maybe, like I always joke about the stab in the back at the back. I would say it’s really the polar of the State of Maine. I think there’s a very genuine feeling about even adventuring here. So, I think that really the two go hand in hand, that we can be at home, and really feel like there’s a genuine experience, and there’s adventure and fun. Then there’s work. I mean work is maybe this best way that I have found to happiness is through a little bit of discomfort, and I think that’s okay. I like that. I like the way that you draw that parallel and I think that we could just keep going with that. It really could be a very spiritual thing about how it isn’t always about being peaceful and happy all the time. Sometimes you have to go through the birth canal to get there.
Dr. Lisa: Susan I’m going to end our conversation with this quote from the Law of Dreams, written by Peter Behrens: “His courage, just the awareness that gestures, journeys, lives; have intrinsic shape, and must one way or another be completed; that there is a path to be followed literally to the death. Awareness is harsh but better than being unaware and never sensing a path. Better than a life of stunts, false starts, dead ends, better than the irredeemable ugliness of the half hearted. Better than feeling there is no shape to anything. There is. The world knows itself”.
It strikes me that really what we’re talking about in feeding the soul is courage; is the courage to follow something whatever that looks like even if it doesn’t feel that comfortable to us, and that’s how we are fed.
Susan: Mm. Thank you for sharing that Lisa, you gave me the chills when you read that. I think it’s courage, and sometimes it’s faith.
Dr. Lisa: I would absolutely agree, and I suspect people who are going to pick up not only this Maine Magazine, Forty–Eight Hours issue, but all of the copies of Maine Magazine. I know people still keep them. It’s funny. Maine Magazine is beloved. People keep it around forever. I have a sense that they’re going to feel that. They’re going to feel that there’s a little bit of faith, a little bit of courage, a little bit of an adventure. It’s a very new place we live in and I think that you represent it well.
Susan: Thank you so much. Thank you. I really appreciate it.
Dr. Lisa: So, I hope that people will take the time to go to your website which is?
Susan: Themainemag.com
Dr. Lisa: And also find your publications, Maine Magazine, Maine Home Design, and all of the Eat Maine, Art Maine. Also go to the Art Collector Maine website, and really learn more about feeding the soul in the way that you and everybody at Maine Media Collective is putting forth.
I’ve been speaking with the Editor in Chief of Maine Magazine, and Maine Home Design, Susan Grisanti. Thanks so much for coming in.
Susan: Thank you Lisa.
Dr. Lisa: You’ve been listening to the Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast show number 99. Feeding the soul. Our guests have included, Peter Behrens, and Susan Grisanti. For more information on our guests as well as they’re extended interviews, visit Doctorlisa.org.
We’d like you to join us for a few special events. The first is Lobsters on the Sound, taking place in South West Harbor on August 6th. Lobsters on the Sound benefits Harbor House, which serves all the people of Mount Desert Island. Every Harbor house program and activity springs from common ideas and individual contributions. With six key program areas and a roster of more than 45 health fitness educational sports community based and youth focus classes and activities. Harbor House serves every age group and every economic level. For more information visit HarborHouseMDI.org.
The next event is the 29th Annual Bike MS Great Maine Getaway out of the University of New England and Bedford Maine. During this two day ride, cyclists will experience the beauty of Maine southern coastline including an up close look at Walkers Point, the summer home of George H W Bush. This will take place on August 10 and 11, 2013. For more information, go to National MS Society.org.
The Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast is downloadable for free on iTunes. For a preview of each week show, sign up for our e newsletter, and ‘like’ our Dr. Lisa Facebook page. You can also follow me on Twitter and Pinrest, and read my take on health and wellbeing on the bountiful blog. Bountiful-blog.com. We do love to hear from so please let us know what you think of the Dr. Lisa radio hour. 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 the Dr. Lisa radio hour to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Belisle hoping that you have enjoyed our feeding the soul show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day. May you have a bountiful life.
Male: The Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast is made possible with the support of the following generous sponsors. Maine Magazine, Marci Booth of Booth Maine, Apothecary by Design, Premier Sports Health a division of Black Bear Medical, Dr. John Herzog of Orthopedic Specialists, Mike LePage and Beth Franklin of Re/Max Heritage, Ted Carter Inspired Landscapes, and Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial.
The Dr. Lisa radio hour and podcast is recorded at the studios of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street in Portland Maine. Our executive producers are Kevin Thomas and Dr. Lisa Belisle. Audio production and original music is by John C McCain. Our assistant producer is Leanne [inaudible 00:59:36]. Become a subscriber of Dr. Lisa Belisle on iTunes. See the Dr. Lisa website or Facebook page for details. Summaries of all our past shows can be found at doctorlisa.org.