I have been meaning to reintroduce myself to this blog. On July 15, E. and I set off on a cross-country move from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine–a long trip that left surprisingly little time for pleasure reading. Still, I made it across fourteen states and through David Pressfield’s Gates of Fire, and have unpacked all the boxes and begun Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions. (Incidentally, it’s a lewd little treasure, tempered with his usual sad cleverness.)
My new home and office are located downtown, in an architectural farrago at the very end of a dead-end street. The building itself is the last in a row of redbrick office structures. Our living room faces the Cumberland County Civic Center: basically, a mid-century concrete fortress. And my desk window overlooks a line of gaunt, weathered houses that could have been taken from The Shipping News.
The streets are full of potholes, and in the potholes you can see the cobblestones underneath. It’s a fair metaphor for the city itself, whose history shows through the layer of restaurants, gift shops, backlit ATMs, hotels, and bank buildings. Every morning at the wharf, lobster vessels set out before dawn, and among all the sailboats on the water, you’ll see thousands of round buoys marking the traps.
I realize that I missed this twin sense of history and labor in Oregon’s Portland, and I’m glad to be back on the East Coast. For my non-Maine friends, if you’d like to write to me, you can do it from this website or through Facebook–or if you still have paper and ink, I can even give you my mailing address. Nothing has changed with my editing business, or my plans to finish the next novel this winter. In the meantime, here are a few shots of our trip eastward.
Stay tuned for an interview with Pacific NW fantasy author Adam Copeland, who released his first novel, ECHOES OF AVALON, this summer.
Tags: miscellany, travel, work in progress
Welcome! We hope you like our city as much as we do.
Nice blog, nice website! Interesting reading. Thanks for sending me the link. John
Dana–the visit to my website is truly appreciated, thank you!
John–see you at Backspace in November? We should sit down over coffee this time.