This is not fiction. My novels are listed on the BOOK SHELF and my short stories (fiction) are collected under the title Tales to Warm Your Mind. Here, instead, are some pieces I wrote to inform, entertain, or reflect upon subjects that have mattered to me.
After all, beer matters. It’s a brand, (trademark pending), but a brand you can use. (go to the article)
You might think that a guide just gets paid to go fishing. There is that; but let me tell you about a few incidents from my last few years in the woods. (go to the article)
I still don’t know how to tell whether a life is at stake when someone asks: Can I talk to you? I do know that is why I now stop and try to hear the message most of the time when someone speaks to me. (go to the article)
A pair of abandoned, standard-gauge steam locomotives of the Eagle Lake & West Branch Railroad stand in a small clearing deep in the north woods of Maine. Canoeists on the Allagash Wilderness Waterway go ashore and see them. This is a guide to finding them if you don’t intend to canoe the entire Allagash River. (go to the article)
Perhaps unique among American employers because it was so remote from notice and completely surrounded by the natural resources that provided both raw material and power, Great Northern Paper Company in 1977 was the product of a century of American industrial Zeitgeist. Its 4,200 workers offered living proof that capitalism works and that both the employer and its people need merely to be left alone and they will indeed get it right. But, within a decade, the impulse of government to protect everything by regulating it to death had injected a lethal dose of too much caring. This is a memoir of those days. (go to the article)
In the summer of 1970 I was still looking for a 1939 Chrysler straight-eight motor. An issue of the Maine Sunday Telegram that summer brought me to the most ethereal, enchanting place I’ve ever been. The newspaper reported on a man from away who was searching for his ancestors’ graves in South Thomaston. He had found the Thorndike cemetery, but the article played on his complaint that the graveyard was surrounded by an immense junkyard of pre-war cars. (go to the article)
Non-fiction, essays, biography, cartoons, photography, fiction, short stories — by categories these are my favorite books of all time — more than 80, actually, and the list is growing. (go to the article)
A song I composed in 1992 while driving. I passed the turnoff to a side road that had a sign post with the name of the road (I forget what it was) and also had a Dead End sign. The chorus of the song came to me immediately, and by the time I reached home I had one verse, part of another, and a tune to go with it all. (go to the article)
DamnYankee.com 