Guests
by Paul Doiron, July 8, 2011 11:34 AM
There's a familiar Maine joke — hell, it's probably a joke everywhere — about a tourist coming upon an old timer in a backwoods cabin and asking him disdainfully, "Have you lived in this place your whole life?" And the old timer answers, "Not yet." That's sort of how I feel about writing. The most common question I get asked at readings is, "How long did it take to write the book?" I've never understood why the matter is of such widespread interest. Maybe it's because writing a novel seems like such a colossal undertaking (which it can be).
In any case, the answer I always give for The Poacher's Son is "about five to six years." With Trespasser the answer is "about two and a half years." And for my next book it will be even less.
But the truth is, it's taken me a lifetime to write these novels. A lifetime of growing up, making mistakes, learning my craft. And like the old timer in the Maine joke, it's not like my journey is over yet thank you very much. My story continues.
I'm typing these words from a hotel room in New York City that's about the size (and temperature) of a beer cooler. I'm here because The Poacher's Son was nominated as "Best First Novel" for the prestigious Strand Critics Award, which is chosen every year by a panel of the nation's top mystery book reviewers. Two nights ago, I showed up for the awards ceremony, a nervous nominee at a posh executive club. The next thing I knew I was being introduced to bestselling author Laura Lippman and David Simon, who created The Wire and Treme. A little while later, I learned that I had won and was making a rambling speech at a podium with an odd-shaped trophy in hand. In a daze, I soon found myself standing next to Michael Connelly, who won for "Best Novel" for The Reversal, posing for a photograph.
Last night, I attended a party that my publisher, Minotaur, gives each year to kick off the annual ThrillerFest convention. I was talking to my publicist when John Lescroart — John Lescroart! — elbowed his way through the crowd to introduce himself to me as a fan of my books.
I'm not telling these stories to advertise myself (not entirely, at least): I am telling them because I, too, am in a state of disbelief about my good fortune. As I always remind audiences: until The Poacher's Son came out last year, I had spent most of my life as a failed author. Of course, I wasn't really a failure any more than winning prizes or hobnobbing with literary celebrities now makes me a success.
The true measure of success for a writer — the reason I have written all my life even when I seemed to have no reason to continue — comes from the reward of communicating heart-to-heart with readers. It's nice to have millions of readers with whom you create that sort of bond — but it's not necessary. A few are all it takes. Maybe even one is enough. Keep that in mind the next time you receive a rejection notice, and remember how long my "overnight success" took, as well.
I hope that over the past five days I've given you a sense of who I am as a writer and a person and that this online introduction will prompt you to pick up The Poacher's Son or Trespasser, and that something in those books will resonate with you. Thank you to the good people at Powell's for giving me this unique opportunity. May we meet again on our mutual
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Guests
by Paul Doiron, July 7, 2011 12:04 PM
My new novel Trespasser opens with a woman hitting a deer on a foggy Maine road. She's alone in a remote and unfamiliar place. What is she supposed to do? It's an increasingly common (and scary) occurrence. Over the past 10 years, Maine has averaged more than 3,000 deer-vehicle crashes each year.
In one of my favorite natural history books, Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America, Richard Nelson writes: Few events in the history of North American wildlife have been so remakable, so unexpected, and so provocative of conflict as the rise of the suburban deer. In some places, as city waistlines spread into the countryside, deer have held their own instead of fleeing to rural lands that are already overcrowded with their own kind. And in other places, deer from the outlands have gradually colonized our neighborhoods, their trails weaving like veins of wilderness through the geometry of backyards, greenways, and roads. From 1997 to 2007 a wildlife management district along the southern Maine coast had an average of 50 deer per square mile.
And many of these deer were infested with ticks (as much as 100 per animal) that carried Lyme disease. The prevalence of Lyme disease, an inflammatory ailment that can cause longterm damage to the heart and nervous system, has become epidemic in places. On Monhegan Island, nine miles off the Maine coast, residents voted to exterminate every last deer on the island after 13 percent of the human populaton came down with the disease. It's no wonder that the New Yorker writer John McPhee once called deer "rats with antlers, roaches with split hooves."
They are also spectacularly beautiful and graceful creatures that are a lot stranger than most people probably realize. Here are seven facts about deer that aren't widely known:
- Deer can sprint up to 30 miles per hour and leap as high as 10 feet and as far as 30 feet in a single bound.
- One in 30,000 deer is an albino.
- Deer can become rabid (so watch out!). A September 2010 Pennyslvania rabies report listed six white-tailed deer out of the 312 total positive rabies cases for the year to date. By comparison, Maine had no rabid deer through that date last year and none through June 2011. Just lots of foxes, raccoons, skunks, and a single sheep. That's right: a rabid sheep.
- During the fawning seasons (May–June) of 2005 and 2006, 13 con?rmed incidences of white-tailed deer attacking humans occurred on the campus of Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
- Deer have dichromatic (two-color) vision while humans have trichromatic vision. So what deer do not see are the oranges and reds that stand out so well to people — which is why blaze orange doesn't make hunters more noticeable to deer.
- White-tailed deer have been known to opportunistically feed on nesting songbirds and field mice.
- Dick Day, the illustrator who created Bambi for Walt Disney, used real fawns from Maine's Baxter State Park as his prototypes — so Bambi as we know him is indisputably a Maine
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Guests
by Paul Doiron, July 6, 2011 11:13 AM
In my new book, Trespasser, I observe that the most famous game warden in history is Robin Hood's arch foe, the Big Cheese of Nottingham. I think that says a lot about the relative obscurity of the profession of conservation law enforcement officer. It also frames the unique challenge of writing crime novels for a modern audience about a job that seemingly had its heyday during the time of Friar Tuck. The profession of game warden has changed considerably since the reign of John Lackland. Medieval wardens were basically armored thugs whose job was to punish any knave or varlet caught poaching the king's deer. Protecting natural resources for future generations was not foremost in their minds (unless it was for future generations of Plantagenets).
Modern game wardens, by contrast, are dedicated professionals who risk their lives to stop elephant poachers, break up smuggling rings that trade in endangered birds and snakes (or even, more weirdly, in animal parts related to erectile dysfunction), and generally protect the well-being of people in remote and dangerous parts of the world. When I began researching my first novel, The Poacher's Son, I thought I knew about most of the brave and important work wardens did, but in truth, I had no clue. Nor do most people, I soon discovered.
As my crime-solving protagonist, Warden Mike Bowditch, explains, "What I tried to explain to these nice people was that I was a cop and the forest was my beat." But even that description isn't completely accurate. In Maine, for example, game wardens have all the powers of state troopers. They are also charged with a slew of unusual duties that change from season to season. In the winter they enforce the state's snowmobile laws (13,000 miles of trail) and check ice fishing licenses. In mud season — which Mainers have instead of spring — they chase ATV vandals. Wardens enforce boating laws on Maine's 5,782 lakes and ponds as well as on all navigable rivers. In the summertime they stumble on backwoods marijuana plantations. And poaching — a year-round problem — gets worse as hunting season nears in the fall. Then there are the four-season emergencies: deer-car and moose-car collisions, tracking escaped convicts, rescuing injured mountain climbers, searching for people lost in the woods.
"Most days," Bowditch says, "I patrolled my district by truck, boat, or snowmobile, issuing warnings, handing out summons, and making arrests. Wherever I went in the woods, I traveled with the heart-heavy knowledge that I was alone and without backup, that the most apparently casual encounter could turn bad on me if I let down my guard, and that if I ran into trouble, I should probably not expect help any time soon."
Given this job description, I am surprised that so few crime authors have made game wardens their protagonists. Fiction is all about conflict, and game wardens live every day on the razor's edge between the past and the future, the city and the forest. A few years ago, Nature seemed to be losing topicality, but that was before a hurricane swallowed the Big Easy, an even bigger wave washed away part of Japan, and tornadoes cleared a mile-wide path through a Midwestern city.
Things are getting pretty wild out there, and, increasingly, game wardens are finding themselves at the center of the action. I don’t expect I’ll run out things to write about any time
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Guests
by Paul Doiron, July 5, 2011 12:02 PM
Here's the thing about being struck by lightning: It feels exactly like you'd expect it to feel. Your brain sizzles. Your heart tries to burst through your chest like the xenomorph from Alien, and every muscle in your body does a simultaneous full-flex. Even the hair on your head rises. I know because it happened to me. People use the term "being struck by lightning" as a metaphor all the time. It suggests a nearly impossible occurrence or some other life-changing event. That's what it was for me — both as a writer and a man. That near-death experience served as the starting point for both my writing career and my lifelong fascination with Maine game wardens. I never would have written The Poacher's Son or Trespasser, in other words, if I hadn't nearly been fried.
On Memorial Day weekend 23 years ago I went camping with two friends in the mountains of western Maine. I slept horribly on the first night of the expedition, nightmares all night long. So before going to sleep on the second night I moved my tent out from under a fir tree at the edge of the clearing.
I was fast asleep when the lightning struck. The bolt hit the tree under which I had been camped, and the electricity traveled through the roots. (If I hadn't moved my tent I would have been electrocuted and crushed by the falling tree.) I was actually blown off the ground and received a burn the size of a quarter on my side. My friend, sleeping in a tent nearer the tree, was not so lucky: The current nearly killed him. We were miles from the nearest road, one thousand feet up in elevation. I spent five hours alone with my friend, thinking he would die, while his brother fetched help.
Just before dawn, help finally arrived — two emergency medical technicians and the district game warden, a rugged man named Don Gray. They stabilized my friend's breathing. Soon volunteers from the Appalachian Mountain Club and Outward Bound arrived to carry the litter down the steep hill to the ambulance.
My friend spent a week in the hospital, and doctors told us that his heart had stopped when the lightning struck. He recovered fully except that he had no memory of that night.
The article I wrote about our ordeal was the first I ever published, and it appeared in Down East, the same magazine I now edit.
Despite my own trauma, I continued to explore the Maine woods, finding my way into the remote and dangerous back-country. I met other game wardens and made friends with old loggers and trappers, even a former poacher or two. I started writing about some of these people, first for Down East and later in The Poacher's Son and Trespasser.
In time, I decided I was ready to take the test to become a Registered Maine Guide. Maine is one of the only states to require that anyone who guides people into the wilderness be licensed. At my oral exam I would face a panel of experienced and unforgiving outdoorsmen who would grill me on using a map and compass, first aid, woodcraft, canoeing, and finding lost people.
On the morning of my exam, I was surprised to find, sitting across the table from me, a familiar face. Don Gray had retired from the Maine Warden Service, but he was still testing the mettle of potential guides.
I introduced myself as one of the boys struck by lightning on Baldpate Mountain so long ago.
Don nodded knowingly. "God," he said, "wasn't that one hell of a night, though?"
An hour later I passed his
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Guests
by Paul Doiron, July 4, 2011 9:40 AM
The first thing you should probably know about me, assuming you haven't yet read my crime novels, The Poacher's Son and Trespasser, is that I am from Maine. I went to high school in Portland the other one. It might not be widely known out west, but Mainers nurture a keen resentment toward your beautiful city which was named after ours by the turncoat Mainer Francis W. Pettygrove because you have outstripped us in almost every conceivable way. Any time we travel outside New England, we must explain that, no, we come from the smaller, eastern Portland the one with the lobsters. This distinction is an area of special interest to me. In my day job, when I am not writing my novels, I am the editor in chief of Down East: The Magazine of Maine. The magazine was founded in 1954, which makes us roughly the same age as Playboy, but none of our attractions are airbrushed or enhanced with silicone. In the jargon of the magazine trade, Down East is what's called a "regional" publication, meaning we are devoted to all things Maine: travel, arts, politics, etc. Our 404,000 readers are crazy about everything having to do with my home state, because people are frankly obsessed with it. There's a mystique to Maine. Unfortunately, the mystique is based on lots of myths. Yes, we are the nation's preeminent exporters of lobsters (93 million pounds of them in 2010), and we have our fair share of lighthouses (63 by most counts). We are home to a stunning national park, Acadia, that draws millions of visitors (yes, you must visit). And there are indeed plenty of moose here (although I know native Mainers who have never seen one). But here are some things about Maine you might not know: Maine is the most heavily forested state in the nation. It is also the most sparsely settled state east of the Mississippi. We are the nation's second-home capital, with more seasonal camps and cottages per capita than any other state. Our population is the oldest in the country and getting older, which might surprise Floridians. Lastly, we are a remarkably safe place to live. Maine consistently has one of the lowest crime rates in the nation. Now, this probably comes as news to you, if you have ever encountered a book by a little-known author named Stephen King. In the popular imagination Maine is a place of pet "semataries," telekinetic prom queens, rabid St. Bernards, vampire children who float outside windows, and killer clowns who hang out in sewers. Given Mr. King's world-wide popularity, it's a wonder the Maine Department of Tourism manages to attract anyone to this blood-soaked, supernatural wilderness. I suspect, actually, that the opposite phenomenon applies: Travelers come to Maine for its dark and fog-bound allure. As a relatively new crime novelist who sets his books in Maine, I therefore owe Stephen King and the many other great writers of suspense and mystery here a profound debt of thanks. The myth they helped create is the bedrock upon which I am constructing my series of Mike Bowditch novels. Thank you to Powell's for hosting me here this week. I hope you'll come back tomorrow so I can share with you the story of my first encounter with a game warden and how it changed my life, both as a writer and a man. Here's a hint: It involved 100 million volts of
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