“Orr’s Island is the place that’s been most important to my life as a writer,” says Elise Juska, author of the new novel “Reunion.”
For Juska, writing about Maine during the pandemic was a way to make her way back to the state through fiction. While a student at Bowdoin College, she felt “sort of incredulous” that Orr’s Island, with its “gorgeous, otherworldly landscape,” was only 20 minutes away. Still, she didn’t go there often. But between graduation and becoming an author, her own story with Orr’s had unfolded.
Juska graduated from Bowdoin in 1995 as an English major. The influence of fiction workshops in the Chase Barn Chamber and of professor Frank Burroughs, whom she calls the most important teacher she has ever had, stayed with her after graduation. So did a handful of close friends. One summer when she was in her early 30s, Juska rented a cottage for a month on Orr’s Island — along Atlantic Place, past the end of Ledgemere Road. For her, Orr’s was the perfect place to write.
That was 2005. Juska stayed the month, then another. The owners lived in a house across the yard, and one was a Bowdoin professor. Juska used their internet after a lightning storm. She walked the paths by what is now the Schiller Coastal Studies Center, and the Cliff Trail on Mountain Road. Then she returned for the entire summer, alone, for the next seven years.
“I fell in love with it,” Juska says. “I didn’t mind the solitude because the island community was so kind to me.”
Juska, an author of five novels and numerous short stories, has taught creative writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia for 24 years. When she was spending summers on Orr’s, she’d leave the day after her spring classes ended and drive back to Philadelphia the day before the fall ones began.
She describes the work she did on the island as “tunnelling down into my writing,” a process that may not have been possible anywhere else — and necessitated time alone. Still, there were moments of connection. The library book sale in Harpswell, she says, was one of her favorite days of the year.
Unlike so much of her writing, Juska drafted most of “Reunion” from her home in Philadelphia, during lockdown. In 2020, her 25th Bowdoin reunion was canceled because of the pandemic. “Out of that disappointment,” Juska says, “I started imagining a story that was set there.”
The book, which began as a scene about someone going to their postponed reunion a year later, tracks three friends whose experience at such a reunion touches the rest of their lives. Although Hope, Polly, and Adam have remained close after graduation, each has left holes in what they’ve told the others about their lives — until they band together to find Polly’s son, who has run away on the fictional Ledgemere Island.
“Part of the reason it’s set where it’s set is I missed the place so much,” explains Juska. “I was stuck at home and wanted to be somewhere else.”
Although her best friends in college were also a man and woman, Juska says the details of the characters in “Reunion” were invented, with an important exception. “One thing that feels like me is that Hope’s college experience feels so immediate to her,” she says.
Juska still returns to Orr’s for a week each summer, now accompanied by her husband and son. Fittingly, she completed the final edits of “Reunion” on the island. The mornings she spent finishing the novel there “felt perfect,” she says.
“Reunion,” released in May, is available on Amazon and directly from the publisher, HarperCollins. It is also in stock at Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick.
On Aug. 6 at 6 p.m., Juska will give a talk about the novel at Longfellow Books in Portland. Her conversation partner for the event is Meredith Hall, a Maine author who was a classmate of Juska’s in writing workshops at Bowdoin. For more information about the event, go to longellowbooks.com.
