When Erin O’Mara told her friend Kara Douglas that she needed a creative pursuit, Douglas suggested that she head to Cundy’s Harbor to take a class on hand-carving wooden spoons. O’Mara ended up with a spatula (easier for a first-time carver than a deep ladle) and an essay about the experience in the Harpswell Anchor.
“I have Harpswell to thank for my writing,” says O’Mara, who began writing her monthly “Never Not Amazed” column for the Anchor in 2022, soon after that first essay. “The column is a creative outlet for me, but it’s also a conversation starter.” Last fall, when Douglas asked O’Mara to help her edit a collection of personal essays by Mainers, O’Mara agreed.
“The most important thing for me and the reason I said yes,” O’Mara remembers, “was because Kara asked.”
“Alive to This: Essays on Living Fully by 20 Maine Writers” was released in October by Portland’s Littoral Books, an independent press founded by a group of young women in 1975. Co-founder Agnes Bushell describes how Douglas pitched the collection to her and her husband at the Portland Poetry Festival: “Kara came to us with the idea, and we were delighted because it was something we’d been thinking of for several years. We got a really wonderful collection, I think — a very varied collection.”
To garner contributors from across the state, Bushell put out a call through the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance. She also contacted a handful of authors she knew personally.
A novelist and former professor of writing at the Maine College of Art & Design, Bushell’s connection to Maine’s writing community stretches back to 1975, when she and a group of college friends started Littoral Books to publish a collection of poems by local women. Those women included Janet Mills, now governor of Maine.
“Alive to This” gathers personal essays on disassembling an old barn in Unity and taking a dance class, jumping between rooftops as a boy in Kurdistan and running with a mask on during the new days of the pandemic.
“Here’s this book that’s got 20 different ways of looking at the world through the lens of living fully,” Bushell says, “and I think that’s amazing.” She plans to nominate the book for the Maine Literary Awards.
“There was a big,” starts O’Mara — “Huge!” corrects Douglas — “learning curve for us,” finishes O’Mara, talking about the year they spent putting “Alive to This” together.
“We took all the submissions in and read them separately, read them together — we were learning how to do it as we were doing it,” O’Mara adds.
Both Douglas and O’Mara live on Harpswell Neck. Douglas, who moved to Harpswell in 2008, is a poet and yoga teacher, as well as a former reporter for the Harpswell Anchor.
“I had to just write when everyone was asleep,” she says, describing the years when she had young children and was starting a small business.
O’Mara has family roots in Harpswell. (“My father just had the audacity to leave Maine,” she quips). She moved here year-round in 2020. A background in media leadership led her to begin focusing on her own writing.
Douglas and O’Mara each have two essays in the collection. In “On Falling,” Douglas writes about the moment when a massive limb cracks off the trunk of “the Baldwin,” an apple tree that “predates the Emancipation Proclamation, the invention of the automobile, and a woman’s right to vote,” and the reverence she feels for its fierce, long life. One of O’Mara’s essays describes postholing in the mud of the Ecuadorian jungle, six months into a solo trip around the world, and how a local guide’s kindness helped repair her “Broken Bootstraps.”
“Editing this anthology was a spark of aliveness and gift to us,” the two write in the book’s introduction. The theme was Douglas’ idea: After a harrowing experience in a sea kayak that required her to be “completely present,” she had captured that feeling in an essay.
“It’s not an instruction manual for what you need to do to be alive,” Douglas says of the collection. “There’s just this deeper sense of connection and possibility.”
Douglas and O’Mara hope the diversity of experience captured in “Alive to This” will allow many people to relate to the stories within. As Douglas puts it: “I feel like the world needs that sense of reconnect so much.””Alive to This: Essays on Living Fully by 20 Maine Writers” is available online from Littoral Books. It also is stocked at local Sherman’s bookstores and Brunswick’s Gulf of Maine Books.
