Maine Metaphor: The Green and Blue House

How to live in rural Maine? How--in the 1980s when descendants of Maines settlers wonder about our coming out of the Rust Belt in search of work in search of a life? They were not bitter about our coming here where jobs were already scarce--they were incredulous. Why did we come? Sometimes I answered God. God brought us the formerly middle-class inept to live among these most hardy and canny of make-do people. God brought us to experience life in Maine where my spouse sometimes worked turning and trimming four thousand boards a night waking to drive one hundred miles round-trip to finish our undergraduate educations with the aid of loans and grants. So I studied the place where we came to live. And I forgot where we came from. Rural Maine was ragged rugged hardscrabble and wild--but full of the most visible vital natural creation. Ive tried to express that aspect of Maine life in The Green and Blue House. And there is the metaphor also. S. Dorman has lived in Maine and studied its ways for thirty years. She is the author of several works of speculative fiction including The Gods Cycle Gottims Monster 1808 and Fantastic Travelogue. Maine Metaphor is her first book of creative nonfiction.