A new book launching this weekend brings together stories, essays and poetry from the lives of Bucksport-area people, spanning topics from growing up poor to selling books on Main Street to working in the town’s former paper mill.
It’s the third oral history-style volume collected locally in the last decade, following “Still Mill,” recorded in the wake of the mill’s closure in 2014, and “Heart and Soul” five years later.
But the new volume, “Tell Your Story, Write Your Story, Share Your Story,” is less focused on a specific event and more on recording a time capsule of what life is like in the community today, organizers Lisa Ladd and Vanessa Newman said. They also hoped it would bridge divides between people who grew up in town and those who did not, while bringing positivity in a time they see as increasingly negative.
“This, to me, is what needs to be happening right now,” Ladd said.
As a writer, Newman said she views words as able to harm or to heal, and she wanted to find a way to use them positively.
National Public Radio projects have set out to do something similar, with programs like the Moth Radio Hour bringing people together to tell stories from their lives. The idea to create a local version in Bucksport was born during a breakfast outing shortly after the presidential election and also responded to increasing polarization on social media over local issues.
A modest start met with so much interest that it grew into five workshops and four author visits funded by a Maine Humanities Council grant, including one from the state’s poet laureate. The project was created by the Buck Memorial Library, Bucksport Bay Healthy Communities Coalition and Wednesday on Main, a local summer event series.
All ages are represented in the final volume, from children at the library’s story hour to teenagers from the REACH school to retirees. Longtime residents, former mill workers and others with long ties in the community are featured alongside those who have moved in. Some prompts were provided, but the book was open-ended and also features transcribed stories from people less comfortable with writing.
Though the project wasn’t framed around the mill, which closed a decade ago, it still figured prominently in the process.
“A lot of what we hear is still that question of ‘where do we go from here?’” Ladd said.
Even without a mill and the hundreds of jobs it provided, Bucksport has drawn new people and new ideas to its downtown as have other towns across Maine in the past five years.
Ladd, who is the town’s library director, and Newman, who works for the healthy communities coalition, both said they have experienced entrenched tension in town over people from away, sometimes firsthand. They see the book as a labor of love to express to the community that they’re committed.
It also provides a venue for these different opinions to be expressed publicly and discussed, they said, a longstanding part of New England life evidenced by traditions such as annual town meetings.
“We were hearing from community members [about] their differing perceptions and not having a place to put them,” Newman said. “And now they have a place.”
In the future, they hope the book will lead to an ongoing writing group, and that similar projects might be organized in the town’s public schools and in other communities.
The book will be archived in the Library of Congress and the Maine State Library. It’ll also be available at the Buck Memorial Library, BookStacks and at a public launch party on Saturday, Sept. 6 from 1-4 p.m. at the Bucksport Trading Post.