Monica Wood reads from her new novel at Falmouth Memorial Library. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer
Nina Woodward was still giddy about a July visit from Monica Wood.
Woodward was happily amazed that Wood, a bestselling author from Maine with a national reputation, would make an appearance at the tiny Chase Emerson Memorial Library on Deer Isle, where Woodward is director. The library is open just 17 hours a week and has no full-time staff. Located more than three hours from Portland, on an island, it’s not exactly an easy stop for authors on tour.
“It was such a huge get for us. When I heard she was offering to come to any Maine library, I immediately reached out,” said Woodward. “Patrons were asking me, ‘How did you ever get Monica Wood?’ It was so gracious for someone of her caliber to do this for small institutions like us.”
Wood gave a talk on the Deer Isle library’s lawn on July 22, in the middle of an intensive Maine tour that started when her new novel “How to Read a Book” came out in early May. By the time it ends in October, Wood will have given talks or done signings in more than 40 locations around the state.
Most have been libraries, 28 of them from Sanford and York to Presque Isle and Fort Kent. Along the way, she’s scheduled stops in out-of-the way mill towns and rural communities, including Pittsfield, Jay, Carmel, Millinocket and Readfield.
She’s also been to several Portland-area libraries and has visited book clubs and bookstores. Her tour is unusual not only because of the number of appearances – about a dozen stops is the norm – but because of her focus on going to small libraries in every corner of the state, librarians and other writers say. She’s only made a half dozen or so appearances since the book came out that weren’t in Maine.
“Tours like this are very rare in Maine. I can’t really think of anything else that compares. It’s such a huge state with so many small places, so something like this really tough to pull off,” said Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, executive director of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, which organizes many author events. “I’m surprised, but not surprised, because she’s such a lovely person, so beloved around the state, and Maine figures so prominently in her work.”
Wood, who lives in Portland, has gained popular and critical success over a 30-year career as a novelist and playwright, while earning a reputation as someone who depicts Maine and its people honestly and vividly. “How to Read a Book” was picked as one of the six “books we recommend this week” by New York Times critics shortly after it came out. Her 2016 novel, “The One-in-a-Million Boy,” was a national bestseller and was translated into 20 languages. Her 2012 memoir about growing up in the Maine paper mill town of Mexico, “When We Were the Kennedys,” was a New England bestseller and winner of the May Sarton Memoir Award.
Her other works of fiction include “Any Bitter Thing,” “Ernie’s Ark” and “My Only Story.” In 2018, she received the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance Distinguished Achievement Award for her work over the years. This month, she was given the 2024 Sarah Josepha Hale Award, presented annually since 1956 by the Richards Free Library in Newport, New Hampshire, to recognize New England writers with a ” distinguished body of work in the field of literature and letters.” The first winner was Robert Frost and recent honorees include Richard Russo and Jodi Picoult.
BRING BACK THE JOY
Wood, 71, says the long and geographically challenging tour was her way of thanking Maine readers for supporting her and reading her books. But she also went on the five-month-long tour because she felt she needed to.
Her book was originally scheduled to come out a year earlier, in 2023, but there was a strike among workers at her publisher, HarperCollins. After learning about the strike, which included her editor, she decided in the fall of 2022 not to sign off on the release of her book until the strike was settled. Growing up in a union family in the paper-making town of Mexico, near Rumford, she felt compelled to not “cross the picket line” with her book.
The strike was settled in February of 2023, but the delay meant the book was rescheduled for release in May of this year. Wood said the strike and the delay “sucked all the joy” out of having a new book go on sale and going on tour. To try to recapture that, she decided she needed to focus a tour on her home state, where she grew up, where her family is and where she has so many loyal readers.
Monica Wood speaks to a full room – 80 people – at Falmouth Memorial Library on Sept. 11. Derek Davis/Staff Photographer
The homing instinct also told her to visit lots of libraries, since the library has always been a place where she’s felt at home, beginning with the first library she ever entered, the Mexico Public Library on Main Street, a couple blocks from a massive paper mill.
“The minute I got back on the road and started meeting readers who had read it, all the joy of it was restored to me, which was a really great thing,” Wood told a packed room of 80 people at the Falmouth Memorial Library on Sept. 11. “So thank you and all the other wonderful Maine readers who have welcomed me into their teeny libraries and big libraries and community centers. It really has been palliative, for me, to have this happen.”
To create her tour, she asked librarian Lisa Joyce at the South Portland Public Library to put out her offer to as many libraries as possible via email, and she began hearing from them right away. Despite the fact that she hates to drive, Wood started booking library dates.
Her husband, Dan Abbott, is a professor in the architectural and engineering design department at Southern Maine Community College in South Portland, so he drove her to many of the talks during the summer when he was off work. She’s asked a friend to drive her on the last leg of the tour, in late September and October, with stops in Fort Kent, Presque Isle, Millinocket and Bangor. Her last southern Maine library talk will be at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 26, at Prince Memorial Library in Cumberland.
Wood’s been welcomed on her tour with relatively big crowds, especially in small places. She drew 58 people in Deer Isle, which has a population of about 3,000. In Falmouth, the 80 seats had been reserved for more than a month, and there was a waiting list of 30. The staff at the Falmouth library also had a pre-talk cocktail party in her honor, with donors as invited guests. She drew 80 people to the York Library and more than 100 people to the South Portland Library, both events held this month.
She’s also felt welcome because of the personal connections readers want to make with her. At the event at Libby Memorial Library in Old Orchard Beach in early September, a woman drove from New York City to have Wood sign her book for her baby granddaughter. At several stops, she’s run into Mexico and Rumford natives who had her sister as a teacher in high school. Some people have given her books they’ve written – historical fiction, memoirs – not to get a blurb for the jacket, but just to share it with another Maine writer.
At the Gray Public Library in May, Wood was greeted by a 30-year-old African parrot named Zimmy. Wood has been fascinated with research on African gray parrots for years, about how smart they are, and was “dying to put this job into a book” for years. In “How to Read a Book,” one of the main characters gets a job as an assistant to an African gray parrot researcher.
While writing her book, she had heard about Zimmy and contacted his owner, Donna Gerardo, a librarian in Gray. Gerardo and Zimmy helped Wood with her research. So, of course, when Wood spoke at the Gray Public Library, Zimmy had to be there.
“He was mister sweetness and light with her. He let her kiss him and everything,” said Gerardo.
Monica Wood got a visit from a parrot named Zimmy when she spoke at the Gray Public Library. Photo courtesy of Monica Wood
RECOMMENDED READING
New York Times reviewer Helen Simonson called Wood’s latest book “a charming, openhearted novel, deceptively easy to read but layered with sharp observations, hard truths and rich ideas.”
Set in and around Portland, “How to Read a Book” is the story of three people whose lives connect in tragic and heartwarming ways. There’s Violet Powell, 22, recently released from a Maine’s women’s prison after serving time for killing a woman while driving drunk. There’s Harriet Larson, a retired teacher who had led a book group in the prison where Violet was held. And finally there’s Frank Daigle, a retired machinist whose wife was killed in Violet’s drunk-driving accident. He now works at a local bookstore as a handyman, and that’s where they all meet. It’s called Wadsworth Books, which is based on Longfellow Books in Monument Square.
While speaking at the Falmouth library, Wood talked about how she had led reading and writing groups at the women’s portion of the Maine Correctional Center in Windham. To understand Frank’s character, she said she spent time with students learning to be machinists at SMCC.
She also told the audience she wrote much of “How to Read a Book” in the Falmouth Memorial Library, just a few minutes’ drive from her home in Portland. She likes to write there, she said, because “the chairs are the size of beds, and there’s nowhere in this library that doesn’t have good light.”
The audience for her 6 p.m. talk in Falmouth started arriving a half hour before the talk. Some people said they signed up for the reserved seats in June or July, as soon as they heard Wood was coming.
Several audiences members said before the talk that they liked that Wood was making an effort to reach so many Maine readers and stay true to her Maine roots.
“I heard her on Maine Public (radio) say that she’s doing this tour because she’s so very grateful to the libraries in Maine,” said Chrys Hahn, 69, a retired English teacher from Falmouth. “I was pretty taken with that. It says something about her, that she’s willing to give back. She’s a real Maine girl.”
Vanessa Record, an attorney from Falmouth who came to the reading with her mother and daughter, said she liked that, by visiting libraries all over the state, Wood was showing Mainers that being a successful author from Maine was possible, a tangible goal.
Wood says she knows her journey around Maine might seem like a farewell tour to some, but it’s not. She plans to keep writing. And even though publishing “How to Read a Book” was difficult for her, the tour has made it worthwhile.
“Readers have been so incredibly sweet, bringing me flowers or books. I’ve been extremely touched by it all,” Wood said in early September, her tour nearing its end. “I feel now I owe a big thank you to the readers of Maine for restoring the joy to my writing life.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-18 05:50:00
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