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- Maine Metaphor: The Gulf
Each summer weekend can be like a holiday here in Maine. Once, to the Vikings, it was rugged Vineland; today Maine is Vacationland. After a hard, dirty winter, mild air and watery sunlit places are calling: an abundance of evocative coastal places within a couple minutes' or couple of hours' drive. The author experienced one beach not typical of Maine. It was different in a lively way. She and her spouse, Allen, drove to Auburn for groceries and suddenly decided--over lunch in the Nickel Diner--to go visit Old Orchard Beach before grocery shopping.Old Orchard Beach has long been a resort town, situated in a curve of Saco Bay and full of mechanized carnival life, its waterfront crammed with screaming or jovial activity, shimmering in sunlight. After a search in side streets full of summer lodgings and cars, the travelers locate a place to park, then walk down to the sea--down to "Maine on the Mediterranean."
S. Dorman is author of The God’s Cycle, a series of novels set in fictional Gottheim, Maine. She writes the nonfiction Maine Metaphor, a memoir in four volumes, based on undergraduate and graduate studies in various aspects of the State O’Maine. She is the author of Fantastic Travelogue: Mark Twain and C. S. Lewis Talk Things over in the Hereafter, based on graduate work in the humanities. S. Dorman also writes speculative fiction and satire.
“Susan Dorman has produced an unusual book about Maine. She discovered Maine decades ago and remembers that her ‘eyes were made new here,’ seeing ‘its beauty and ways in something of the manner of those Northmen,’ the Vikings, who sailed into the high, rocky coast of its gulf. Now, she writes about this evocative place, the gulf, in a manner in itself evocative, seeing it as representative of Maine’s great diversity of nature and fascinating way of life.”
—Dean Bennett, professor emeritus, University of Maine at Farmington
“Like Thomas De Quincey, Paul Metcalf, and other blessedly unclassifiable writers, S. Dorman shows us the contours of the familiar world—and our lives in it—from fresh angles: she is a master of ‘the ordinary extraordinary,’ as her new book yet again confirms.”
—John Wilson, senior editor, Marginalia Review of Books