Searsport, famed for sea captains

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Hard to believe, driving on U.S. Route 1 along Penobscot Bay, that one rather quaint village was once a thriving maritime center of significance.

These days, Searsport, population 2,649, is eclipsed by Belfast, Camden, and Rockland on the waters to the south

But it is worth a second look. Here’s why.

  1. A taste of the past. Settled in the 1670s, Searsport retains the federal-style brick downtown of a century-and-a-half ago as well as magnificent sea captain’s mansions now operated as bed-and-breakfast inns.
  2. Penobscot Marine Museum. Anchoring the downtown in its 13 historic and modern buildings, the museum displays treasures from the region’s seafaring riches, including a large collection of boats, in addition to displays reflecting Penobscot life over the years. For researchers, its library and archives offer historic and genealogical depth.
  3. Historic harbor. Maine’s second largest deep-water port once had 17 shipyards that constructed 200 ships.
  4. Rail connection. The waterfront further flourished when the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad opened a terminus in 1905, bypassing the Central Maine Railroad for shipping potatoes, timber, and ice by water and importing coal for its locomotives and points north.
  5. Shipmasters. At one point, one-tenth of the U.S. merchant marine deep-water captains were from Searsport, nearly 300 in all, many of them sailing as far as India and China. The majority came from just two extended families, or so I’ve heard.  
  6. Joanna Colcord. Among the prized possessions of the marine museum are nearly 700 glass and cellulose photographic negatives taken by the daughter of a famed Searsport sea captain. Joanna Colcord was born in 1882 in the South Seas aboard the bark Charlotte A. Littlefield. She grew up mostly at sea on the ships her father commanded, but was well educated, earning a Master’s in chemistry was she had moved ashore. The museum also has an annotated scrapbook and postcards she sent from abroad. In addition, she’s valued as an essential collector of historic chanteys and other seafaring songs.
  7. Lincoln Colcord: Her father had married a year before her birth. On his wedding night, his bride, Jane, set sail with him for China. Having captain’s wives and children accompany long voyages was not uncommon, as his daughter documented. Also born on the journey was son Lincoln, who would become a prolific author. The Colcord family had deep roots in northern New England’s coast, going back to Edward Colcord, a signer of the Dover Combination in 1640 in New Hampshire. (I finally connected the surname to my research for Quaking Dover – yay!) From what I see looking at the genealogies, it produced a preponderance of males who wound up in Searsport.
  8. Phineas Banning Blanchard. Here’s another example of an old Searsport family that produced generations of sea captains. Phineas Blanchard was born in 1879 aboard the bark the Wealthy Pendleton, which at the time was grounded on a mud flat in southern California. He grew up to become one of the last masters of tall ships. His first command came when he was just 19. His final voyage aboard a masted ship was with the Bangalore in 1906, made with his newlywed wife, Georgia Maria Gilkey, which was chronicled in several books and articles. As I was saying about wives at sea? He was also a master woodworker who created dozens of fine model ships. And he became wealthy, spending most of his adult years in New York City.
  9. John C. Blanchard. As a further taste of the museum’s archives and the town’s prominence of sea captains across generations of families, I’ll cite the surviving letters of Captain John Clifford Blanchard, 1811-1887, reflecting his voyages, family, and business interests. He emerged as prominent in the lucrative sugar trade from Cuba. The letters detail many of the hardships, including illnesses, that plagued the captains and their crews. Among the subjects tagged in these letters, ship captains’ spouses fuels further interest.
  10. The antique capital of Maine. Or so the town claims. Who am I to argue? Maybe it all started with the estates of those wealthy seafarers.

Acid test novelist: Ken Kesey (1935-2001)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Although my classmates in a contemporary novel course rhapsodized over One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and the author’s later role as a Merry Prankster advocating LSD use, I was fonder of Sometimes a Great Nation, which I read while living not all that far from its setting in the coastal mountains of Oregon. Sections from the unfinished Seven Prayers of Grandma Whittier were also tantalizing. Now I am wondering about his naming of the grandmother, as a nod to … Quaker?

Kesey is fascinating as a forceful, larger-than-life counterculture celebrity, even notoriety, from the Beat movement on. How could anyone begin to compress his activities into prose, either fiction or nonfiction?

Both of his novels were published by the time he was 30. Maybe he was just too busy living to continue.

Cruise ships on way

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Eastport is preparing to welcome eight cruise ships for visits after Labor Day. That’s about half as many as last year’s record but could top it in the number of passengers. Four others were slated to visit but had to change plans when Customs could not provide agents to clear passengers and crews into the United States.

So far, I’ve found seven of the expected ships.

  • September 3: Enchanted Princess, 1,083 feet length, 18 decks, 4,500 maximum passengers, 1,346 crew.
  • September 17: Roald Amundsen, 459 feet, 530 maximum passengers, 160 crew.
  • October 5: Zuiderdam, 936 feet, 1,964 maximum passengers, 817 crew.
  • October 13: Volendam, 778 feet, 1,718 maximum passengers, 647 crew.
  • October 14: Azamara Journey, 594 feet, 781 maximum passengers, 408 crew.
  • October 15: Viking Mars, 748 feet, 938 maximum passengers, 465 crew.
  • October 27: Le Champlain, 430 feet, 264 maximum passengers, 112 crew.
  • Next year is already shaping up to be more active.

The visits have boosted the local retail season for many merchants, especially after the Summer People have retreated to their usual haunts.

 

Away she goes, Act 2

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Removing the old asphalt roofing and underlying sheathing and replacing them with standing-seam metal roofing promised to be an encore act of last fall’s drive on the back half of the house. A dustpan, or shed, dormer, connecting what had been two small dormers would be the biggest design difference.

This time the work would be in full view on a central pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare. By now, the renovation is a widespread topic of conversation, year-round residents and summer people alike. Yes, one more aspect of small-town living.

Once again, new rafters would replace the old ones, many of them charred in the 1886 downtown fire as well as a later chimney fire or two. And the new 2-by-12s would be more numerous than the old 3-by-4, 4-by-5, and 5-by-6 beams they were replacing. They would also be up to building code rather than sporadically placed. Better yet, they would be solidly joined to a ridge pole and the four central structural support columns our contractor had inserted last fall. Earlier episodes of this series discuss the intricate work of getting those significant details into place.

Once underway, this phase turned into something more than a quick encore. Removing the two dormers had its own complications, and then a series of rainy day forecasts prompted Adam to concentrate on the south end first rather than the full roof in one sweep.

Further complications came in finding the sheathing was doubled, unlike the back, and a desire to salvage as much of the timber as possible. Some folks in this project are hoping to make a dining room table or some such to recognize the home’s heritage.

Our thinking about this project has definitely changed. Adam is really rebuilding the top half of our house, not merely remodeling it. We’re most impressed. Technically, it’s still post-and-beam aka timber framed.

Would I have gone along with all this if I had known about all this at the outset?

We really didn’t have much choice. As we’ve been discovering, there was so much trouble just waiting to happen. Fortuitously, we’re addressing it all proactively rather than in a panic after an overhead disaster.

We’re no longer tempting fate, are we?

Let’s be clear, you do judge a book by its cover

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

With my training as an artist, I have some strong feelings about book covers. Most of the ones I see leave me cold. I think they’re too cluttered, and most of them lack a strong graphic element – I prefer a good photograph though am coming around on the painted image argument – and I like a clean, easy to read impression. Some of the typefaces used for the title or the author are nearly impossible to make out.

I did have a friend who was a professional illustrator for a Fortune 500 corporation. CAD (computer assisted design) was overtaking the field, and he felt it was destroying his artist’s hand, the one with the Rhode Island School of Design sharpened skills. His aspiration was to design old-fashioned book jackets, and while his style there wasn’t my cup of tea, I could see its appeal. Fortunately, he conceived a children’s book that took off, in part because it was based on a Pete Seeger song, which did get buyers’ attention. And led to many more all on his own.

I still don’t understand all the nuance, though. Is it true that a certain strand of fantasy is supposed to have a specific element woven into the cover to alert a potential reader that this is the subgenre she’s looking for? You know, maybe a touch of moonlight or a small bat in flight or a golden glimmer in someone’s eye?

I am learning, though. A cover makes a promise with a reader, so I’ve heard at Smashwords.

My thoughts on cover design and some of my favorites appear in earlier posts here at the Red Barn.

Self-publishing requires much more than merely producing a compelling text.

Naming a book is hard enough. For the record, I found naming What’s Left to be my most difficult, as I’ll explain in a future post.

In the world of books, and not just ebooks, a strong cover is crucial.

If you can afford to hire an illustrator or graphic artist to design yours great. I’m envious.

My first novel, in paper, wound up with an “art designer” misfire. Rather than respecting the black-and-white photo of passengers in a subway car, a flat yellow lotus shape was cut into the image with the title and author credits inside that field. It didn’t fly. In addition, my name wasn’t left as simply Jnana, as I desired. It was the full yoga version, an additional five syllables or 14 letters. Well, it kinda has a 1950s feel, even with some graffiti on its walls, but the action was all high hippie ‘60s and early ‘70s. I’m now wondering if getting a tagger to do the cover would have been a more successful alternative. I’m sensing it would have been a more in-your-face result. Buy me now!

For my first round at Smashwords, I hired a book designer who was, I seem to recall, living in the Czech Republic. Emailing made everything easier, including paying him via PayPal, which was new to me. Since he had a deal with a stock agency for low-cost photos, I rifled through its online pages filled with shots that might fit my need.

It’s harder than you’d think.

A good cover isn’t a poster. It’s more like a billboard on a much smaller scale. And your potential readers are zipping by.

The right photo turns out to be a rarity. It has to somehow reflect the story and still attract a buyer.

Even when you find a good fit, there can be problems. For instance, the photo I settled on for Hippie Drum was a black-and-white portrait of a shirtless young male playing a set of Conga drums. It even looked a lot like me at the time of the story. Little did I know how many viewers it repulsed.

There is debate over showing a person’s face on the cover. It can limit a reader’s perception of your central character, for one thing, and one reader’s ideal can be an instant rejection from another.

If you’re going the human face route, you may find the perfect photo with one slight flaw. She’s a redhead while your character’s brunette. It may be easier to tweak the book to fit the cover.

The experience of tweaking a character to fit the cover image.

There’s also a debate over a painted or drawn artwork versus a photograph.

When I got around to designing my own covers, I came upon a drawn image of a single daffodil bloom. How perfect and I still love it. And within the title I inserted a peace emblem for an “O” in DAFFODIL SUNRISE.

A few years later, when I changed the title, that cover went out of circulation. That peace emblem just didn’t work with the new version’s Kindle print-on-demand cover, either.

I have to admit a special fondness to the ones on Subway Visions, Yoga Bootcamp, and the Secret Side of Jaya – none of them photos.