Michaela Cavallaro

Feb 20, 2025 | downeast.com | Michaela Cavallaro |Lois Lowry

A  long line of talented authors has fostered a vibrant literary scene in Maine, with lots of support from our state’s community of avid readers. So it should come as no surprise that Maine boasts the country’s second most bookstores per capita, more than doubling the national average. In the interest of exploring this thriving ecosystem of writing, selling, and reading books (and also just because we were curious), we asked some notable writers where they like to go to find their next good read.

Jan 13, 2025 | downeast.com | Michaela Cavallaro

Audrey Mahlman, pictured with her daughter, Olive (seated at left), and her friends in Mahlman’s crocheted hats. Following in her mom’s footsteps, Olive sells homemade candles and donates the proceeds to pediatric-cancer charities. In the evenings, Audrey Mahlman can be found on the sectional in her York living room with her 12-year-old daughter, Olive, and a handful of bins filled with crochet projects.

Oct 11, 2024 | downeast.com | Michaela Cavallaro

Penobscot Nation musician and fashion designer Jason Brown stands with his back to the Bangor Symphony Orchestra and 138 choral singers in an iridescent, floor-length vest he and his wife, Donna Decontie-Brown, made of stiff silk. It rustles faintly as he moves, accompanied by the tinkling of the glass beads and metal balls that adorn the garment.

Oct 3, 2024 | downeast.com | Michaela Cavallaro

Thirty-three years after she began farming on a Brooksville plot formerly owned by back-to-the-landers Helen and Scott Nearing, Barbara Damrosch remains utterly beguiled by what she manages to coax from the earth. “When my Italian honey fig started making fruits so full of sweet nectar that they would plop into my outstretched hand,” she writes in A Life in the Garden (Timber Press; hardcover; $40), “I was quick to tell the greedy rooted tree, ‘Go ahead. Take over my little greenhouse.

Jul 30, 2024 | downeast.com | Michaela Cavallaro |Bridget Burns

Burn, by Peter Heller$28, hardcover, KnopfWhen childhood friends Storey and Jess emerge from the northern Maine woods after their annual moose-hunting trip, they find devastation all around: entire towns burned to the ground, bridges blown up, and not a soul in sight save a few blackened bodies.