Kilt Dead in Maine

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(Written, obviously, in the beginning of January 2013)

The first week in January, I finished reading one of the best novels I’ve read in the past six months. Sure, I’ve read a lot of books since last summer, and most of them have been enjoyable, even excellent reads. But I’ve been exclaiming about Emma Donoghue’s Room ever since I started it; even more so when I finished it.

There are, however, a couple of good reasons why I won’t be reviewing Room in this week’s column. The book club at the bookstore doesn’t meet until the evening of Tuesday, January 22nd, so I don’t want to tell everyone my opinions this far out. I don’t want to give spoilers or unduly influence other members’ experience of reading the book. Also, as I type this column on Sunday night, the 13th (why, no, editor, I don’t write my columns at the last minute! Whatever makes you think I’d procrastinate like that?), there is still a week and a half to tempt other folks to read Room and join us at this month’s meeting. I guarantee you’ll fly through the pages of this book: even if you are just reading this column on Thursday or Friday just before the book club meeting, I’m certain you can finish Room in a weekend. It is that compelling.

Nevertheless, it still being obvious how much I wavered in my decision, I finally asked my husband and bookstore business partner – the person best for me when bouncing around both personal and “professional” book reviews – “which should I do this week’s column on, Room by Emma Donoghue, or those Scottish mysteries by Kaitlyn Dunnett?” Knowing my enthusiastic response to both authors, and the possibilities for discussing each, Kevin didn’t hesitate. “The Dunnett mysteries,” he answered, “because they’re more fun. Besides, you can always do a review on Room later, after the book club meeting.”

And that is why, loyal readers, you’ll have to take a teaser on Room, and hear about how much I have enjoyed Kaitlyn Dunnett’s cozy mystery series about the little western Maine town of Moosetookalook and its charming cast of characters. At the ripe old age of twenty-seven, Liss MacCrimmon finds her career as a professional dancer cut short when she severely injures her knee. Though surgery guarantees she will walk normally again, Liss can never risk going back to dancing the high-impact Scottish folk dances of her troupe, Strathspey (think Riverdance, only the heritage of the Scots, not the Irish). Now instead of touring the U.S. as the lead dancer fifty weeks out of the year, Liss returns home to her small town in Maine, to continue to heal up and decide what comes next. In the meantime, she’ll work in her Aunt Margaret’s shop, the Scottish Emporium, purveyors of custom-order kilts, beautiful tartan fabrics, shortbread, canned haggis, Celtic jewelry, books on Scotland, and many niche gifts. Though Tandy’s Music Shop takes care of major musical instruments, including the bagpipes, the Scottish Emporium does have practice chanters, pennywhistles, and drumsticks. They even sell the sgian dubh, the small, traditional “black dagger” of the Scots.

While the sgian dubh is not the murder weapon used in the first book, Kilt Dead, it does make a gruesome appearance in The Corpse Wore Tartan, the fourth book in the series, when the Scottish Heritage Appreciation Society hosts their annual Burns Night Dinner at the Spruces, a resort overlooking Moosetookalook. Liss’s boyfriend, Dan Ruskin, and his family, have slaved to re-open the old-fashioned resort, hoping to bring more tourism to their area. Having the Robert Burns Dinner scheduled there over a winter weekend is a great foray into the kind of business they hope to attract, especially since the dinner is an annual event. But the staff at the Spruces notices right away that Scottish Heritage Appreciation Society has a shared history beyond Scottish ancestry, and, before you know it, a fresh body is found in a storage room, throat apparently slit with his own sgian dubh. In true Agatha Christie style, a huge snowstorm blows in, trapping all the guests at the hotel for several days, without electricity and with a murderer in their midst.

It’s no surprise that Liss is often getting herself in the midst of “work better left to professional detectives, Ms. MacCrimmon,” since she adores murder mysteries, shying away from the forensic stories, but loving the amateur sleuths. Liss, her friend Angie (who runs the local bookstore), and all the small business owners of Moosetookalook are thrilled when the Spruces hosts a mystery writers’ conference in Scotched. Sadly, a famous writer falls to her death at the local lovers’ leap, and the circumstances are too strange not to ask questions.

In many ways a typical “cozy” mystery series, but with plenty of Maine local color and a fresh idea with the addition of Scottish-American heritage theme, Liss MacCrimmon and the gang are a welcome new act in the crowded field of fun, light mysteries.

Small Town Monsters & "Nessie" of Wellsboro?

The Monsters of Templeton, by Lauren Groff, is everything that makes closet-novelists like me jealous, even while we’re happily lapping up the pages. What is there to Monsters that paints me green? Though several of her short stories have been published in well-known literary magazines, The Monsters of Templeton is Groff’s first novel. Right out of the gate, still in hardcover, Monsters garnered the attention of important headlines in the industry – chosen for the BookSense newsletter of the national independent bookstores’ association; voted as one of the Top 100 Books of 2008 at Amazon; lauded by newspaper columnists from The Denver Post to USA Today; featured as a “Staff Pick” at indie bookstores all across the nation.

Besides all the hoopla, which is certainly nice to receive on a debut novel, what is it about Groff’s book which makes me wish I wrote it? The story itself is not earth-shatteringly original, but Groff’s voice, and the structure of the novel, is clever, unusual, and engaging on many different levels. By turns history, romance, mystery, ghost story, family saga, the plotline makes it possible to shift through different characters’ voices and eras without confusing the reader. In Lauren Groff’s capable hands, and with protagonist Willie Upton’s determined journey into her family’s past, there is a method to the madness.

On the verge of finishing her Ph.D., Wilhemina “Willie” Upton has returned in shame to her hometown of Templeton, NY, (read “Cooperstown”) after having an affair with her dissertation advisor, and finding herself pregnant. She decides she’ll hide out with her hippie-turned-Baptist mother in the one place to which she’d sworn she’d never come back. Though proud of their heritage – being descendants of the founding father and the famous writer hometown son (read “James Fenimore Cooper”) – Vivienne always wanted more for Willie than her own lot. Now, Viv drops a bombshell in a confession of her own: Willie’s father was not some random man at a San Francisco commune, but is a prominent man in Templeton. Vivienne refuses to tell Willie who he is; Willie must figure this out for herself, with only the clue that her biological father was also a descendant of the founding Temple family, albeit through an illegitimate and secret link.

Just who are the “monsters” of Templeton? The day that Willie arrives home, the body of the lake monster who had only been a legend, surfaces on Lake Glimmerglass. The discovery of “Glimmy” thrusts the town into the spotlight, exponentially increasing the number of visitors over the usual baseball museum crowd. Discovering monsters, however, one needs to go below the surface, and not just of the lake. Reading through old journals, letters, novels and documents she finds at the historical museum and in her own family’s attic, Willie unearths murderers, adulterers, Virginia Woolf imitators, and antics galore. And while the reading of these histories amuses us, it touches a nerve, too. These are the secrets of small towns. This is the heart of the monster, and we recognize it. Like Willie, we must decide if we will claim it for our own.

This same story, by a different author, could easily be maudlin, weighty, and overblown. Instead, the narrative is infused with warmth. Ultimately, it is obvious how much Groff loves her characters, these people both historical and fictional, and how much she loves both her hometown of Cooperstown and her fictional village of Templeton.

I’d love to write a novel about Wellsboro, with such lovely prose, such sympathetic characters, who the reader ends up loving in all their glorious, lumpy, imperfect humanity. We need a novel where we dance in and out of our history, of settlers and writers gone before us, of local legends and unquiet ghosts. Lauren Groff found the right recipe for such a concoction. We need a cookbook of our own.

Hobo wants to dance to the music of the Endless Mountains, discover a “Nessie” of his own in Lake Nessmuk, and bring a spotlight to his hometown. Read Hobo’s first story of his home, in “Hobo Finds A Home”, a children’s book set here. Check out other reflections on local discoveries at Hobo’s blog, http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com.

Our Town, Laramie, and Wellsboro.... the history of small towns...

Kasey Cox

This past week marked eight years since the terrorist attacks our nation woke up to on September 11, 2001. Once again, I hear the words of a Tony Hoagland poem in my mind. This amazing poem, "The Change", is in Hoagland’s latest collection entitled, What Narcissism Means to Me. In it, Hoagland, as an aging white man, deals with the discomfort “his world” feels at watching a powerful, loud, darkly black-skinned young woman trounce her small, white-skinned opponent at the U.S. Open, which he openly confesses to making an analogy of a new era bumping up against the old. When our old ideas, our old stereotypes, our old comfortable categories, melt and crack before our eyes, it is difficult for us, no matter how “accepting” we believe we are. My favorite lines, the ones that give me shivers every time I read them: "There are moments when history/passes you so close/you can smell its breath,/You can reach your hand out/and touch it on its flank...."

Who among us, especially those who lived through Sept. 11th, doesn’t know what that moment feels like? I feel the same breath of history running through the pages of the play The Laramie Project. This play was a collaborative work between Moises Kaufman, the Tectonic Theater Project, and hundreds of people in Laramie, Wyoming, who agreed to be interviewed in the wake of the brutal beating and subsequent death of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student, in October 1998.

Indeed, in his introduction to the play, Kaufman explains:

"There are moments in history when a particular event brings the various ideologies and beliefs prevailing in a culture into sharp focus. At these junctures, the event becomes a lightning rod of sorts, attracting and distilling the essence of these philosophies and convictions. By paying careful attention in moments like this to people’s words, one is able to hear the way these prevailing ideas affect not only individual lives but the culture at large.... The brutal murder of Matthew Shepard was ... [an] event of this kind. In its immediate aftermath, the nation launched into a dialogue that brought to the surface how we think and talk about homosexuality, sexual politics, education, class, violence, privileges and rights, and the difference between tolerance and acceptance.....”

The work of the Tectonic Theater Project, in conducting over 200 interviews in Laramie, was just as much anthropology as it was theater. I think of Temple Grandin, amazing woman, internationally-known writer, designer of cattle-handling machinery used all around the world, who is an extremely high-functioning person with Aspergers'. Her work has helped many understand better the way people with autism spectrum see the world. Grandin explains her perspective, living among people with “normal” brains, as feeling like an anthropologist from Mars. She feels she is an alien, a foreigner, and that she is constantly studying human beings to see how they act and why, so she might better blend in.

In many ways, as I work through The Laramie Project with my fellow amateur actors and anthropologists, I believe this play allows us to step outside our own era, our own culture, in this same way, for a little while, to observe ourselves. What do we believe? Why? How do we act toward one another? How do we decide on those actions? And then, once we have observed ourselves, as an anthropologist from Mars, then maybe we can step inside to examine ourselves, to see that we relate to the people in this story, as we see ourselves there. As one young woman from Laramie said at the time of the vigils held for Matthew Shepard, “And we have to mourn that... we live in a town, a state, a country where ... this happens.... people [are] trying to distance themselves from this crime. And we need to own this crime, I feel. Everyone needs to own this. We are like this. We ARE like this. WE are LIKE this.”

Plays such as The Laramie Project or Our Town or The Crucible can be, and often are, read in English class. Ultimately, though, theater is meant to be experienced, watched, and participated in. I invite everyone to read this work, and then come experience it with us as Hamilton-Gibson gives all of us a chance to “reach out our hands and touch history on its flanks”, and meditate on our lives in this small town, in this era.


Hobo knows every day life is always full of drama. If this article seemed like shameless promotion of an event in town, that’s because it is. Hobo has no problem with shameless self-promotion, obviously. If you’ve got something good, then tell people about it! He does it every week in his blog, at http://frommyshelf.blogspot.com. If you’ve got things to promote, email Hobo at frommyshelf@epix.net to ask for his help.