(bright music) - Hello, and welcome to the September gathering of the Maine Public Book Club.

I'm your host, Bill Nemitz, and with us today is Art Dingley, who is the author of Immigrants.

If you've ever traveled in Northern Maine, you probably love this book because there are a lot of places that you'll recognize.

Art, welcome.

- Thank you, Bill.

- This is a great story.

I mean, I came away from this thinking, how can so many things be going on in such a quiet part of the state?

We think of Northern Maine as this sleepy place where it's the same every day, yet this book has everything.

Well, it has smuggling, it has crime, it has drama, it has mystery.

How did this all come to be?

- Well, it was a surprise to me.

I was working on another book, the first book I ever tried to write, and I was bogged down in it, and I decided to step back from it and just take a break.

And when I did, the idea for this book came into my head like email, really, and the entire idea was two people and where they lived, which is not much of an idea for a book.

I thought, well, I like the people and I like the town where they live.

Agnes Bushell, who's one of the founders of the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, and one of the principals of Literal Books, which publishes Immigrants, said something I think is right on.

When the characters move into your house and won't leave, you've got a book, so stop writing.

And I would get up every day and sit down at my laptop and let the characters tell me what they did, and I would write it down.

- Now, these two characters in this case are Micah and Maryam, I assume.

- The two principal characters.

And the town of Deep Lake, Maine is of course fictional.

It's up on Route 11, if it existed, south of Fort Kent, north of Ashland, west of Prescott, east of the North Maine Woods.

- Well, you had Clayton Lake.

- Which exists.

- There is a number of real places.

- So the roads, the border crossings, all exist.

The gate into the North Maine Woods that's described in the book is fictional, and of course, all the characters are fictional.

But every day the characters would tell me what happened and I just wrote it down.

- Who showed up first, Micah?

- Yes.

Yeah, he did.

So that's how that book came about.

Now, the book that I was working on, I put aside, I later finished and got that into shape thanks to the editors at Literal Books.

And that's coming out in two weeks.

- Oh, good.

- A book called Charmed, a very different tale, but I think told in the same straight ahead style.

- Well, this is a very fast moving book, and that's one of the things I liked about it.

I told you before we started that I was actually camping when I read this and it seemed very apropos because I was actually out in the woods reading this book and it seemed the perfect setting for it.

Before we get into the story, I want to hear a little bit more about you because I read your bio has you as a physician, a lawyer, correct?

And now, a novelist.

How did that all unfold?

- That's a good question.

Some of it was serendipity, some of it was just hard work, but I grew up in a town so small, we didn't have a village idiot, we had to take turns as the joke goes.

And this was in the 1950s.

TV was black and white.

Mostly it was Westerns, sitcoms.

Cartoons didn't get popular until the late '50s.

There were no astronauts, there were no computers.

And so if you were a kid in that environment in the 1950s, the greatest achievements that were modeled to you or that caught your imagination were being a lawyer, being a doctor or being a writer of books.

- Now to clarify, you grew up in a very rural area near Bingham, correct?

- Yes, across the river from Bingham in Concord Plantation, yeah.

- So not much going on there in the '50s.

- Not much going on, great place to grow up.

I moved to Portland in 1962 with my family and started seventh grade right on Stevens Avenue in Portland and graduated during high school.

- Well, that must have been a culture shock.

- It was a wicked culture shock.

- Much as it was for Micah when he went to law school in Portland, correct?

- Yeah.

Where he went to law school isn't exactly nailed down.

- [Bill] University of Maine Law School.

- So it's implied but not expressed.

- Which did you prefer as a kid growing up?

Stevens Avenue?

- They were just different and they both influenced my life in important ways.

When I moved to Portland, I made a group of extraordinary friends.

And now at my age, some are dead and some are living as the song goes.

But the ones who were still with me are still dear friends to this day.

Those friends influenced my life hugely as a teenager and young adult.

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Now back to the episode.

Often I speak to writers, they talk about how old friends or family members, whoever it might be, like that kind of infiltrate their way into your writing.

And you say Micah and Maryam just kind of appeared, but is there anyone, Micah being the central character, the protagonist in this story, is there anyone in your life who may have inspired him?

- No, not at all.

I can't say that there was a Maryam either for that matter.

They just appeared in my imagination and they stay pretty much the same, true to character and personality throughout the book.

They don't change much, Maryam changes to some extent.

She's of course, Muslim, and she got away from her original culture and her Muslim faith as a young adult.

And now she's coming back.

She's very Americanized as a youngster and now is getting back to her roots, getting back to her faith, getting back to her Imam, which is increasing as would be said in Islam.

- The setting for that is what struck me because she and how do I pronounce her mother's name?

- Hannah.

- Hannah.

They're running this small market in the middle of Deep Lake, which really could be any number of different places up there.

They all fit that description.

Yet this is not your normal mom and pop general store.

And what struck me right from the get-go was how without any big major bumps or difficulties, how easily they were able to function in an area where most people from the outside, their perception of this is very homogenous, very closed minded.

Outsiders, let alone Islamic faith and things like that are generally not frowned upon, but not welcomed with open arms, put it that way.

Yet they function pretty effortlessly in this town.

Is that a misconception of that area?

- Well, Maryam and Hannah have lived through a lot.

They've lived through a lot tougher circumstances than Deep Lake, Maine.

So they're pretty tough and pretty resilient.

They don't take much guff.

So there is that.

In terms of the title of the book, Immigrants, Maine has of course enjoyed waves of immigration since pre-history.

We had, who may be the Clovis Point people who we associate with New Mexico who were here following the retreating glacier 10,000 years ago.

- The original Mainers.

- The original, not necessarily, but probably the original Mainers and then who we call the Red Paint People about whom we know almost nothing, except that they buried their dead with a substance called red ochre, hence the name.

They were here thousands of years ago.

And then of course the Wabanaki people and then the French and the English.

And then in the 1800s, of course we had the Lithuanians to Rumford and the Russians to Richmond, the Italians and the Irish to everywhere, and then the Quebecois to the mill towns, the Acadians to the St.

John Valley.

And now the most recent wave of immigration has been from the MENA, from the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and East Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya in particular, Somalia, Sudan.

Those folks don't always have a lot in common culturally.

They're all Muslim.

So what happens with immigration always, wherever it takes place, is that the immigrants who move into a dominant culture are changed by the dominant culture.

They're assimilated.

- Assimilation.

- And the culture into which they move is changed by them.

So I think what's interesting and remains to be seen is how religion is going to affect that process of assimilation.

- Good point.

Now you live in Auburn.

- I live in Auburn, yeah.

- And you've seen a fair amount of that in Auburn as well, I assume.

- Yeah, yeah.

And everybody's gotten along pretty well.

There's been a few bumps and a few unfortunate incidents, but they're pretty widely dispersed.

It doesn't seem to be part of any sort of general discontent.

Probably 6,000 residents of Lewiston, Auburn are immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.

Most of the folks who are Muslim who are under the age of 20 living in Lewiston were born here.

So we're second or third generation of folks.

And that's led to some interesting dynamics culturally because in some of the cultures from which people immigrated, the elders called the shots.

They were the deciders.

Here and now, what determines your agency is your English skills and how tech savvy you are.

And that's the young people.

- Yeah.

And they're leaving the elders in their dust.

- Yeah, and there's a very, very interesting way that that's playing out.

So I think the whole thing is interesting.

- Now having grown up in more Western Maine than Northern Maine, around Bingham, still there are some similarities.

I'm curious, when it came to fleshing out this story, did you spend a lot of time yourself up in Northern Maine?

Because it rings very, it's very authentic, because I've traveled up there a lot myself and you're very good at creating the visuals, the sensory things around there.

And I was struck by the accuracy of it.

And I'm wondering, did you spend a lot of time up there?

- I've been up through there hunting, fishing, camping, backpacking, that kind of thing.

I've never lived up there.

I've lived in several towns in Maine, but not north of Orono.

So no, I've never lived there.

- [Bill] But you've traveled Route 11.

- Yeah.

- Have a favorite quote from this book?

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Now back to the book.

I thought you described that beautifully with Micah going up and down to Bangor and all those times because until you've driven Route 11 at night, I don't think you've really experienced.

- Yeah, I think that authenticity matters.

I mean, to quote Agnes Bushell again, she said something I think is absolutely bang on and that is that a novelist, a writer of fiction is creating this dream state into which the reader is invited.

And if you say something in the course of your writing that contradicts the reader's experience or their education, something that they know is wrong, is just tinny, you kicked them out of the dream.

They're not gonna like you for doing that.

So write about what you know or look it up.

I mean, we have the internet at our disposal.

We have all of human knowledge right there in front of us on the screen.

- Don't guess.

- Don't guess.

I mean, you read things that people write about firearms or scuba diving or rock climbing and it's immediately clear they've never done these things.

They have no idea what they're talking about and they haven't bothered to look it up and read about it.

- And especially with the expert reader who might know a thing or two about those things.

You don't want to get tripped up on something like that.

The other thing that struck me, we think of that, as I said earlier, as a very remote area where people can kind of go, you could go there to get lost or to disappear if you wanted to.

Yet, what struck me about the comings and goings in this area, in this story, is that everything's recorded.

You've got the Fulton Gate where Alice may or may not be there, but that camera's running all the time.

You have the Nahal.

Is that the pronunciation for the market?

- Nahal.

- The Nahal Market.

- Has cameras.

- They got their security cameras.

And parts of this, when it came time to, it was tracking Lena's comings and goings and whatnot, it almost read like a big city crime novel in terms of how easy it was to keep track of who was coming and going.

It led me to wonder, is there any place in the world that's truly remote anymore?

- Not really in Maine.

I mean, there's no wilderness in Maine.

There's this fantasy that the northern woods of Maine or some pristine virgin wildfire.

No, it's been cut over and cut over and clear cut and clear cut and trashed for the last hundred years.

And there's a network of roads that make all of it accessible.

- Yeah, that's true.

All you have to do is get up in a helicopter or a small plane.

- Sure.

- It often struck me with the Allagash Waterway, for example, where you can canoe down that and think that you are on the end of the earth, but if you got 300 feet.

- There's a little modesty fringe of trees along the edge of the river.

- It's a little carpet.

But beyond that, it's really agricultural if you think about it.

- It is.

- People don't often think of softwood as a crop, the Maine woods, but really?

- It's a fiber crop.

They're growing fiber, not trees, fiber.

- And as you point out in the book, they're clear cutting them and then planting trees that are gonna grow up, take what, 20 years or so to grow.

- Cut it again.

- Cut 'em again.

So it's not unlike your garden tomatoes.

It just takes longer.

Kershai, the border patrol guy, and you wrote this book contemporaneously.

And I'm wondering, was it hard for you, because that's such a politicized thing right now, those people, border patrol, ICE agents.

As we speak, they're going about their business here in Maine.

Yet, you kept the politics of that out of it.

I mean, this was a guy who becomes actually more likable as the book goes on.

He's kind of a jerk at first, but over time he softens, Micah softens.

Was that kind of a hot button issue?

Did you realize that?

Do I want somebody to be from the federal government here doing this kind of thing?

- I wanted him to appear to be a very hard nut, very threatening, sort of intrusive, unlikable character and then have him morph into a much more likable and helpful person over the course of the story.

Micah and Maryam, the two principal characters, are steady on.

They don't change much.

No surprises really over the course of the book.

But the kind of cast of supporting characters, the other towns folk, do change.

Nobody's quite who you think they are.

And I like that in the story and I tried to capture that in the course of it.

- Yeah, he clearly evolves and he becomes more, he likes them more and they like him more.

And I think there was no scene that struck that note more clearly than when Micah held the Ramadan dinner.

- And invites Border Patrol.

- Yeah, right.

But again, it just seemed like a head spinner to look at this and think you have Maryam and Hannah and then you have all these townspeople gathering for a Ramadan dinner that Micah prepared and it all seemed so normal.

Whereas if somebody had said, oh yeah, I was just up at Jeep Lake and I had a Ramadan dinner, people would say, you did what?

What made you incorporate, was there a specific reason for you to do that?

Because it seemed to be a point where it really, really brought everybody together.

- Yeah.

No, the characters just told me the story and I wrote it down.

I mean, obviously what we write comes out of our heads.

It doesn't come from any place else, but my experience subjectively of writing the story was they told me what happened every day and I wrote down my five pages.

- Drill into that a little more.

Is this you on the back porch, eyes closed, daydreaming, and all of a sudden Micah shows up?

Or is it more deliberate than that for you?

- Neither one.

It wasn't deliberate and it wasn't daydreaming.

Like I say, the idea just came into my, my experience of this was that the idea came into my head like email.

And the whole idea was the two people, Maryam and Micah and the town they lived in.

That was the entire idea.

Not much of an idea for a book.

- So you didn't have a narrative thread there at all?

- They just told me what happened and I wrote it down.

- You just ran with it.

- Yeah.

- Man, I wish I could have people do that to me.

Because writing fiction is always, I've always considered it very challenging, but it sounds for you like it's more not so much going after and finding something or somebody as opposed to just kind of opening yourself up.

- Just going with the flow and writing it down.

My second book, the book that's launching in two weeks is Charmed.

It's a different tale.

It's a tale of African witchcraft and genie mythology.

And so it's a different tale.

- [Bill] Where is it set, if I might ask?

- A made up town in Maine, Boston, and mostly in Mombasa, Kenya, where I've been, so I can write about the coast of Kenya having been there and seen what's there to be seen and so forth and met people and traveled around.

That was a more deliberate work.

That took some construction and some planning and revision.

That didn't come easily, which is why I put it aside two years ago and decided to take a break when I got the idea for Immigrants.

But getting back to it was a more deliberate effort.

- Thanks to Highland Green, Island Port Press and Coffee by Design for their generous support of the club.

Without organizations like these, shows like this would not be possible.

I'm also interested in the role that Portland plays in this story because I've found that the farther north you go in Maine, the more Portland becomes the great metropolis.

Whereas if you live in Portland or around Portland, it's a small city.

And there's that different perception of the same place that struck me.

Now you lived that.

I mean, you've essentially lived parts of your life in both places.

- I lived in Portland in different neighborhoods.

I lived many different neighborhoods in Portland over 40 years.

And I had finally, I'd had it with Portland.

I moved back to Farmington where I was born and worked there for 15 or 16 years.

And it was a happy day to see Portland in my rear view mirror after 40 years.

- Much like Micah and Ellie.

Right?

Although Ellie seems a little more.

- A little scattered.

- Yeah.

She can't figure out where she wants to be.

But they both went down and came back.

- And they wanted to go back to their hometown, which was Millinocket.

- Yes, right.

- They lived in Medway, close to Millinocket for a year.

And then Micah has the opportunity to work further north up in this little town of Deep Lake, and they decided to try that because their town had changed.

Millinocket was not the Millinocket they grew up in.

And I was worried that I had disrespected Millinocket or described it inaccurately, but somebody who grew up in Medway next to Millinocket told me that I nailed it.

So I think that's high praise, I'll take it.

- When you're writing something, does that weigh on you?

What are people gonna think?

- Yeah, and I think that if you're writing about someone else's town, someone else's culture, a religion, whether yours or someone else's, there are two rules.

One is to get it right, be accurate, and the other is be respectful.

And so I was worried that I had either not gotten it right or been somehow disrespectful.

- But you haven't gotten any angry emails yet.

- I haven't.

And another thing I know nothing about whatsoever is fixing heavy equipment.

I can cut down trees with a chainsaw, yeah, but I never worked in the woods.

I never repaired a skidder.

And so I've been waiting to get hate mail from people who've done that for a while.

- Because there's one point where Micah, what was it?

It was a clogged, it was a problem and then there was a secondary problem and he got ahead of the actual problem and figured out what really was wrong here.

Did you go to a community college and take a crash course in heavy mechanics or what?

- I went to Google community college and I learned that with the hydraulics of those kinds of harvesters, there is a drain system that you need to keep the pressure in the return hydraulic hose right.

And if it's plugged and the case drain doesn't function, you'll blow a hose.

- We don't have a whole lot of time, but we need to talk about the ending because the ending, it has to be the happiest of happy endings I've ever seen in my life.

And as soon as I saw Microsoft, the stock, What was his name, Owen?

- Davis Owens, yeah.

- Davis Owens.

I thought, oh boy, paper Microsoft stock certificates.

Did you research that to see what would happen?

- I sure did.

- 1986, I believe it was.

And what would it be now?

Were you surprised?

- Yes.

- Just like Micah, right?

- But that's a great number.

I'll go with it.

- He went from figuring he had maybe in the six figures to, what was it, 215 million dollars?

And then at the end of the book, you kind of take a sharp turn.

Well, it's really more of an epilogue with the Bangor Examiner feature story on what's happened to Deep Lake.

Why that?

Why did you take that route?

Although you had mentioned Bangor Examiner a couple times earlier.

- Yeah, because the book begins with a little news article about the snowmobiler who's found dead by Daaquam up in the woods.

That's how the book starts with that newspaper story.

And so I thought it was fitting to end with another newspaper story.

And I'm a sucker for a happy ending.

- Yeah, really.

And I found myself wondering whatever happened to Lena?

Do you wonder?

- Well, she apparently did okay.

She got home.

- She got home.

- Yeah, because she called Rod Sears screaming on the phone for her data.

Missing data, yeah.

- But I also was wondering, as I looked at the new and improved Deep Lake after this incredible infusion of money, how would a place like if you were to project into the future beyond where the book ends, how does a place like Deep Lake exist in a place like Northern Maine when it has suddenly so much, yet regionally, things really haven't changed that much?

I mean, is there a sequel there?

- No.

It would be a challenge for all those reasons.

I mean, regionally, you'd have stresses and strains that would be a challenge to all of the things described in the end.

- I'm thinking, for example, that if I recall, anybody with a good cause or a good idea can get essentially a free loan from the town.

- They better pay it back because the person who's in charge of it and knows hard times herself and you're not gonna fool her.

- That's right.

Yeah.

I couldn't help but imagine if that were the case, how are they gonna handle all the people who suddenly want to move to Deep Lake?

It could only handle so many people.

Oh, I wanted to also talk about your own background.

Now you said you were a lawyer.

And a physician.

Micah was gonna be a lawyer.

Did you practice as an attorney?

- Yeah, for 10 years.

- And then physician came after that?

- Yes.

- So you went to medical school after you went to law school?

- Yes.

- Wow.

What prompted that?

- That's a very long story that I'll spare you, but everything fell into place.

- So growing up, you were looking at three things, doctor, lawyer, writer.

You've hit all three.

- Well, I'm working on being a writer.

For a year after Immigrants came out, I refused to refer to myself as a writer.

I call myself a guy who wrote a book because I think that to be a writer, you need to have a body of work that proves that.

And I of course didn't.

- [Bill] Well, you're getting there though.

- I'm inching toward it, yeah.

- So your next book comes out?

- Two weeks.

- Does it have a title?

Can you share the title of it?

- Charmed.

Charmed, yeah.

- Okay.

- It's a look at charms generally in the broad sense.

What they are, why we believe in them, how people use them in different cultures and different ways.

And it's a mystery and a love story.

And so it's layered.

- Oh, good.

Well, we look forward to that.

- And genie mythology, yes.

- Genie mythology.

Oh boy.

That gonna require some education on my part.

I don't know a lot about that.

So we're all out of time, Art.

I want to thank you for joining us.

I want to wish you the best of luck with your next book.

- Thank you so much.

- And hope there are many more that follow.

- Thank you.

- Okay.

And thank all of you for joining us.

We'll see you next time on Maine Public Book Club.

(air whooshing) (bright music)