Features:

Forward, Not Back: The odds are millennial farmers will fail. Why they pursue the good life anyways.

When Rachel Bell looked out the large windows of her concrete-floored living room on July 4, 2014, the rain from Hurricane Arthur had slowed. The wind, however, had not. The tall pines surrounding her property on the coast in Edmunds quivered.

Rachel’s farm is situated at the highest point of Tidemill Farm Inc.’s property. The trees, despite their great efforts, could not ward off the wind. Her goats took shelter in their hoop house, and its plastic tarp flapped and snapped like a flag in the wind, as strong gusts pushed the plastic against its frame… (read more)

Believing in the Back Country

One 16-year-old’s inadvertent quest to find herself in the most remote location in the lower 48 states

At 10,000 feet elevation the sun determined when Sierra D’Amours went to bed and when she woke. For thirty days in the Absorka Mountain Range of Wyoming, D’Amours knew how many hours she had to get back to camp based on the sun’s location. The mountain ranges crest by same sun was her alarm. Now, back at sea level the days are getting shorter. The tides of the Great Bay tickle the banks of Jackson’s boat lading in Durham, New Hampshire as D’Amours and I walk out to a bench seated at the end of a small peninsula surrounded by calm waters. It’s six o’clock and it’s already impossible to see much besides the separation between water, trees and horizon as well as TV flickering in a house across the water. The light is distracting…(Read more)

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Event: Poetry Slam

Behind the Microphone

Standing behind a microphone in front of an almost-full Minsky Recital Hall, I was “shivering with anticipation” as one of my poetry classmates so accurately put it.

Although the faces in the audience were shadowy, I could see them all looking intently to me. The random draw of who would go first in UMaine’s second bi-annual Poetry Slam, of course, would be me.

For the three-round slam, I had selected my poems, practiced and scribbled notes in the margins about tone and eye contact — “Look up, Danielle.”

I was excited. But also felt totally unprepared… (Read more)

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Creative: Paying Homage

When we sat and read Walden where Thoreau wrote it we were paying homage- being purposeful. Tourists took photographs but we were reading. An overweight man in a beige and green Hawaiian shirt came up to us and quoted Thoreau, said we “were doing it right” and left. The birds sang as we read about them, this had to be purposeful… (Read more) 

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Humor: Things I’ve learned from Twitter

The United States spent 121 billion minutes on social media sites in July 2012, according to Nielsen’s Annual Social Media report. With my impending social media doom trembling between my tweeting thumbs, I’m grabbing a hold of my 140 character reins and becoming a student of social media. Thus, I have compiled this report of all the things I’ve learned from Twitter (subject to whom you follow)…(Read more)