Brooding with Storm Clouds was inspired by an extraordinary summer high school program that lured me from New York to Oaxaca, Mexico and led to my study of anthropology at Bennington College and UCLA, and a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research. Applying these studies to journalism, I wrote for national and international periodicals, including cover stories in Smithsonian and Natural History magazines.
Longing for a simpler, more hands-on life, I moved to Maine where I discovered my place: a century-old, wood-heated former inn on a hill overlooking the Penobscot River as it opens to the bay and, with novelist and poet Bill Carpenter, sent a lovely child out into the world.
Here, I served as a correspondent for the Boston Globe and other regional newspapers, published two Maine travel books, and We Never Knew Any Different: Stockton Springs Stories of the Past Century, created as part of my effort to help families and communities record and publish their stories through Personal History*, while also launching COA, the magazine of the environmental College of the Atlantic.
And here, within the quiet of rural Maine and the daily interplay of sun and cloud on water, I found the perspective to visualize the fullness of the friendships and openings gathered during my time in Oaxaca and mold it into the fictional story that is Brooding with Storm Clouds.—DG
*For more on my work with Personal History, visit www.personalhistory.org.