Best of 2015

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine radio show number 223 best of 2015 hearing for the first time on Sunday, December 27, 2015, we love what we do on Love Maine Radio. Now in our fifth year, it has been our great privilege to spend time with hundreds of intriguing Mainers who also love the lives that they have created. This week we revisit insightful conversations with artist Scott Nash, musical legend Dan Crew, brothers Paul and Lou Yarenik, and chocolate maker Kate McAleer, founder of Bixby Company. Thank you for joining us.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It's interesting to me that I can know somebody's name and then years and years later end up meeting this person and this individual that I'm talking to. Scott Nash is that person. Scott Nash is an illustrator, graphic designer and chair of the Illustration department at the Maine College of Art. He's also the owner of Nash Box Studios and he's someone that I've known about. I don't know, it's probably got to be 15 years or so. And it's the way it goes that here you are today, and I get to talk to you. And I feel really fortunate that you've been able to come in today.

[Unidentified voice]:

It's nice to be here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Scott, you are doing something that I think a lot of people have the opportunity to enjoy, which is illustration and also the book that you've written, the High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate.

[Unidentified voice]:

I'm really into short titles.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yes, I can see that. Yeah. And yet it's something that I don't think people know that much about. They don't necessarily know why one becomes an illustrator. They don't know how one becomes an illustrator, how one could be an illustrator who works on national shows and with national organizations and live on Peaks island the way that you do. So I'm kind of fascinated about how you got to be where you are.

[Unidentified voice]:

Well, let's change that. We'll let people know exactly how to become an illustrator in Portland. I moved here about. Let me give you a little history. I moved here about, gee whiz, 20 years ago. I had run a design studio down in Boston, and it got a little bit overwhelming for me. I suddenly found my managing a staff of 80 people. I really define myself as a creative person. And what's important to me is to make things, basically, long story short, is started trolling around looking for places and had good friends who were here in Maine and found it to be not only a vital creative community, but a very welcoming creative community. It's not in the least bit stodgy. We got to know people that have become, in the first couple of years of being. Being here, that are still fast friends for us. And we felt very connected to this place. And it seemed like a place where I could have sort of the best of both worlds. I could have the sort of quiet time that's needed to write and create and also find a place where I could really engage and connect with a wealth of creative talent in Portland, up the coast, throughout the entire state. As a matter of fact, I sort of refer to Maine as being sort of a state of hidden treasures. They're constantly revealing themselves to us. And while I find that really intriguing, I also want to find a way to have them be a little bit less hidden. And that's why I'm very appreciative of being here today to talk about illustration.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, the funny thing is, in the intro, I almost said, you can't turn over a rock without finding an artist, but I thought people might think that was really negative. But I think that what you're saying is kind of the same thing.

[Unidentified voice]:

You do have to turn over rocks to find creative people here. Because sometimes we're hiding, we've come from another place and we're thinking that we want that seclusion. And actually, one of the questions on the survey here that was asked was, what would I do if I could do it all over again? If I could go 10 years back, it would be engage more quickly, really connect with people right from the get go. I sort of sequestered myself for a while, but now I've sort of flourished. And as we talk, you'll see that I'm really dedicated to engaging with the community both here in Portland and throughout the state of Maine.

[Unidentified voice]:

Well,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

that is an interesting thing that I think we've talked with other artists about. There is this the need to sequester and the need to have solitude and the need to create, but then also the very real need to connect. And in your case, the need to interact and to teach and to mentor and to be a fabric in the creative community.

[Unidentified voice]:

And I'm sorry. And one of the things that I do is in my teaching is I teach my students discipline. And that discipline is actually a good thing. And the way I am finding this is more and more true of creative people is that we have to find a way to sort of compartmentalize our lives. So I have, you know, depending on how you count it, three jobs that I do, three passions. In the morning, I get up on a good day, make a cup of coffee, shuffle across our deck, which we call our commute. My wife and I call our commute to my studio, where I write for most of the morning. Then in the afternoon, come into the studio at Nashbox, or I head into Maine College of Art to work with the students. And then I trundle back to Peaks island, take a boat back to Peaks, and spend ridiculous amount of hours at night illustrating. And seems to be a terrific time to create what I call ridiculous ideas. And I also embrace the idea of creating ridiculous ideas. It's the. Well, it's the main impetus and main catalyst for a lot of stuff, especially in kids media. But I think it's important for creative people and just people in general. Our lives are pretty frenetic to find ways to give yourself time throughout the day to do specific tasks. And it's worked for me, and I think it works pretty well for my students as well.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I was reading the High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate last night. Thank you And I know you're working on the next book.

[Unidentified voice]:

I am.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Which I don't. When will that come out?

[Unidentified voice]:

It's called the Earthly Exploits. And that is the question. Especially on Peaks island, where the kids come up to me and ask me, if I'm on the boat, why I'm not back home writing the sequel to this. But in fact, a longer process. I stepped into something that was far more epic than I had anticipated. I have to say I'm fairly surprised that I've actually written a fantasy, something that could be categorized as a fantasy adventure. And now I'm well on pretty much through the second version of the second edition of Blue Jay the Pirate. And I have a third one in mind as well. So there's going to be, I think, three in this series.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So we don't know when the next one will come out. But you're working on it.

[Unidentified voice]:

I am. Right. I was just evading the question.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Okay.

[Unidentified voice]:

Yeah, no, no, it's coming out. It has to be finished. I have to really finish this up in the next couple of months, so I'm well on the way.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, the thing that I like about this book, it is very rich in illustration. And that. That, to me is wonderful because it reminds me of the books that I read when I was younger where there was a whole world that was created and created using illustration. I think one of your earlier illustrations is of the boat that they are on and they are lifting the. I believe it's the egg. And you label the various parts of the boat. And this was one of the things that I so enjoyed when I was growing up was that there would be this world and an illustrator, an author illustrator, would take the time to configure the entire world and label it. And it just. It makes it so rich and layered.

[Unidentified voice]:

Well, you're speaking to what I see as one of the primary sort of virtues of an illustrated book. I just recently read a book, what We See when we Read by Peter Mendelsohn, who was suggesting that actually novels should not be illustrated, that we should. That with a writer, what we should be doing is engaging in a collaborative process where we are a. Imagining what basically the general ideas that are laid out by the author. That's fine if you have a frame of reference, if you're an adult, if you have some sort of life experience. But for kids, it's really useful to have an illustrated world, especially if it's a fantasy realm. I mean, I'm sure that as an adult, you could imagine what pirate birds would look like, but I'm guessing most people can't. And so I think having illustrated books helps to provide a context, especially to kids, for what this world is about. I used to love going through, you know, I mentioned Treasure island earlier. I used to love those books. Those are the books that I grew up with. And one of the things I especially appreciated about them is that the reading, the illustrations were sort of a reward to not that the reading wasn't pleasurable, but it's a reward to the reading or it enhanced the reading in very specific ways. And this is a form that these are discussions that we have all the time at Maine College of Art. It's one of the things that I really enjoy about working in this program. We're all really passionate about narrative, about thinking about narrative, thinking about plot, thinking about character design. Not only, though, in the writing realm, but in illustration as well, in drawing. And as a matter of fact, I teach a sort of an iterative or progressive sort of process where the students will use drawing as an inspiration for writing and writing as an inspiration for drawing. It really makes the whole world a little bit more real and tangible, especially when you're working again within a fantasy realm or with subjects like I've worked on books like Flat Stanley, about a little boy who's flattened to an eighth of an inch thick. And I would contend that that has to be illustrated because the thought, the realistic thought of a kid being flattened to an eighth of an inch thick is not a pleasant one. And so we actually do want to control that and make sure that he looks like a gingerbread boy as opposed to something else.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

For the past three years, Maine Magazine has put together a list of 50 Mainers who are really visionaries for our state. And Dan Crew is one of these 50 Mainers. Of course, he probably belonged on the first list, but I'm fortunate because he's on this year's list, and I get to speak with him this year. And this happens to be our 200th show, which is a very big deal for us. So thanks so much for coming in, Dan.

[Unidentified voice]:

I'm very happy to.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And let me give a little background about you for those who. I'm sure almost everybody who's listening has heard of Dan Crewe or read the magazine, but I'll give your background because it's important. You've done a lot. This is Dan Crew. He's a supporter of the arts in Maine. He is currently the president of the Bob Crew Foundation. Named for his late brother, the foundation is intended to help aspiring musicians and artists find fulfilling careers and to support the LGBT community. The Bob Crew foundation recently gave $3 million to the Maine College of Art to create the Bob Crew Program for Music and Art. Dan Crew is currently overseeing the creation and construction of the program. And this is just what you've been doing recently?

[Unidentified voice]:

Filled in my spare time, yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

In your spare time. And your house was actually featured in Maine Home and Design not so long ago?

[Unidentified voice]:

That's correct.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You put a lot of effort into that house. But tell me about why Maine? Why did you decide to come here? Why was it important?

[Unidentified voice]:

Well, back in 1990, I had completed the sale of a music publishing company with my brother, and that gave me tremendous flexibility to pretty much do what I wanted to do. And so the following summer, we wound up summering up on North Haven. And by the second month or month and a half after I was up there, I came back from my bike ride, and I announced to my wife, I said, I'm not going back. Now, I have to understand. I had sort of an internal epiphany, but I had not thought, what does that actually mean? So it wasn't that we were going to live on Northaven or what have you, but I wasn't going back to what we had, and that precipitated a lot of action. So by September, we moved into a house up on the Western Prom, and my kids never left, went from the island right to school in Portland, and the rest evolved from that. And part and parcel of that is I also had to let Bob Ludwig, who was a very close friend of mine and someone whom I had been advising for many years, let him know that we were not going to Be building a studio in New York City, which had been what we had been talking about for some time. And he was. His reaction was. I thought he was having a heart attack, but his reaction was, oh my God, do you think we could do it in Maine? Because he had this. He and Gail, his wife, had this personal hope that one day they could move to Maine because his father and mother already lived here. They had retired up here. In the process. It took me about six months to do a business plan. I came up with the idea that it would work. It may not be as big as it would be in New York City, but I really knew it could succeed. As it turned out after we did it, it turned out to be bigger than even New York. It was huge and is to this day a huge success.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you're talking about the Gateway Studios?

[Unidentified voice]:

Yes, that's right.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We did have the opportunity to interview Bob and actually his wife Gail was in the studio with us. And it seems like they were able to. You were all collectively able to bring some pretty big names to Maine.

[Unidentified voice]:

And they still do. I mean it is probably one of the best mastering studios in the world. And at the time, early on, because in 91, when we opened, actually in 90, officially opened in 93, but we actually opened November of 92 with our first couple of artists. But by the second or third year of our operation, we exceeded our 10 year goal. So it was raving success.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Where are you originally from?

[Unidentified voice]:

I lived in New York, but had moved to Connecticut. I was at that moment living in western Connecticut with my wife and my two young girls and Bob was in New York City. So it was quite a transition for both, for both of us, really.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Why music? What was it about music that kind of got you into the music publishing business and has kept you interested all this time?

[Unidentified voice]:

Well, I always tell this little quote joke. People ask me all the time how to get into the music business. And I say, well, my experience is this. You go to the Naval Academy, you graduated from the Naval Academy, you become an officer in the service and you get out and go to work for Bell Laboratories. And then your brother comes and asks to have lunch with you one day and says, would you think about coming into the music business with me? Because things were. What had happened is the Four Seasons started to break wide open. My brother didn't know what to do and he came to me to help and I joined him. And that's now Rest is all history. I've been in the music business since 1961.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you were able to work for quite a long time, in fact, up until his death, with your brother in a very close capacity.

[Unidentified voice]:

My brother had a series of physical problems that developed. But in the last three years, four years, it became very serious, and I had to bring them to Maine and put them into a nursing home. But up until then, we had been in business, and I had always been in the role of fireman might be the word. But we had built. In the 60s, he and I had built a hugely successful production and publishing company. We had a series of number. I mean, a lot of number one records, top ten records, and part of which is the history that has been shown on Broadway with the show Jersey Boys, which is basically the story of one of our groups called the Four Seasons. The interesting part of that is when we were doing all of those records, when we were doing the Four Seasons and Mitch Rider and the Detroit Wheels and Leslie Gore and all of those artists that were ours that we produced and released records by, we had this attitude that this is just music for this week, and are we on the charts this week? And what role are we on the charts? How many sales have we had? No one would have thought that records and music that we were creating in 1961 through 1966 or 67 would find itself on Broadway in the 2000s. And be quite honestly, one of the biggest hits, financial hits, in the history of Broadway. It's still running on Broadway. It's in its ninth year on Broadway. Broadway, it's in London, it's in Las Vegas. It's got a road company. It's been. It's had companies in Australia and Canada and South Africa. So quite honestly, it's beyond. You can't conceive of that. You can't look forward and say, oh, this is what's going to happen with our lives. It altered a lot of the things that we could do. And as a result of Jersey Boys, one of the great benefits is the Bob Crew foundation, because what do you do with all this success? What we're basically, Bob and I decided is to pay it forward. Hence we formed the foundation. And of course, at the time, my brother was still reasonably well, but then he had this very tragic fall when we were going to the next day, we were supposed to go and celebrate the fifth year of Jersey Boys in New York. And he fell down a flight of stairs and pretty much permanently damaged his brain. And so that set this whole cycle for the next three years or so for him, downward spiral. It was a very tragic episode for all of us. But Sad because he can't enjoy what we're now able to do. It's tough.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've had a lot of tough things, actually.

[Unidentified voice]:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Your daughter Jessie died 19 years ago, and we had her mother, who is now Sydney, on the show. And he was telling us about how this impacted his music because he went through a gender reassignment surgery.

[Unidentified voice]:

Oh, yeah,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've had a lot of things.

[Unidentified voice]:

Jesse's death was the most significant event in both of our lives and certainly it still profoundly affects everything I do and think about. There isn't a day that I don't think about Jesse and that so much of my motivation is about the concept that this is a concept that I have in that she hasn't been able to live her life out. And I'm living out her life for her, doing the kind of things that I really am convinced she would have done. She had this belief, she had righteous indignation. She was going to correct so many things. And she did. And she had a major impact on her classmates who talk about her and still talk about her. Yes, Jessie was phenomenal. She was a phenomenon. But I do mean this when I say that at one point when I really didn't know I would be able to go on because of the grief, it was that realization that I had to make a difference, that I had in her name, do something to make a difference. And that's what I've been doing.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

It isn't often that I have the opportunity to interview a set of brothers, a set of sisters, a set of siblings of any sort on the radio show. And today I have that privilege. Today I have with me Lou and Paul Urenik. Lou is a former Nieman Fellow and editor in residence at Harvard University. He is a professor of journalism at Boston University. Now he was deputy managing editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer and editor of the Portland Press Herald. His writing has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe, and Field and Stream. A former Fulbright Fellow, Uranik is the author of Backcast, which won the National Outdoor Book Award for Literary Merit, and Two Brothers a Dream and Five Acres in Maine. His latest book is the Great One American's Mission to Rescue victims of the 20th century's first genocide. Lou's brother Paul moved to Maine in the 1970s when he was asked to help build a post and beam home on land that Lou bought in New Gloucester. The home took three years worth of Sunday work to build. After that, Paul got involved in construction and eventually moved into a construction management position at at the Bolas Company, where he has been part of many notable projects such as Pineland Redevelopment, the Winslow Homer Home restoration for the Portland Museum of Art, Allagash Breweries, Evolving Development and Expansion, Backyard Farms Research and Development center in Madison, and the current Thompson's Point redevelopment. Thank you so much for coming in.

[Unidentified voice]:

Thank you for having us. It's great to be here. Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

These were smaller versions of much more work that you both have done. I could have actually spent the entire show just talking about the stuff that you each have done for the Portland area and the world at large, I guess, let's just say so. We're very privileged to have you here today.

[Unidentified voice]:

Thank you.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I really enjoyed reading the book Cabin, and in no small part it was because of the brother aspect of all of this. Now, Lou, you were going through some significant transitions in your life when you decided to build this cabin, and it was an interesting and sometimes a difficult book to read from that standpoint. Talk to me a little bit about what was happening in your life.

[Unidentified voice]:

I undertook the cabin project, really as a kind of healing project, as you say, transitions. I had lost a job. I had some years earlier gone through a divorce and was still reverberating in my life. And our mother had died some years earlier, so there was a lot of tumult and turmoil in my life. And so I was looking for something that I could take on that would engage the better part of me, something positive to do. And I had always loved the outdoors. It's part of what brought me to Maine many years ago, and it's been an important part of my life. So I played with several different ideas about traveling to somewhere or doing something else and decided the thing I really wanted to do was build a cabin. And it was a fantasy in a way, really. And I'm not really capable of building a cabin by myself. So fortunately, I have a brother who is So I had this idea, this dream, and I loved that part of Maine, western Maine. So I bought the land. Paul and I went up together and looked at it, and Paul concluded that it was, you know, good place to put a cabin. And so I got a good deal on it, and we started building later that year. So it would have been 2008. So that's how it began.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And it's interesting to me, Paul, because you didn't start the book in the story. You didn't start as having been going through transitions yourself, necessarily, but by the end of the book, you were going through your own set of transitions.

[Unidentified voice]:

Correct? Correct.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So this seemed like kind of an important thing for you both to be doing at this period of time.

[Unidentified voice]:

Yeah, you know, I guess. I guess life is really just a series of transitions when you look at it. And, you know, the cabin was a project where the two of us could be together, could work together, we could bring other family members involved, mainly my children, who all lived locally, and they all love working with their hands, etc. So, you know, what do you do when you have transition in your life? You know, I think you revert back to family and to those things that are anchors in your life, and you bring them together, and those are your rudder.

[Unidentified voice]:

Yeah, absolutely. And it was a great, I don't know, salve. Solace to me to be. To be with Paul through this and his sons who would come out and, you know, lend a hand. One of the boys in particular, Kevin, turned out to be hugely important to the project. He worked with me on the frame of the cabin through the winter. You know, absolutely insane that we were building this thing through the winter, but that's the way it happened. And I was too eager to delay, despite Paul's advice. So we. We went ahead. We began the project in November. Can you believe that? And we were putting up the frame in the winter, in the teeth of a Maine winter, it's snowing each weekend. I'd go back up there with Kevin and Paul, and we'd have another 6 or 12 inches of snow on the deck, and we'd have to shovel it off and broom off the beams and so forth and get to work. But actually, it turned out to be a lot of fun. Winter is a great time to be outdoors. The air is crisp and clear, the sky was blue. And, you know, we'd build a fire, we'd cook some lunch, you know, hot dogs or whatever. So even though it was a little nutty, it turned out to be a lot of fun and it sure was a great joy, comfort to me to be with Paul and Kevin and his other son Paulie, and occasionally Andrew, a third son, a very capable young man would come along. So we were having. We were sort of having our own work party.

[Unidentified voice]:

I had teased Lou during that part of the project because concurrent with us building it, he was also writing a blog for the New York Times

[Unidentified voice]:

on

[Unidentified voice]:

the building of the cabin. And I had said to him, this is the first time a schedule of a construction project for me has been driven by the need for you to write something to get into your weekly blog. So that is what's kept us on schedule, his need to keep the blog updated for the Times.

[Unidentified voice]:

That's right. We were dealing with the cabin and we were also dealing with my need to file two or three times to the New York Times. And so I described the ascent of the cabin for the New York Times over the course of the year. And that turned out to be fun too. And we had pictures of all of us, you know, as part of that. But you're right, that was pretty funny. And so, you know, people all over the world, actually I had forgotten about that. People all over the world were experiencing this cabin going up. And it was not without disasters. I mean, we screwed things up, things fell down, you know, it went point. I hadn't sufficiently, I guess, braced the, the roof trusses and it's a very windy place, we're up on a hill and the roof trusses blew down. It was a complete disaster. I just wanted to walk away from the whole project. When I saw that one spring day, spring of 2009, I guess. But Paul and Kevin, you guys, I was amazed you guys went, you know, it was like, hey, this is great. We can solve this problem. I was ready to shoot myself and Paul and Kevin went to work and untangled the rafters and pushed the walls back together. And we found a way to swing these very heavy trusses back up into position. So even that worked out, but we shared that with the world via the New York Times. You know, the catastrophe of the rafters.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I would think that this is something that's not that foreign to you, Paul. Having something happen during construction that wasn't what you expected. And just having to deal with it,

[Unidentified voice]:

well, that's what construction, you know, no matter. And I've been in, you know, I've been involved in very, very simple projects to very complex multi million dollar projects. And I don't care what team of professionals you have, how much planning you do, there is something that's going to go wrong. I mean, that's. That's just the way construction is.

[Unidentified voice]:

You know, you try to limit those

[Unidentified voice]:

things as much as possible. But. But, you know, in construction, they don't call them problems, they call them opportunities.

[Unidentified voice]:

We had a lot of opportunities, that's for sure.

[Unidentified voice]:

And so, you know, you figure it out. But it's. It's, you know, it's good to get out from behind a computer, get out of the office and those things and, you know, to use your hands and use your brains to, you know, solve something physically and hopefully physically with using your brain and not your back, you know, to, you know, correct the problem. So it's fun. And it's. And it's. And it's all a. It's teamwork. It's a collaborative thing. And Lou was mentioning my son Kevin. He, you know, he puts a tremendous amount of thought. You know, he'll look at a problem for five minutes and not say a word, and then he'll approach the solution to it. So, you know, there's. There's some good interaction that goes on between. Not everybody agrees. Not everybody agrees on the best way to solve a problem. But, you know, you work it out and say, okay, let's do this.

[Unidentified voice]:

And, you know, Kevin has something that then Paul has the same quality. I completely lack it. And that's this ability to understand space relationships. You know, some people can look at a box and kind of turn it in their mind and say, well, what would that look like if it were turned sideways and. Or unfold the box in their mind? And it turns out that that is a good quality to have if you're building something, because you have to think, well, how would I fit that into that? And so forth. I don't have it. And so Kevin, in particular, he was great. He saved us a lot of time and effort by thinking these things through, sort of turning the box in his mind as, you know, as we build things. And you're right, there was, you know, there was disagreement along the way, and we worked it out. You know, when I started the cabin, I had a pretty firm idea how I wanted the interior space. And I was going to have a writing room, you know, which was a ridiculous idea. You know, another fantasy, as if I were going to go up there and sit in a room inside a cabin and write. But anyway, that this was part of the fantasy. And. And my nephew Paulie, Paul's son, said, uncle Louie, no way. This cabin has to be wide open. It has to be open space. It's a family space. We're all going to be together. Nobody gets behind the door to write a book, you know. And I said, no, Paulie, I'm not sure. I think I could use a place where I could escape. No, no. He insisted and he started citing cabins that we had been in in the past. There was a cabin in particular in Aroostook County. We used to take the B.O. southern Roosta county for three or four days every fall around Thanksgiving for a deer hunting trip. Nobody ever shot a deer, I think. But in any event, we used to stay in this cabin. And Paul, you know, he was described. Paulie was describing that cabin. And so he made the argument and he was right. So there's no. The interior space of the cabin is fully open. It's communal family space. There are bunk beds against the back wall, and if you're sitting in the eating area, you can see the bunk beds. And if somebody's playing poker at the table, it's all wide open. So we work these things through as a group as it went up.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

we have with us in the studio Kate McAleer, who is the founder of Bixby Company, a chocolate making company that uses organic, wholesome ingredients like real fruits, nuts and cocoa. Kate's Chocolate Factory is on the water in Rockland, and she sells to national and local stores and including Whole Foods, Belfast Co Op, Rosemont Market, Aurora Provisions, and Lois's Natural Marketplace. Kate, what a great job you have.

[Unidentified voice]:

It's very exciting and chocolatey and chocolatey, which is.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I think that's the best thing, is that you get to do things that make people happy. There's really not. Well, unless something went wrong with a batch, I guess there's really nothing that you could do that would present people with any sort of problematic conundrum in their life.

[Unidentified voice]:

Hopefully not. No.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Hopefully not. Well, I was interested to have you come in and talk to us today because you are in an article written by Sophie Nielsen from Maine Magazine called Maine Kind of Bixby Co. Chocolate and its clever creator, Kate McAleer. She just writes this glowing article about you and your journey. So I wanted to. I wanted our listeners to be able to experience that as well. You're only 27 years old.

[Unidentified voice]:

27, yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah, that's pretty young to be in charge of a, a good sized company.

[Unidentified voice]:

It's really exciting how I started this company when I was 23, turning 24. And my mom had always said, you know, you have a unique opportunity in your 20s to work really hard for yourself, try and launch something and build something and if it doesn't work out, you still have your 30s to rebound. And that was a really incredibly, you know, powerful thing that she had told me at a pretty young age and had encouraged me to go sort of this completely non corporate path and learn everything about starting a company and then everything about chocolate from the ground up, literally from scratch. So it's been an incredible learning experience and growing experience for myself. And that was sort of the point in a way that, you know, it was about taking just a giant leap in risk and work really hard and learn a lot about myself and about business and food. And it's been an incredible experience. Challenging but exciting and fun and stressful all combined together.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I love that idea that your 20s are this very. They're a time where you can experiment and you can take risks and you can work hard and you have the energy to work hard. But also it's not like anything's lost if you take a risk and it doesn't pan out right.

[Unidentified voice]:

And you don't have as many commitments as people further down the road. One of these business classes I was in, one of these men asked a question, he was saying, you know, I'm in my mid-40s. Is it too late for me to become an entrepreneur? And that was a really interesting question to me. You know, I'm not saying that you can't be an entrepreneur at any age, but there's a particular time in my life right now where I'm not really committed to anything but Bixby and company. So I can put 150% of all of my time and energy and at 1am in the morning I can be researching freight companies because I'm slightly sleep deprived and obsessed with finding economic freight out of Maine, which I think is unique to my own characteristic, but also probably my age.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You have a connection to Maine that is lifelong?

[Unidentified voice]:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Although you've lived here for just the past two years full time, Right? Full time.

[Unidentified voice]:

As a Mainer for the past two years.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So tell me about what was that initial connection? Why did you start coming here?

[Unidentified voice]:

Sure. So my mom's family has roots in the Spruce Head Rockland area and my parents had bought a second home in the Rockport area before I was really young. Even born so we started coming here for not just the summer periods, but for Thanksgivings and winters and year round, you know, second home vacation experiences. And we'd always loved the foodie scene, the beautiful scenery. The breakwater is one of our favorite family walks with our dog. And my parents had retired two years ago when I was starting up this business. They had said, you know, we want to move to Maine full time. We think you should come with us. And I said, you know, okay. That wasn't maybe necessarily what I was thinking, but it's an amazing place to live, amazing place to eat food, and then as it turns out, an amazing place to have a business. So the way that the business community has embraced me and helped me grow my business here in Maine has been just fantastic. And I think that the opportunities for small businesses and even startup businesses in Maine are huge. Unlike other places where I think you would never have the access to the help, resources, networking in a way that you do in Maine. And that's something I think unique to Maine.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You had the opportunity pretty early on to share some of your work, we'll call it with Cellar Door Winery.

[Unidentified voice]:

Yes.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

That must have been pretty important.

[Unidentified voice]:

Absolutely. I mean, Cellar Door Winery is an example of a successful business, but also a successful woman owned business and a role model, quite frankly. So when I moved to Maine, I don't recall specifically, but I believe Celador Winery reached out to me before I even reached out to them. And they said, you know, can you drop us off samples of. And I ran over there and did a sampling and they opened up some wine and we were already pairing which bars would go with which of their wines. And then they invited me to come and do samplings, which are incredible experiences at the winery in Lincolnville. And so many fascinating people walk through that location in Lincolnville. And some of my biggest networking for business opportunities actually occurred at Cellar Door Winery. And again, you have to be open to doing these things. But then things come together unexpectedly and in an exciting fashion.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You originally weren't going to focus on chocolate. You weren't going to focus on really food at all. You've traveled a lot. You spent time abroad in China and France, where there was a candy focus, of course, but. But originally you graduated from New York University with a degree in East Asian Studies and minors in art history and French. And then you began graduate work at the new School studying the history of decorative arts and design. Yep. So there's a lot of interesting.

[Unidentified voice]:

Yeah, so I like to call myself a fan of cultural history. So be it through objects, art or, you know, history. History and studying abroad. So in high school I lived abroad as a high school student in China and in France, living with host families, being immersed in those cultures and those were incredible experiences that had major impacts on who I am and obviously what I'm now doing. For me, I was trying to figure out how to tie together all of these widespread interests. What could be this one thing that would tie it together? I was pursuing an art history, decorative arts career and then decided to just take a total pivot and some of my friends called it a quarter life crisis. But I think it was just you start going down something and you realize, okay, this is really interesting and it's intellectually interesting, but it's not going to be enough to fulfill everything that I'm looking for in terms of a full time, impassioned career effort. So thinking about how am I going to wake up every day and want to work incredibly hard at something and tie in so many of my interests. Owning your own company was one medium through which you could do that. But then in the mode of food, which is such an interesting medium through which so many things can be expressed, and then chocolate. As a lifelong chocolate lover and then having been exposed to to chocolate in France, the French are, they're very opinionated and they have a lot of opinions that Americans don't know what real chocolate is or they don't know how to even eat properly and all these stereotypes about Americans. So I learned a lot about what it means to eat good food and appreciate good food in France. And then that translated into eventually the launching of Bixby and company.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've been listening to Lovemain radio show number 223 best of 2015. Our guests have included Scott Nash, Dan Krug, Paul and Lou urenic, and Kate McAleer. Follow me on Twitter as DrLisa and see my running travel, food and wellness photos as bountiful1 on Instagram. We love to hear from you, so please let us know what you think of Love Maine Radio. We welcome your suggestions for future shows. Also let our sponsors know that you have heard about them here. We are privileged that they enable us to bring Love Maine Radio to you each week. This is Dr. Lisa Bellio. I hope that you have enjoyed Our best of 2015 show. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your day and of 2015. May you have a bountiful life and a happy New year.

[Unidentified voice]:

I surrender. I wave a white flag and surrender to you how hard must we fight? How soft can we touch? How bright can we weep? Hey lonely girl can't you see I'm a sad boy too? They say misery loves company Maybe we'll be sad but true? Cause there ain't nothing wrong with a little pain There's a reason why it's called a flame Reach out and let it burn. Reach out and let it it burn. We both burst into flames Burst into tears Stood in the rain. We brave the war but some wars you can't win hey, whose sad are you?

[Unidentified voice]:

On.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

A lonely boy?

[Unidentified voice]:

Oh, can't you see that I've been sad?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Sad, sad no.

[Unidentified voice]:

Oh, they say misery loves company Leave. Maybe we'll be sad but true Ooh. Cause there ain't nothing wrong with a little pain There's a reason why it's called a flame Reach out and let it burn your baby please Reach out and let it burn. Sam, You too. Oh, they say misery loves company. Maybe we'll be sad but true Oz There ain't no nothing wrong with a little pain There's a reason why it's called the flame Reach out and let it bury baby. Reach out and let it burn. I saw her today. She's in the family. Waiting. In the back of my mind I thought what if that child ain't that mine? Just give it time. I think of things that we said while we were laying in bed and wonder how I've been able to redo what things have been Fun time Just give it time oh, just give it time. I can take back the wor I hurt you in I know mistakes were made let's give it space and time. I did my as I put it away I found a pair of your socks and the basket all balled up with mine Just give it time oh, just give it away. I can take back the world I hurt you. I know mistakes were made It's. I can take back the words I got you. I know mistakes were made I will give you this I know mistakes were made I'll give you this I made mistake.