Gary Lawless, Gulf of Maine Books

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Gary Lawless is a poet, publisher and editor. He is also the co owner of Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick and lots of other things. It's really good to have you in here today.

Gary Lawless:

Thank you. Thanks. My big trip to Portland?

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, yeah, I mean, that's. That's pretty far distance from Brunswick, right?

Gary Lawless:

It's a long way.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Plus you live even further up there, is that right?

Gary Lawless:

I do. I live in nobleborough, so that's just

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

a little bit further down.

Gary Lawless:

Yeah. Another 35 miles north of Brunswick.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Now, am I right that you also have a farm?

Gary Lawless:

I live on a farm that was owned by two writers, Henry Beston and Elizabeth Coatsworth, and between them they published 150 books. And then they left their farm to their daughter, Kate Barnes, who was Maine's first poet laureate and published a number of books herself. So it's. Kate says that the farm grew words and not crops, so. Yeah. But it's a gentleman's farm in the country, I think. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I read one of the books that Henry Beston wrote, and it was about. I was sort of watching his plants grow.

Gary Lawless:

Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And I'm wondering if he must have done that while he was living on your.

Gary Lawless:

He did. He did. He had a big herb garden there and he wrote a book called Herbs in the Earth about that herb garden. And then he had a more general book called Northern Farm that was kind of a journal of farm life in four seasons. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But he wasn't originally a farmer, which was what made it so interesting.

Gary Lawless:

No, no. He grew up in Hingham and went to Harvard and kind of a. But he went to the First World War as an ambulance driver and saw such horror that he came back and spent almost two years out on the end of Cape Cod by himself doing work that we would probably now term PTSD work. And he wrote a book called Outermost House about that, which has become a real classic of Cape Cod life. And then after that he moved to Maine in the early 1930s.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

So that kind of leads us nicely into work that you are currently doing with veterans of a more recent war.

Gary Lawless:

Yeah, I worked with veterans originally in the early 90s. I was the artist in residence at Preble street here in Portland for two years. And I ran a once a week open writers workshop for any of the homeless and low income folks who were using Preble Street. And I started working with a number of homeless vets who were coming in during the day. They wouldn't come in at night because they didn't want to give up that last shred of what they owned. But they would come in during the day and I would get them to. Well, some of them told stories, some of them wrote poems, one of them wrote great songs. And one of the counselors that was working at Preble street then went to the veterans center in Lewiston and I kind of followed and have been doing writing groups with combat veterans there. So a number of them are Vietnam veterans. And they've told me, for some reason I found this a lot. Working with poetry is really different from talking to a counselor or a spouse or a family member. And people will say things when they're committing the act of poetry that they don't necessarily say to counselors or in conversation with loved ones, stuff comes out and then when it comes out, you're not carrying it around inside you anymore. So it's really. It's one way I can try to help people heal a little bit through creative work.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Yeah, we did an interview with Monica Wood, who is mostly a fiction writer, but she's also done some autobiographical stuff,

Gary Lawless:

a wonderful memoir and.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Wonderful memoir. And she's a teacher and she had worked with people who are incarcerated. I don't know if she had exactly the same experience you're describing, but there is. There was sort of an opening that she talked about through story.

Gary Lawless:

Well, I worked in the old prison in Thomaston when it was there years ago. There was a USM professor who was in Thomaston for killing his wife. And he set up a program in there, actually a degree program for the University of Maine. And a bunch of us went in and did writing projects with the folks in jail. And then I published a book about Dennis Deschane and the Sarah Cherry murders and have been quite involved with that as well. So, yeah, it's different there. It's different there because with the vets, they're still out in the world. And with the disabled folks I work with, we're trying to get them more out into the world. And when you're behind bars, I can't really help them get out into the world. I can help them feel better about themselves, perhaps, and the way they relate to each other. But I'm not going to break them out. Poetry can only go so far. You know,

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I love poetry and I also know that one of the biggest arguments against poetry is its, I don't know, seeming impracticality, which I find very interesting, because people will say, well, you can't make money as a poet. But if we decide only to do things that we can make money with, then first of all, we may never learn that we actually could make money as a poet. And second of all, we're really limiting ourselves and valuing only very specific things.

Gary Lawless:

And if you choose to work in a creative art, if you're doing it to make money, you probably shouldn't be doing it. That's not really, I don't think what it's about. But I also tell people that I go in and do poetry workshops. And if it helps you to elucidate what you're thinking, to translate your thought into language, you know, you can tell the doctor more specifically what you want, or you can tell the mechanic at the garage more specifically what you want, or it helps you be more lucid and clear in your language. So that I think that is a positive thing in the world. I used to go into high schools and do poetry, and in the 70s and 80s, nobody wanted to rhyme. The high school kids didn't want to rhyme. That was old fashioned. No, we don't want to do that. We want to be Allen Ginsberg. Now I go in and they all want to out rhyme each other, but they see it in terms of rap and hip hop. Yet there are forms. There are regular beats, there are forms, there's rhyming. And so there's this wonderful shift back to rhyme that I see when I go into schools. And it's cultural and it's not necessarily because they want to write a sonnet, but whatever has brought them back to rhyme, you know, it's fine with me.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I have a Poem that you wrote, which I'm just going to read a few lines from. And this is, I believe, called Caribou Planet.

Gary Lawless:

Oh, okay.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Will I discover the yellow dog who lives within the sunlit garden of your body, breathing deep water like old cave walls, spirals of moisture and aged stone. Will I discover the hidden passage, the lost and forgotten tunnel? How marvelous to find a wall of muscled flesh. How wonderful, these beasts, how soft, as if I had crawled through the labyrinth of rock to come upon a garden of sinew in the lush bloom of pelt, all moving in spirals toward the chambered ceiling, torches flickering. That's only a part of this poem. But that just puts you into this place that. I mean, it's so evocative.

Gary Lawless:

Oh, yeah. I'm actually dreaming that I'm inside a dog of mine who had passed away. But also, when my wife and I got married, we went to. We spent our honeymoon in central France, going into caves to look at cave paintings. So I was hearkening back to those cave paintings in the dream. A weird thing. I go to Italy almost every year, and I've got five books of poems out in Italian and Italy. And the Italians, of course, have a whole different take on translation. So they translated that poem thinking that I was having an affair with a woman I was calling a female dog, basically. So the title of the poem was Cana Bastarda in the Italian. And I read it a couple times and didn't. Wasn't then I didn't speak Italian, so I didn't really know what the translator was reading. When I would read in English and they would read in Italian. And I was reading this poem about this dog that I loved who had died. And they're reading this poem about me having an affair. And of course, very Italian twist. And the first couple times I read it, people came up to my wife and said, don't you feel bad when he reads that? And she loved that dog too. So she said, I cry every time he reads it. So then they were convinced that their. Their translation was right. But finally someone told me the difference between the two and. And we. We got a different translator for that. But, you know, you have to be careful with poetry. And I went to Lithuania for a week to poetry festivals, and my. My translator there was drunk the whole time. Never actually read anything I had written. I would read in English, and then he would tell stories in Lithuanian or read poems of his own. I never knew. And this went on for seven nights. I never knew what he was going to do. But it was never anything I wrote. So translation is an interesting thing, but a lot of creative arts are translations, because you get the idea in your head or your heart or some other part of your body, and then you choose a way to express it out into the world. And I'm choosing to do it in the English language with somewhat proper syntax and grammar, But I could be dancing it or singing it or painting it or cooking it or, you know, there's any number of ways to bring those ideas into, you know, from your heart out into the world.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We went to Cranberry island to interview the artist Ashley Bryan, and he is. Well, first of all, he's been doing things for a long, long time.

Gary Lawless:

200 years, I think.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I didn't want to say this, but he's got.

Gary Lawless:

He's in his 90s.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

He's got some years behind him. But what I loved about our conversation was that his art took so many different forms, that he was thinking about things visually. That's what people know him for as a painter and a bookmaker. But he also thinks about art from a musical standpoint, and he also thinks about it poetically.

Gary Lawless:

He always recites poems in his talks. Langston Hughes will come rolling out of him. Yeah, that's wonderful. It's a wonderful combination. I wish I had more skills. I'm jealous of that.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

But is that more common than not that if you are somebody who is open to being creative, that you're creative in lots of different ways?

Gary Lawless:

I think it's common in that if you're creative in that way, you're constantly searching for new ways to express yourself. You don't want to do the same thing over and over again. I mean, some people do, and that's fine. But I think you do try to find new ways to do that. And once you get interested in translation, a whole world opens up. Because we really, as poets, we really only know European poets and American poets. You know, Portland has poets from Sudan and Somalia and Iran and Iraq and Syria. And, you know, there's this wonderful mix of languages. We don't know the language, first of all. We couldn't name poets and musicians from a lot of their cultures. And yet here we are, friends and neighbors in a community. So I think you're also constantly educating yourself about the possibilities of language, because you can do a lot of things in other languages that you can't do in ours.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

When I interviewed Reza Jalali, who is a poet and artist, and I guess many things. So many things. I don't want to pigeonhole him into anything. But when I interviewed him and then when I watched him give his speech at Maine Live, you know, his words and the way that he was able to translate this life that he had lived before, it was so much. That had so much more of an impact on me than just saying, this is the man. This is his biography. Here are some factual things about his life. So it really gave a lot of power to his past.

Gary Lawless:

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's true of a number of people in Maine right now because, you know, they. They come from situations of abuse and violence and horror that we can't really understand as. As pretty comfortable Mainers. And. And, you know, there's. There's a Portland poet, Kifa Abdullah, who was, you know, who was in the Iraqi army and was a prisoner of war in Iran, and for six years didn't even have a window to look out and can now. He's a joyful, wonderful painter and poet and artist, and he made it through that horrible situation that I think most of us can't even imagine being in a room for six years and not knowing what season it was, what time of day or night it was, and not seeing other living things except your jailer, which is not really the living thing you want to see. So I'm constantly trying to learn. That's what I've. Last 30 years, I've been working with refugees and folks with disabilities and prisoners and just trying to. Homeless folks and trying to learn about the realities of their world here in my own state. And the way I get them to tell me their stories is trying to get them to write poems. And if they commit that act, then all of us have access to those stories. If I can find ways to get them out to the world. I've got this gig at the Maine Humanities Council right now, where once a month, I'm putting up a poem from a community of voices in Maine that maybe people haven't heard. So your guest, Eklass, was last month's. This month is a Maliseet woman, Miku Paul, who lives here in Portland. And I've had a Palestinian poet, an Iraqi poet, and they all live here in Maine. It's an amazing composition of community that we try not to deny, but, you know, and if we listen to each other, then we learn a lot.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

We've been talking about people who have a voice, even if their language isn't one that we share, but with spindleworks and in other ways. You have worked with people who have disabilities who may not always have a voice or May not be able to use it the same way that the rest of us. Us can.

Gary Lawless:

Yeah, well, it depends on what you mean by voice. You know, I mean, I. I've. I've done poetry with deaf folks, and there's a. There's. Every year, there's a national deaf poetry gathering where people do their poems in sign language, and it's gorgeous. And, you know, and then there are a lot of people who don't read or write. But I tell them Homer probably didn't read or write, and he did. Okay. You know, so that was true at Preble street, too. There were people who had reading disabilities. There's quite a few people maneuvering the world, and we don't realize they don't read or write. You know, they have difficulties, like going to the restaurant. What do you order if you can't read the menu? And you don't cook at home that much because you can't read recipes. My friends at Spindleworks write amazing poems, but it's more of an oral tradition, and that's fine. You know, I just. When I work with people, I don't correct their syntax and grammar. I try to get them to tell me things, and then I usually. I read it back to them and say, is that how you want it? And that's. Then they have a chance to edit and correct. But I don't want to make them talk like me. I want to hear how they think in language and how they create things in language. And Spindleworks is a art center for adults with disabilities. So five days a week, the whole staff is artists rather than people in the social work profession. So they're encouraged to be as creative as possible. And then there is staff there that can help them. You know, they learn how to weave. They learn how to paint. They learn how to make pottery. They write poems with me. They do all. They make film. Now they're doing filmmaking. And I'm jealous because I want a place to go where five days a week, I'm encouraged to be as creative as I can be. Don't we all like that idea? And after a little while, the disabilities, you don't see that part of them. You see them as these creative, functioning, wonderful human beings. So what if their leg doesn't work the way yours does? Or they're in a chair, sit down. When you talk to them, don't stand over them. But you make these little adjustments, and then you're all just human and conversations are possible. And, you know, there are lots of different kinds of language. Some People make it on little type pads. Some people do it with their hands. It makes it make symbols and signs. That's just, you know, you have to, first of all, change your perception of what language is.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

The first two pieces that I wrote for Maine Magazine back three plus years ago now, one was about a young man named Scotty wenzel, who's now 16, and one was John Imber, who is an artist who has since passed away with als. And both of those individuals, their language, their verbal language, was limited by their situation, but they were absolutely still expressing themselves in ways that if you just were open to it, just had a little patience. Sometimes that patience is hard to have.

Gary Lawless:

Patience is key, and we're not raised to have patience anymore. I don't think everything's really fast. And when you're working with folks with some kinds of disabilities, you do have to change your speed a little bit. With als, it's especially hard because you know that the person inside that body that's not working right, their mind is totally clear and hasn't been affected. It's just that everything else is shutting down. So, yeah, yeah, I mean, so. And people with ALS and symptoms like that try really hard to find ways to communicate, you know, as they lose the possibilities of communication, they're still trying, you know, and so you have to be patient and help them find that way and be there.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

Well, and John. John Imber, he went from painting with one hand to his other hand. And then he eventually painted with his head, with a. With a paintbrush that was attached to a piece on his head. So it was so important that he express himself that he found another way physically to do it.

Gary Lawless:

And what is it that makes you so compelled to create that you will find a way even when your body is shutting down like that? I taught a course last year on poetry and walking, and it was all about poets who were walking while they were writing. And one of the poets was a Hungarian poet who was walking to a concentration camp and knew that he was going to die sometime within the next probably week or two, and. And was still writing poems all along the way. And they weren't about that. They were about the beauty of the landscape he was passing through. And he was, in fact, shot and killed before he ever got there. And his wife found his body and the poems were in a notebook. And right up until pretty much his last moment, he was still trying to make beauty out of the world around him. What is it that compels us to do that? And that's not just poets I mean, that's all the creative arts.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

You've been. You and your wife have owned Gulf of Maine Books in Brunswick for how many years?

Gary Lawless:

38. 38 years. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

And you've seen a lot of changes to the publishing industry. Probably that's, you know, the same things I've seen. Even the big bookstore chains, they've downsized and shut things down. We've said, well, we need to go virtual. But I still find when I go into a bookstore like yours or one of these other smaller bookstores, there's still something about picking up a book and what it represents that does something to me that's different than downloading a Kindle, which is good. I mean, those Kindle books are also good. They have their own thing. But. Okay, you're rolling your eyes.

Gary Lawless:

Maybe you do. Well, they do. They do. I mean, I teach at senior college, and. And with Kindles, you can make the type size really big. So folks who are having poor folks with poor eyesight can read with a Kindle. It's a good tool, and that is a disability. I'm wearing glasses. I've got a disability. But, yeah, a Kindle, it's a tool. But people come into our bookstore. One thing they do when they come in is they say it smells like a bookstore. And I asked them what it would smell like to walk into a Kindle store or what's a used bookstore going to look like when it's Kindles. Although you'll be able to learn about other people's lives because the Kindle will have one person's individual choices. So you can sort of do some psychological investigation that way, I think, a little bit. But, no, I think people still like the tactile sense of holding a book and touching a book and maybe smelling. I don't know what the smell is. I think it's mold, but I'm not sure. But also, people come in in the summer and they get very nostalgic and say, well, we used to have a bookstore in our town. And I'll ask them what happened, and they'll say, well, a bigger bookstore came in, chased the little bookstore out, and then the bigger bookstore closed. So now there's not a bookstore, and they miss it. It's not that they want to live without a bookstore in their town and order things from the Great Satan online, but the. But it's like Brunswick had a book land and a borders. They were located next to the gate, the front gate to the naval air station. So when the naval air station closed, they lost several thousand Customers immediately. And they didn't last much longer after that. But we're still there. Sometimes the old hippies win, which is. It's rare, but we're still here.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

What I particularly liked about your bookstore is. And I like a broad range of books, so I like poetry, I like fiction. I like nonfiction, But I really like. I like your spiritual section. I liked being able to go in there and pick up some of these books about Buddhism or Daoism. And you seem to have a little bit bigger selection than many of the independent bookstores that I go into.

Gary Lawless:

Yeah, well, part of that is just my. I was a East Asian Studies major in college, and then instead of going to graduate school, I wrote to my favorite poet and said, can I come live with you as your apprentice? And I ended up living with him. And he was a part of the San Francisco Zen center and had. His name was Gary Snyder, and he had a lot of people around him from a lot of different spiritual paths, and they were all welcome and all interesting. And so I left Maine and went out there to California and into that sort of milieu, and, you know, and they still are all welcoming and all interesting. I go to Italy almost every year, and I've been. I've been writing a travel guide to Italy based on body parts, basically based on saints relics. So, you know, where you can see cool pieces of people around. So I've spent a lot of time in Catholic churches, you know, and yet I'm this, you know, sort of atheist Mainer who's got this weird path. Although this year I'm about to go to Venice for a month. I've got an arts residency there. So I'm going to Venice to look at how the stone came to Venice. My grandfather worked in quarries here in Maine, and I've always been interested in granite and how it moved around. So I'm going to go to Venice and look at how the stone moved around. Because Venice is just clay and mud. There's not much, and yet there are all these stone buildings and stone things happening there. So I'm going to spend a month investigating that and then hopefully come back. Like, Shebeg built these wonderful stone sloops that transported granite. So I want to see what the boats were like that brought granite from the Istrian Peninsula over to Venice and sort of compare them to the Shebig sloops. And, you know, just.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

See, that's what I think is so interesting. When I went into your store a few years ago, I picked up a book, and I can't remember what it was called like something on fire, but it was about the monastery that burned. These are the people that wrote the Tassajara Bread book. And I wouldn't have picked that up if I hadn't gone into your bookstore, because I certainly wouldn't have. Amazon's not gonna recommend that for me. But I read that and it kind of sent me down a path. Send me another path. And of course, I'm all over the place. Place now still, but. And you're just describing kind of the same thing, like, all right, well, I'm kind of interested. My grandfather, he worked in a quarry. And then this sends me over here. And this sends me over here. And there's like a wandering of the mind that's okay. And made possible by people sharing their stories,

Gary Lawless:

I think. Yes. And I think that again, our spirituality section is open to diversity. And I think that's really. You know, when I went to. When I went to Cuba, they said, as a poet, Brunswick has a sister city in Cuba, Trinidad. And I went there with a group of poets and musicians. And they said, for you to understand our city, it's an Afro Cuban city where Santeria practitioners, so you guys have to be initiated. So we got initiated and we started learning about their religion, which had a lot to do with, for instance, the drum patterns that the percussionists were playing had a lot to do with the references in the poetry that the poetry writing. And it was important and not something you want to build a wall against to keep out, you know, but, you know, that being open to diversity enriches your education, I think. And therefore, I mean, I'm 66 years old, but I keep wanting to follow all those little trails. I'll never get to follow them all, but, you know, I keep being interested in lots of new things and that keeps me going. Yeah.

Dr. Lisa Belisle:

I appreciate your coming in today. I've been speaking with Gary Lawless, who is a poet, publisher and editor and co owner of the Gulf of Maine Books bookstore in Brunswick, Also one of this year's 50 Mainers. Also a winner of, I think, multiple well deserved honors around the state and around the country. Keep up the good work and thank you for spending this time with me today.

Gary Lawless:

Thanks for having me.