Echoes features personal stories
Past, present and future come together on the pages of the new edition of Echoes magazine.
Echoes 98 commemorates a town that once produced shingles and clapboards, helps The Aroostook Medical Center celebrate its centennial and documents efforts to assure a future for the New Sweden band shell. In addition, the fall Echoes features an Aroostook County girl who became a sculptor’s model. Born in a log cabin in South Oakfield, Dora Louise Higgins was newly married and living in Georgetown when world famous sculptor William Zorach invited her to model. Writer and Caribou native Trudy Chambers Price traced the story of her Aunt Dora Higgins Akeley and the red clay sculpture that eventually made its way from New York to a gallery in Wiscasset.
Paul Cyr took the cover photo of a chickadee on a snowy Christmas tree bough, and the issue debuts two new photographers to Echoes: Corey Park and Brent Stoliker.
Personal essays in Issue 98 detail poignant life experiences, from losing a sister to Alzheimer’s disease to losing the language your grandparents tried to lose; from finding a way to say thank you to a supportive community to facing some amusing challenges while babysitting grandchildren.
In an essay titled “She,” with a photo by Erni Roberts, Dale Murray honors the deer he shot by detailing her last moments from her point of view. And in Part II of his short story “Penny and Portia,” Gordon Hammond draws on his own experience to describe how a couple of would-be farmers from the city end the lives of the pigs who became pets.
Regular columnists Glenna Johnson Smith, John Dombek and Lucy Leaf present their views on things to be grateful for, the X-Factor television program and nurturing new fruit trees, respectively, and Roger Parent of Lille continues his account of life as a Peace Corps volunteer in Thaliand. Dottie Hutchins helps family members trace their genealogy in her “Tapping Family Trees” column.
Other writers featured in Echoes 98 include Deidre Dicker of Westfield, Masardis native Charles Weeks of Lake Saint Louis, Mo., Sr. Elizabeth Wagner of Windsor, Phyllis Hutchins of Chapman, Terri Dombek Smith of Moline, Ill., Fort Kent native Noelle Dubay of Farmington and Kathryn Olmstead of Caribou. The new edition also contains poems by Katie Johnson of Seattle, David Parker of Rochester, N.Y., Anita Findlen of Clifton and Mike McNally of Ashland.
Dedicated to rediscovering qualities of community at risk today, Echoes is published quarterly by Echoes Press, based in Caribou, and printed at Northeast Publishing Company in Presque Isle. For more information, visit echoesofmaine.com.
