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Novelist Elizabeth Strout ’77 was photographed last spring in Portland, Maine, by\u00a0Phyllis Graber Jensen.<\/strong><\/p>\n The slender Strout stands in the chilly shade of a building\u2019s porch. Across the street the flat, strengthening sunlight of March bathes a row of wooden houses. It\u2019s an Edward Hopper kind of light.<\/p>\n \u201cI miss the way sunlight falls on Maine houses,\u201d she says. Strout is a longtime Brooklyn, N.Y., resident but lived much of her earlier life in Maine. And the state \u2014 its natural realm, its rhythms, its people \u2014 lives large in Strout\u2019s novels.<\/p>\n Maine, she says, means \u201cjust about everything\u201d to her.<\/p>\n Her parents were born in Lewiston, a city Strout came to love while at Bates. Her father taught microbiology at the University of New Hampshire. Her mother taught high school writing and early on encouraged her daughter\u2019s authorial aspirations. The family shuttled between Durham, N.H., and a house down a dirt road in Harpswell.<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s where my parents\u2019 sense of home was,\u201d Strout says, \u201cso that\u2019s where my sense of home was.\u201d (Her brother, Jonathan, remains in Maine, a Freeport dentist and photographer.)<\/p>\n \u201cMy parents knew the names of all the trees and the wildflowers and the birds,\u201d she says, and were generous with that knowledge. \u201cWe knew where the first violets could be found and knew what a cardinal\u2019s call sounded like.\u201d Strout\u2019s attunement to nature is a constant in her prose, as ornament, symbol, and psychological mirror.<\/p>\n \u201cI find her Maine incredibly real. I\u2019d put it in a league with Annie Proulx\u2019s Wyoming,\u201d says publisher David Foster \u201977. In particular, Strout captures the way Maine \u201ccan be so grand and so incredibly claustrophobic at the same time,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople are physically distant, but because there aren\u2019t very many, her characters are forced to confront one another day in and day out \u2014 not unlike eating at Commons.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can\u2019t hide in the crowd in Liz\u2019s novels or in Maine.\u201d<\/p>\n Entering Bates after her junior year of high school, Strout loved theater and majored in English. She studied creative writing with English professor James Hepburn, who, she recalls, at graduation offered her a bracing dose of reality about the writing game: \u201cOnce you\u2019re out of here, nobody will care whether or not you write another word.\u201d<\/p>\n After Bates, in England and America, Strout worked a veritable Yellow Pages of jobs \u2014 waitressing, performing as a nightclub pianist, selling mattresses, and working in the Bates secretarial pool, to name a few.<\/p>\n She earned a law degree at Syracuse but didn\u2019t like the work, and went on to teach English at Manhattan Community College. (She now teaches in a low-residency writing program at Queens University, Charlotte, N.C.). Strout published her first short story in 1982, and her byline has since appeared in Redbook, The New Yorker,<\/em> and various literary journals.<\/p>\n But she reconnected emotionally with Maine only as she got into Amy and Isabelle.<\/em> The story of a daughter and mother whose similarities bring them to a grinding conflict, it\u2019s set in a depressed mill town during an oppressive summer. \u201cI began to realize, \u2018Oh, there is your sense of literature and place,\u2019\u201d she explains. \u201cIt was enormously big.\u201d<\/p>\n The first novel, the author says, arose \u201cnaturally and organically.\u201d Abide with Me<\/em> was more deliberate, the product of Strout\u2019s fascination with religion and with the ministry as a job, as opposed to a spiritual vocation. Set in 1959 in insular West Annett, upriver from the first book\u2019s Shirley Falls, it depicts how his wife\u2019s death affects the Rev. Tyler Caskey and his other relationships.<\/p>\n Young, capable, and well-meaning, Caskey \u201cloved people and they liked him back,\u201d Strout says. \u201cHe thought that his life was going to go in a certain direction.\u201d<\/p>\n But no. The demise of Lauren, his wife, a rich girl ill-suited for hardscrabble West Annett, derails the preacher and all his relationships \u2014 except the one with his housekeeper, which goes weirdly deep even as it\u2019s revealed that the pair, like Amy and Isabelle before them, share a life-changing secret.<\/p>\n Strout rejected as trite the notion of Caskey losing his faith. Instead, \u201cI was interested in Caskey losing his sense of self,\u201d she says, and in what she calls the \u201cstatute of limitations\u201d on grief: what happens when the congregation\u2019s needs from Caskey overturn their sympathy for him?<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t pretty. Strout\u2019s vivid characters take umbrage over everything from his parenting to his taste in desserts. Abide with Me<\/em> hits its climax when Caskey, trying to preach a sermon that will return the flock to righteousness or at least shut them up, fails spectacularly. It\u2019s this failure that clears the air; hubris, for a change, plays to the hero\u2019s advantage.<\/p>\n Jim Hepburn\u2019s inoculation against hubris comes to mind hours after the photo session, at the bookstore in South Portland. Striking in a black suit and black-framed glasses, surrounded by stacks of Abide with Me,<\/em> Strout is reading to 30 attentive listeners about Caskey and his housekeeper.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just so glad to be able to write,\u201d Strout said earlier in the day. \u201cOn a day when it goes well, like when you have a sentence you\u2019re pleased with, it\u2019s wonderful. There\u2019s no feeling like it.\u201d<\/p>\n She adds, with a laugh, \u201cAnd then there are all those days in between when things don\u2019t go so well, and there\u2019s no feeling like that, either.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Spring has sprung, cold gusts are kicking up grit, and novelist Elizabeth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":1183,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-1188","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1188","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1188"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1188\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13715,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1188\/revisions\/13715"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1188"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}