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Maine Man: The Life and Times of a Down Easter
Craig Etchison
Signed / inscribed
Don't be misled by the plain title: Maine Man (1989) is an oral history—Craig Etchison's patient assembly of the life and times of Ray Rice, a genuine Down Easter, into a portrait of rural New England told largely in its subject's own voice. Etchison, a writer and teacher, lets Rice's recollections carry the book, and the result is less biography than sustained listening: the cadences, humor, and hard-won practicality of someone who lived close to the land and water. It's a modest, affectionate volume from the small California house Fithian Press, the kind of regional book that preserves a way of life precisely because no one famous is involved. For readers drawn to Maine, to oral history, or to the texture of ordinary American lives, it offers something increasingly rare: an unhurried, first-person record of a world that has largely passed.
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The author
Craig Etchison is an American writer and educator whose work ranges across fiction and nonfiction; Maine Man sits among a handful of books he wrote for adult readers, alongside later novels. Here he works chiefly as a collector and shaper of another person's testimony.
The subject
Ray Rice is the "Down Easter" of the subtitle—a Maine figure whose recollections form the book's spine. The oral-history method keeps him at the center: Etchison's role is to ask, to listen, and to arrange, rather than to interpret.
The book
Published by Fithian Press in 1989, Maine Man: The Life and Times of a Down Easter runs to a little over two hundred pages. It belongs to a durable tradition of regional oral history that values the ordinary voice and the local particular over grand narrative.
How it reads
Conversational and unforced. The pleasures are in specifics—weather, work, neighbors—and in the sense of sitting across from someone with a long memory.
For more context
Sits comfortably beside Studs Terkel's oral histories and the Foxfire books, which likewise built enduring records from ordinary American speech.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Craig Etchison
- Publisher
- Fithian Press
- Place of publication
- McKinleyville, California
- Year
- 1989
- ISBN
- 0-931832-33-0
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine
Places
To another Maine Man and Down Easter... (inscribed 1990)