From Yankee Magazine April 1982 It was twilight, still and overcast, in Starks, Maine, on November 28, 1981, two days after Thanksgiving. Elsewhere in New England, store merchants were enjoying one of the year’s busiest shopping days. But you wouldn’t have known that in Starks. The town, with a population of 440, is strung along […]
Yankee
From Yankee Magazine January 1978 Like the Old Harbor town itself, some of us in Marblehead, Massachusetts, have for twenty-eight years had a grisly horror on our hands. Saturday night of Thanksgiving weekend in 1950, as a savage nor’easter battered the Massachusetts coast, spinster Beryl Atherton was strangled to death in her own kitchen, her […]
“How do I break into Yankee?” I hear that question over and over from hopeful writers. Through the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of freelancers at writers’ conferences, as well as on the phone and through letters and e-mails. The earnestness and hope in that question are not to be taken lightly. The desire to […]
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Portsmouth, RI: The Tin Can Man
Yankee classic from January/February 2001 In a small, white house on a side street off a side street in the seaside town of Portsmouth, Rhode Island, there lives a village so lightweight a child could pick it up and carry it away, but strong enough to lift the weight of the world off the shoulders […]
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The Dear Old Computer
Yesterday my computer crashed. I hate that sentence and all the possibilities that it implies. I was sending photographs on e-mail to a magazine I occasionally work for and, whether it was this actual act or just coincidence makes no matter, the fact is that the computer threw up a dark screen and refused to […]
“For the last 19 years,” says June LaCombe, Maine’s one-woman outdoor sculpture campaign, “I have been trying to get sculpture out of the white box of the gallery and back into people’s lives where it belongs.” June LaCombe is not just an art dealer; she is an art believer. She curates exhibitions of outdoor sculpture […]
Welcome to the July 2008 edition of “Jud’s New England Journal,” the rather curious monthly musings of Judson Hale, editor-in-chief of Yankee Magazine, published since 1935 in Dublin, New Hampshire. Do You Think Grits Are a Southern Invention? Well, not really. Fact is, they originated in New England… When most people think of New England […]
Yankee
Black Womanhood at the Hood
Back in 2001, while preparing a cover profile of her for the Boston Globe Magazine, I had the distinct privilege of spending time with Kara Walker, arguably America’s most important African-American artist. Walker’s provocative cut paper silhouettes plumb the depths of the highly charged historic experience of African-American women. Other than my conversations with Walker […]
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The Fox Comes Out
A few years ago, I wrote a short story I titled The Fox. It is about a young woman who is struggling to recover from the death of her husband. She works a mind-numbing job and comes home each night to an empty house. One hot summer evening, a fox wanders into her yard. The […]
New England is awash in young musicians challenging the traditional concept of folk music. The genre has become so experimental that it is difficult to come up with anything truly shocking anymore. Kris Delmhorst is pretty far out on the folk spectrum utilizing all of the most modern techniques: unconventional instrumentation, distortion, even some minor […]
Susan Shatter ranks among the best contemporary American watercolor painters. Other than Andrew Wyeth, I can’t think of another living artist who has done a more substantial body of work in watercolor. Shatter’s new exhibition, “Over Seas” at Aucocisco Gallery in Portland, Maine, features more than two dozen paintings that bring the fresh, translucent quality […]
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Pairings Hint — July/Aug
To respond, click on the link below. You will come to our Feedback page. Step 1. Fill in “Pairings” as the subject. Step 2. Fill in your name and e-mail address. Step 3. Type your answer in the box. Please include your city and state with your answer. Good luck! Click here to submit your […]