Dressing the Maine Way

This is NOT the Maine way to dress.

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: When I moved to Maine as a blushing bride, I had a trousseau of sorts. I had been living and working in Washington, DC for the previous four years (and had done a stint in London before that.) I had an entire closet of black-tie dresses and separates, all with coordinating strappy heels. I had professional clothes: big-shouldered, asymmetric jackets with short, tight skirts for winter (this was the eighties) and billowy linen pieces for the summer. It was the perfect big-city, up-to-the-minute wardrobe.


Gone, all gone. And not just because of the shoulder pads. The fact is, in Maine, people dress differently. In fact, most of us bear a distinct resemblance to an LL Bean catalog – if LL Bean models were wearing thirty-year-old items mixed in with the new stuff. In most parts of the fashion industry, designers come up with a look and try to sell it to the consumers. LL Bean, on the other hand, isn’t pushing its style on Mainers – it’s packaging what we already wear and selling it to folks in New York and Chicago. If I had known this simple fact, it would have saved me a lot of sartorial grief. Here’s a brief guide to dressing like a Mainer:

Legal power dressing - Portland, style

We all have Bean boots, and we wear them everywhere. Not all of them are the actual Bean brand,
but they’re all warm, waterproof, and have good treads. Lawyers at Portland’s high-powered firms wear them coming into the office. Patrons of the Bangor Symphony Orchestra wear them to the theatre. Couples going out to high-priced gourmet restaurants wear them on date night. Yes, the first time you put on clunky boots beneath a sexy dress or your best suit you’ll feel like an idiot. The second, time, you’ll think, “Oh, well, at least it’s comfortable.” The third time, and for the rest of your life, you’ll look at folks slipping and sliding down the sidewalk in their dress shoes and wonder what’s wrong with them.

Kind of like this. Only without the lobsters.

Bring a sweater. You’ll need it.  You know that whole sweater-over-the-shoulders thing you thought was just a preppy affectation? Pure practical necessity. My first full summer in Maine I thought I was going to freeze to death. You can go for a week in July here with the temperatures just hitting the seventies, and when the sun goes down, you need that extra layer even if the day itself was hot. If you’re on the coast or out on the water, bring two sweaters. And a windbreaker.

After you swim, just throw on a sweater and you're good to go. Sensible.

Swimsuits should reflect the Maine character: modest and sensible.  Sure, now that the boomers
are all in their fifties and sixties, America has rediscovered the necessity of swim skirts and high-necked suits. Here, they never went away. You don’t want a tiny bikini when the breeze blowing off the beach is a cool 60 degrees. Plus, a significant portion of the beach-going population seems to be eighty-something women swimming laps out in the cove. How do they do it without dying of hypothermia like Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic? It is a mystery. But they’re wearing skirts and boy-leg suits out there.







Buy classic and wear it forever.  This is reflected in two distinct gender-related looks. On the distaff side, you can readily see three generations of women wearing basically the same outfit: flattering khakis, simple tees or sweaters, slip-on shoes that look good at eighteen and sixty-eight. On men, the wear it forever ethos is just that: corduroy pants rubbed so flat the seat and knees are shiny and shirts with the elbows worn to a frayed tatter. No need to get a new button-down when you can cover the holes with your old jacket! So what if lapels haven’t been this wide since the Reagan administration?
Maine women have been known to sneak away their men’s clothing and then profess befuddlement when he can’t find it. “I don’t know, dear. Did you check the attic?”




We wear flannel shirts and flap-eared caps unironically. Everyone’s got them, and everyone wears them. Teenagers and toddlers. Lobstermen and ladies. I personally own a billed polarplus hat with ear flaps. It looks like a baseball cap grew fur and dewlaps. Do I wear it? You bet your booty I do. Mainers were into grunge before it was cool. Hmm. Maybe we are hipsters.

                       Not hipsters.

KATE FLORA ON LAUNCHING A BOOK

DEBORAH CROMBIE: Today our guest is our friend, SinC goddess, and very talented writer, Kate Flora, with a few thoughts on new book babies--and on her own new arrival, Redemption, the third book in her highly acclaimed Joe Burgess series.

We say, "Congrats, Kate," and a raise a virtual glass of champagne to you!

KATE FLORA: Planning a book launch is fun—and scary.

Fun, because it celebrates the end of a long, sometimes harrowing process. Writing the book. Rewriting the book until I’m sick of it. Selling the book. Rewriting the book to please my editor. And finally, long after that lovely moment when I type: THE END, those stacks and stacks of pages come back to me as a real, honest-to-goodness book with a jacket, and my picture and lovely quotes on the back.

I don’t know how it is for other writers, but for me, the day the book arrives is special. There’s that thump on the porch as the heavy box lands inside the door. The sound of a knife slitting the sealing tape. The rustle of protective paper, and finally, the new baby is revealed, rescued from the box, waved about, and taken upstairs to join the rest of the family. My new baby, Redemption, means that I now have twelve little book children.

So if all of this is so good—why should having an event to celebrate be scary? Because as any writer can tell you, book events are the most uncertain things on the planet. I can have all the advertising in the world, great reviews, and more than a dozen faithful readers who assure me that they’ll be there, and then I drive three hours to the venue and end up talking to the one staff member assigned to babysit the visiting writer. Or it can go the other way. I can drive to a small town I’ve never heard of, find a riveted audience of sixty readers, and sell every book I brought.

After a while, I think I’ve seen it all. I’ve seen good weather drag my audience away by the lure of the great outdoors and bad weather suck my audience away because no one wants to venture out in the cold. I’ve spoken to drunks, the mentally challenged, to high school students there only because they’ll get extra credit. I’ve spoken to writers really eager to pick my brain about your process, and to readers who just love my books. I’m braced for whatever may happen.

But a launch is special. It’s the book’s debut. It’s the moment when I carry on my back the weight of my belief in the power of the story I’ve told. It’s when I feel most heavily my responsibility to prove to the publisher that they made the right decision is choosing my book from the many they could have published, and when I feel the need to prove to my local bookstore that they made the right choice in giving me one of their coveted Sunday afternoon author slots. I can’t just show up and see what happens. A lot is riding on this.

So I send e-mails to the organizations I belong to. I send e-mails to my students, my fellow teachers. To my neighbors and my friends. I become a veritable chatty Cathy on Facebook. And I worry. What if this is one of those snowy days? What if it is a beautiful day? What if no one shows up?

Ten minutes to show time. I’m at the bookstore. There is a small stack of books waiting for me. A small row of chairs set up. A few people are sitting in the chairs. My heart sinks. And then, like a floodgate has opened, my friends, my neighbors, my sister writers, and my long-time readers start to arrive. The store sets up more chairs. And more chairs. And more chairs. Until they run out of chairs, and still people keep coming. At 3:00, I take a deep breath, hope my aging memory won’t fail me, and stand up.

“Thank you,” I say, absolutely overwhelmed, even though I have done hundreds of book talks over the years, wondering if this will be all I can manage. “Thank you for coming out to show your support on this beautiful day.” And I begin to tell them about Joe Burgess, and Reggie the Can Man, about fathers and sons and the threads of family, and friendship, and greed and evil that are woven through my new book.

Redemption is launched.

(PS from Debs: Kate will be giving a copy of Redemption to one of our commenters, so be sure to check in tomorrow for the winner.)