Maine Authors Publishing, my publisher, just hosted their annual BookFair event. It’s always a great day because I get to talk with folks who read my books.

I have no idea how it is with other writers, but I’m always surprised that these folks act as if they know me. Of course, they do in a way – they know what I am passionate about (e.g., environmental issues, Maine’s coastal waters, the everyday life of scientists). Each of those themes comes to life in my most recent book, “The Shark, The Girl, & The Sea”.

That’s what writers do – we dig down deep and bring to literal life issues that consume us and that we hope others will care as deeply about.

Who but Mark Twain, for example, could bring Huck and Jim together as fellow travelers on the Mississippi River so we really know Jim as a man and not just a runaway slave.

A very different book, “1984”, is a dystopian science fiction novel, that takes place in an imagined future with mass surveillance and repression. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, is ruled by the Party which uses Thought Police to persecute independent thinking. Terms now common include “Big Brother” and “Doublethink”. Anyone who cares deeply about issues such as gay marriage and abortion can relate to “1984”.

I’ll end with “The Catcher In The Rye”, J.D. Salinger’s novel about alienation told through the voice of Holden Caulfield, a depressed teenager who lives in a sanitorium at the end of World War II. “Catcher” is both one of the most censored and second most taught books in U.S. public schools. Challenges with “Catcher’ include undermining family values, frequent use of vulgar language, and promotion of smoking, drinking, and the like.