Each summer weekend can be like a holiday here in Maine. Once, to the Vikings, it was rugged Vineland; today Maine is Vacationland. After a hard, dirty winter, mild air and watery sunlit places are calling: an abundance of evocative coastal places within a couple minutes’ or couple of hours’ drive. The author experienced one beach not typical of Maine. It was different in a lively way. She and her spouse, Allen, drove to Auburn for groceries and suddenly decided—over lunch in the Nickel Diner—to go visit Old Orchard Beach before grocery shopping.Old Orchard Beach has long been a resort town, situated in a curve of Saco Bay and full of mechanized carnival life, its waterfront crammed with screaming or jovial activity, shimmering in sunlight. After a search in side streets full of summer lodgings and cars, the travelers locate a place to park, then walk down to the sea—down to “Maine on the Mediterranean.”

How to live in rural Maine? How--in the 1980s, when descendants of Maine's settlers wonder about our coming out of the Rust Belt in search of work, in search of a life? They were not bitter about our coming here, where jobs were already scarce--they were incredulous. Why did we come? Sometimes I answered, "God." God brought us, the formerly middle-class inept, to live among these most hardy and canny of make-do people. God brought us to experience life in Maine, where my spouse sometimes worked turning and trimming four thousand boards a night, waking to drive one hundred miles round-trip to finish our undergraduate educations with the aid of loans and grants. So I studied the place where we came to live. And I forgot where we came from. Rural Maine was ragged, rugged, hardscrabble, and wild--but full of the most visible, vital, natural creation. I've tried to express that aspect of Maine life in The Green and Blue House. And there is the metaphor, also.

Maine in Winter bears toward the new millennium and beyond, heading into maturity of body, soul, and insight. Here are thoughts and experiences from entries in S. Dorman's everyday winter and reader's journals. Here are themes of snowy twilight since stopping in Maine, just so, at the beginning of her family's first winter in the Northeast--when the Salvation Army came to their rescue, and the in-laws, and their old friend God. After midlife and reflecting on the Big Winter--what is sometimes called Old Age--this book cycles back toward the beginning, to a flight in celebration of the New Year, new life in Maine.

Maine in Winter bears toward the new millennium and beyond, heading into maturity of body, soul, and insight. Here are thoughts and experiences from entries in S. Dorman's everyday winter and reader’s journals. Here are themes of snowy twilight since stopping in Maine, just so, at the beginning of her family's first winter in the Northeast—when the Salvation Army came to their rescue, and the in-laws, and their old friend God. After midlife and reflecting on the Big Winter—what is sometimes called Old Age—this book cycles back toward the beginning, to a flight in celebration of the New Year, new life in Maine.

S. Dorman began Maine Metaphor with The Green and Blue House. She continued her explorations in the Western Mountains of Maine, studying Maine's characteristic ways and natural realm, possessing the experience, studies, and journaling of rural life and creation. And she wanted to learn about the character of the people who sometimes must live a hardscrabble life. Her quest began thirty some years ago merely in living the life on moving to Maine with her family. This state of New England, once a District of Massachusetts, greatly appealed to her for its peculiar beauty and quiet, but also for its hard-working ethic. Maine flows with metaphors helpful in understanding our right relation to creation and its Maker. Maine's people, landscape, history, geology, weather, and writers tell of this reciprocity of life. Her spouse Allen supported the family, as you'll see in the book. Not, as she says, in order that she might write, but that she might eat! After their brief familial confrontation with homelessness on moving to Maine, Allen struggled to earn a living, but now is retired, with a fixed income; yet work here is seasonal and difficult still for others making a living in the Western Mountains of Maine. Walk these back roads with her, meet some back roads folk, climb these high wooded hills and low stone mountains. Consider and dream over the telling, and come back to yourself from Maine, refreshed.

Groundbreaking case studies mapping the rhetoric inherent in acts of presentation and concealment Rhetorics of Display is a pathbreaking volume that brings together a distinguished group of scholars to assess an increasingly pervasive form of rhetorical activity. Editor Lawrence J. Prelli notes in his introduction that twenty-first century citizens continually confront displays of information and images, from the verbal images of speeches and literature to visual images of film and photography to exhibits in museums to the arrangement of our homes to the merchandising of consumer goods. The volume provides an integrated, comprehensive study of the processes of selecting what to reveal and what to conceal that together constitute the rhetorics of display. Surveying major historical transformations in the relationship between rhetoric and display, this book also identifies the leading themes in relevant scholarship of the past three decades. Seventeen case studies canvass a representative and diverse range of displays—from body piercing to a civil rights memorial to a Titanic exhibition to imagery found in gambling casinos—and examine the ways that phenomena, persons, places, events, identities, communities, and cultures are exhibited before audiences. Collectively the contributors shed light on rhetorics that are nearly ubiquitous in contemporary communication and culture.