Phillip Crossman

In the words of a Maine literary observer, Crossman is ‘a humorist in the Mark Twain mold: wry, satiric, and keenly aware of the shortcomings of human beings, but with a leavening of self-deprecation and underlying sympathy. Though rooted in a regional consciousness (coastal Maine), his humor succeeds in making the local universal.’ In the words of Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic Richard Eder, he is ‘a writer of antic gravity and grace whose sketches draw out stretches, strains and human comedy of a place that is all face-to-face encounters; where ‘when push comes to shove, as it often does, accommodation is somehow pieced together.’

Crossman is a retired builder and semi-retired innkeeper. He writes a regular column for the Working Waterfront and for his island’s weekly newsletter, The Wind. A long-ago revelation that creative nonfiction is a legitimate literary genre prompted him to write, ‘It was the most liberating experience of my life. All these years I thought I’d simply been lying.’ Away Happens and the just released As the Crow Flies each consider daily life on coastal Maine and, in particular, on Vinalhaven, an island in Penobscot Bay that supports both a tight-knit local community and a larger seasonal population. Whether he is recounting a debate that happened at the Lions Club over who counts as a ‘local’ or describing his struggles in getting the Thanksgiving turkey into the oven, ruminating on how the ferry schedule shapes island life or recalling a local crime spree, Crossman is funny, unsentimental, and authentically Maine. “There are only two places, Here, this island off the coast of Maine, and Away. Here, this place, is a small place and Away, everywhere else, is a big place, but make no mistake about it, Here is Here and Away is not. 1276 people live Here. Billions more live Away than live Here, although increasingly, during the summer, it seems otherwise.” ―From Away Happens