Portraits Along the Way: 1976-2024
Portraits Along the Way: 1976-2024
Available for advance orders
Publication date: Sept. 9, 2024
About the Book
What can we learn from what people say and do? Are we simply drawn to stories we enjoy hearing and repeating? Sometimes, we see ourselves in others. I’m always looking and listening. I write about people I observe because I don’t want to lose the experience. Writing is a preservation technique. I’ve kept the people in this book around me. We are a community. I want readers to know them.—PM
A collection of portraits. Of family. Of heroes. Of folk. Of celebrities. Of those who shaped our lives, our places, our memories. From musicians and writers to actors and athletes, from victims and survivors to changemakers and politicians, we see the full social spectrum.
Stretching back to the 1970s, these portraits-in-language include traditional renderings, sprawling treatments, snapshots, monologues, in-depth profiles, sketches, book reviews, a journal, an interview, a self-portrayal, and groups in their own frames.
Readers will recognize Maya Angelou, Bob Dylan, Tony Conigliaro, Stephen King, Leymah Gbowee, Joan Baez, and Jack Kerouac. Beyond the known persons, readers will meet remarkable men and women, not household names, whom the author encountered up close or at a distance, like Jim Casselton, Katherine O’Donnell Murphy, and Hamid Ismailov.
About the Author
Paul Marion (b. 1954) is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches and Lockdown Letters & Other Poems and editor of Jack Kerouac’s early writing, Atop an Underwood. His book Mill Power chronicles the modern revival of the historic textile factory city in which he was born, Lowell, Massachusetts.
His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Café Review, The Massachusetts Review, Wisconsin Review, Yankee Magazine, Cholla Needles, So It Goes, and poetsreadingthenews.com, as well as in anthologies and other literary magazines in the U.S., Canada, Japan, and England. He is featured in The Grifter, the Poet, and the Runaway Train: Stories from a Yankee Writer’s Notebook by Geoffrey Douglas.
He is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and studied in the MFA Program in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. His career work involved communications and cultural affairs in state and federal government positions.
In 1978, he founded a small publishing company, Loom Press, which has released more than fifty titles: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, photography, and anthologies.
With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives in Amesbury in the Merrimack River Valley of northeastern Massachusetts.