Here and Away: Discovering Home on an Island in Maine

In the summer of 1995, after years of being deeply but inexplicably drawn to northeast Maine from her native Midwest, Deborah Cummins traveled to Deer Isle, an island in eastern Penobscot Bay. A small island may seem a surprising choice for someone who doesn't swim very well and is transformed to a welter of thumbs aboard a boat, a place with no previous connections or ties, but there, Cummins writes, "I came home to a place where I'd never been, to a home I didn't know I'd lost."
In this ga...