Elon University education professor Bird Stasz preserves the stories of 94-year-old Dorothy Carney Chase and illustrates the important role stories play in our lives in her new book, “And That’s the Way of It: A Maine Village Life, 1907-2002.”
Stasz met Dorothy in 2001 and began chronicling her stories of growing up in the picturesque village of Sheepscot in midcoast Maine during the early 20th century. Dorothy’s stories, such as “Digging Up Grampa,” a hilarious tale of a late night effort to retrieve diamond shirt studs from her recently buried grandfather, provide a glimpse of a time gone by, uncluttered by tourists, developers, television and the Internet.
For Stasz, preserving Dorothy’s stories was a labor of love and about much more than just simply documenting one woman’s history.
“I see the heritage of narrative storytelling slowly fading away,” says Stasz, also a native of Maine. She believes that by preserving the narratives that form the basis of our history, special places such as Sheepscot will survive. “Landscape is the surface on which memory takes hold and sends down its roots,” Stasz says. “To fully understand a place, beyond its geographical features, we need to listen to the stories of those who have lived there.”
In addition to documenting the stories themselves, Stasz seeks to explore the meaning of the stories not only in a historical sense, but in the larger context of human experience. “It is important to grow to love the stories for themselves, but equally important to mull over what they mean in the larger scheme of things,” says Stasz, who believes stories help us move forward by understanding where we come from. “It makes me wonder, as we cavalierly race to the future, what it is that we are leaving behind. I don’t think I will ever look at a place quite the same way without wanting to know its stories.”
Tom Rankin, director of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, has high praise for Stasz’s book. “Chase talks about a world of rural Maine that no longer exists except in the remembered and imagined cultural landscape of her stories. Through this book, the places exist again, in the minds of us, the readers and listeners. That magical process—from her memory, through her playful stories grounded in history, and then on to us—reconstructs what once seemed gone, invisible, forgotten.”
Produced by Tilbury House Publishers, the book includes more than 50 photographs of Sheepscot, historical and contemporary, compiled by Sheepscot resident Leah Sprague.
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