Author keeps audience laughing

BANGOR – Author Sandy Phippen, the “grand old man” of Maine writing, had an appreciative audience of more than 30 shouting with laughter as he talked about writing and read selections from several of his books. His presentation at Bangor Public Library on Jan. 29 was the last in the Bangor Reads series this year. The featured book for the month was Stephen King’s “On Writing.”

Phippen, dapper in Bean boots, navy blue cords, dark jacket and sweater vest, shared some of his ideas about what writing is.

“It’s stories about people,” he said. “It’s an extension of one’s personality, and it’s a most human form of communication.”

Phippen has logged more than 30 years as a professional writer. He is the author of novels, plays, poems and short stories. He served as host for public television’s “A Good Read” series and did a stint as book editor for the now defunct Maine Life magazine.

As a child, the art of telling a good story and observing the details of daily life was firmly planted in Phippen’s psyche.

“I grew up in a storytelling family,” he said. He spent a lot of time with an aunt who wrote a social column for a local newspaper. “She taught me how to observe things.”

An Orono High School English teacher for many years, Phippen is now retired from that job but continues to teach writing at the University of Maine.

Bangor Public Library, he said, played an important part in his life when as a teenage student at Sumner High School, a teacher took the class to Bangor “to see a real library.” A few years later, Phippen did student teaching at Bangor High School, which in the early 1960s was located next door to Bangor Public Library.

He also saw how writers work when, as an 18-year-old, he served an internship working with outdoors writer Bud Leavitt at the Bangor Daily News.

Eventually Phippen went to Syracuse, N.Y., to teach.

“Upstate New York was important to me as a writer,” he said. “It was where I could look back at Maine.”

What he realized as he looked back to where he was from was that most of the books he had read about Maine were “phony and bogus. They were written by out-of-staters who didn’t know the inner complications” of being a Mainer. That observation sparked in the 1980s a lively debate not only about how to define Maine writing, but whether or not there was such a thing.

Quoting writers he admires, Phippen offered this gem from poet Leo Connellan: “To write one has to be born brilliant or be disturbed by something.”

“The reader of a story,” Phippen said, “should be as disturbed as the writer. It’s the writer’s job to astonish, shock and upset.” And also to make readers hoot with laughter, one of Phippen’s fortes.

Phippen read selections from “The Police Know Everything” and “People Trying to be Good.” In the process, he interjected hilarious stories about the people on whom some of the characters are based, demonstrating his encyclopedic memory for anecdotes about his family and people who summered on the Maine coast. But even though his writing at times lampoons summer people, he is quick to give them credit.

“They taught me about the finer things of life, such as books, music and the world,” he said while reading “Cocktails on the Point.”

“If you write close to the bone,” he quipped, “you have to try to make them laugh, otherwise, they might kill you.”

Phippen is working on a new book, “The Race Riots of Syracuse.”