Transcription of Jaed Coffin for the show Community #62
Dr. Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to the Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast show number 62, “Community” airing for the first time on November 18, 2012 on WLOB and WPEI Radio Portland, Maine. Today’s show features Maine Magazine writer and author Jaed Coffin. Craig Lapine, founder of Cultivating Community, and Julie Jordan Marchese and Andrea Brown of sheJAMS. We specifically put the “Community” show right in front of Thanksgiving and we did this because we understand that there are many different ways in which people belong to communities.
Author Seth Godin actually refers to these as tribes and a tribe or a community can be what you’re born into. It can be where you work, where you play, or simply built of the people that you love. I have communities built around my own life based on where I’m living. I’ve been in Maine since 1977, but also based on the fact that I am the oldest of ten children. I’m a doctor. I’m a writer, and I’m a Facebook picture taker on my early morning runs. In many different ways I’ve created communities that make sense to me, that feel good to me, that nurture me.
This Thanksgiving I’ll be spending time with my extended family at Atlantic Hall and Cape Porpoise right here in Maine. This is something that my family’s been doing for many years because we simply have so many darn people involved in this community, but I love it. My nine younger brothers and sisters and I and our spouses and our families and our significant others. My cousins, my aunts, my uncles, my grandmother, we’ve all really come to enjoy this regular occasion at Atlantic Hall because we consider it community building time. I’m very fortunate to have a family like this and a family that meets regularly right here in Maine.
I hope you enjoy today’s show with Maine Magazine writer and author Jaed Coffin who is going to talk about his experience with community and growing up in Brunswick and the work he’s done for Maine Magazine including the recent article “What is a Mainer?” Also Craig Lapine who has developed a cultivating community presence working in the environment, working with people, working with education, and doing all kinds of interesting things over the last decade. Finally, Julie Jordan Marchese and Andrea Brown of sheJAMS who have created a community around exercise and fitness and social outreach and well-being on so many different levels.
We hope you enjoy today’s show.
On today’s Dr. Lisa Radio Hour and Podcast we’re talking about community and I became interested in discussing this idea with author Jaed Coffin because I read about an article he had written for Maine Magazine which I’m going to let him tell us about, but I think he has a lot of very cogent insights about this topic.
Thanks for coming in and having a conversation. So, real Mainer, why did this become an article that Maine Magazine wanted you to write?
Jaed: Let’s see, I think I won’t take too much credit for it. I know that Kevin and Susan and Sophie had this idea floating around the table for a while. For whatever reason I feel like I end up with the honor or dishonor of tackling these kind of philosophical cultural questions in my career that are about culture, that are about communities, and that are about how we as individuals living in the same space delineate who we are, so I’m not sure why last September was the Mainer story but I know that it was a long time coming.
I think Maine is changing so quickly. It’s such a dynamic place now. It’s both a kind of brand of itself and also a sort of faceless, nameless quantity in many ways for the people that live here, so I think every once in a while you have to step back and rearticulate the world, the name that you’re going to give people or a place just as we might reexamine American culture through literature and the arts, I think Maine, on its own terms, needs to figure out where it’s going and who it is and ask that question over and over again.
Dr. Lisa: Well that is a little bit controversial, I would think. Also you wrote an article about the casinos which was, I think, somewhat controversial as well. Do you find a lot of differing opinions when you talk to people as you’re creating these articles?
Jaed: Yeah, and I think I find different opinions but I also have a pretty heightened sense of what those opinions are going to be before I enter a story and because the media tries to do a pretty good job of laying out those opinions, the story for me typically is when I go into a world or a community with a certain set or lens through which to examine that community and then realize that the opinions I have or the opinions that the media offers are not really even part of the conversation in that community, and that’s when you know you’re dealing with good material and a real story.
Typically I think stories in Maine come down to financial versus moral polarities. How are we going to keep money in our pockets? How are we going to keep people working while at the same time preserving the ethical imperatives that we think are central to who we are as a culture and a state? I know we appreciate our Yankee resourcefulness and our kind of close to the earth living, but on the other hand we need to put food on our tables and that comes at a certain cost and sacrifice.
Dr. Lisa: Your first book “A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants” was written when you were relatively young.
Jaed: Yeah. It came out in 2008. I wrote most of it when I was 26 or 27.
Dr. Lisa: This describes an experience with a community of a very different sort. Can you talk about that a little bit?
Jaed: Sure. Well that community is several hours east of Bangkok, Thailand in the village where my mom is from. She left that village right before or during the Vietnam War, I think in 1967, met my father who was a soldier in the Vietnam War in ’68. They were in northeastern Thailand together on a military base and not long afterward my mother left Thailand and her village for good to be in America. At this point she’s been in America longer than she was ever alive in Thailand which is sort of the tipping point I think for a lot of immigrants.
Like 20 years or 30 years after she came to America, when I was 21, I left college for several months, about the duration of a summer and went back to her village to be a monk in the local temple, Buddhist temple. The same temple where my grandfather and uncles had been monks, so that community was obviously very different than the community of mid-coast Maine or the community of my Brunswick High School. I was surrounded by a lot of family, but also by a culture where because of the size of the village and the intimacy of Thai culture, everyone knew all sorts of things about me. I was a religious figure along with about 35 other men who were my age and older, and the community functioned in what I would think of as a much more connected way.
At the time, this was in 2001, I don’t recall there being internet access anywhere. There was a Dunkin Donuts and a 7-Eleven, but there was certainly not Facebook or emails. As a monk I was really expected to carry a certain spiritual symbolism and positioning in the community. People would come to me, I was 21 years old and after my junior year in Middlebury I really felt that I was in no position to be a purveyor of knowledge, but people would come to me and ask me how to pick a proper wife and where to invest in rice or in a fish market or whatever as if I had this access to this important knowledge because of my spiritual practice which was also quite ignorant and limited, so I tried to get that across in the book.
I think a lot of people thought I set out to write a seven story mountain, like a religious text but that was not my intention.
Dr. Lisa: When you and I spoke you mentioned that you have, I believe, a tradition of healers in your family. Somebody is the equivalent of I don’t want to say medicine man because I guess that sounds really, I don’t know but did that influence your desire to go forward and find yourself in some way when you were only 21?
Jaeb: Yeah. Well, you know I had memories. This comes up in the book early on. I had memories of my grandfather practicing medicine in a very traditional way. I remember people coming to the front steps of our little house next to the canal and rubbing ointments in people’s shoulders and using moxibustion and such to heal them. We have a lot of Chinese blood in our family line so I don’t know if it was passed down. I know very little about that past. I have memories and probably some invented fantasies about how effective that healing was.
I remember walking barefoot through the village and cutting my foot open and my grandfather like reaching to this top shelf, he didn’t speak English, I didn’t speak Thai at that time, and pulling this really gnarly looking bottle with like a clump of moss in it or something and some liquid and rubbing it all over my foot and then the wound being gone the next day. That’s pretty, I don’t know if anything could do that, but that’s how I remember it which says something I suppose.
My mother’s a psychiatric nurse which is a tough job, but my father is, he just retired, but for a time was a staff psychologist for the National Guard so he was working with all the troops who came home from Iraq and Afghanistan back into New England, acclimating them to their normal lives. My wife is a restorative yoga teacher, so I’m pretty well covered I guess in the healing department. I don’t know where my healing work comes but I’m sure it rears its head somehow.
Dr. Lisa: It’s probably more than one person who’s actually read your book and has found some healing or inspiration in that, and think that when you and I had a conversation previously you said that it often seems that for some reason people will still look to you for insight or knowledge or reflection. That’s a heavy something to have been holding onto even from your early years.
Jaeb: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s hard not to talk about this without feeling a little bit self-important, but I know that as a kid I got picked to be the captain of various teams and too often I think was looked to provide inspiration or support or stability in difficult times that I went through with a few friends. Part of that is maybe a kind of natural thingness about me but also I feel like I like that work and I’m willing to have that conversation, so people maybe notice that about me.
I’m sort of a softy. I’ve done a lot of kind of fighting, dangerous stuff, but I am not a confrontational person and prefer compromise innately to putting my foot down on issues, and have always felt very compelled to move between circles, demographic and ethnic and racial and whatever that are separated by various gaps. As a teenager I used to hitchhike around a lot. I just loved entering people’s lives that might not enter at Middlebury College or at Brunswick High School. That was always very exciting to me, so sometimes I feel like, yeah, it’s about healing but also I like being an interpreter of different cultures and different ideas and accessing those ideas and bringing them to other people, so that seems to be kind of the origin of a lot of that work.
Dr. Lisa: You aren’t willing, maybe, to put your foot down in some ways but you did write a book called, that’s coming out this spring, “Roughhouse Friday” that talks about, actually, fighting in Alaska, so where does that come from within you?
Jaeb: Yeah. Well I know that I had a handful of fights in this bar and then I fought Golden Gloves in northeast out of Portland Boxing Club and I definitely was not the kind of fighter that would punch first. You know I’d have to get hit first before I could really do anything to another person, but I think it has to do with intimacy. Obviously not in an erotic way, but intimacy of kind of a spiritual intimacy that you experience with a person you fight.
Everything falls away and you’re left only with you and a ring and your opponent and all the distinctions that typically separate us, class and money and identity kind of disappear and you’re just left with a bare person and a bare soul, and I really like that experience and I think I kind of long for that experience in the same way that the writers who I really admired as a younger man and that I still admire now. I think they were searching for that ephemeral, ineffable, spiritual kind of intimacy also.
For this book I’ve been reading “Into the Wild” a lot. Not so much because my book is similar to this book “Into the Wild” but the aims of Alexander Supertramp are. He was after something that he couldn’t really put his finger on and might or might not have been there, but I find myself kind of hunting down that same thing and I find it in other people. I find it in cityscapes and natural landscapes, so yeah, I’m not really sure where. People have asked me many times, how can you be a monk and a boxer because of course you start to get identified by the books you write.
I don’t see them very differently. Typically I say both are very aesthetic disciplines, so on and so forth, but when it comes down to it I think it’s about intimacy and stripping away all the things that separate us as individuals from, and I kind of put this in quotes, from who we really are in that, I could say soul, but that seems like a problematic term too.
Dr. Lisa: It seems interesting that in Maine, and my family is from Maine. I’ve lived in Maine a long time, went away, came back, seemed interesting that we’ve had this military presence in Maine that sort of brought people from away to places like Brunswick, and you experienced this, I imagine, as a Brunswick High School student because that was before the base actually closed down. Do you think that that had an impact on the culture of that particular town and maybe other towns like it in Maine?
Jaeb: Yeah, definitely. I loved hanging out with the Navy kids because it would be January and we’d be in the middle of basketball season and then some kid with a southern accent would show up who grew up in Alabama or something, and out of nowhere it was this imported culture came into our little community.
I remember going into base housing to play pick-up basketball games against the Navy kids and they were here for a year and a half or for the length of a deployment and then gone. I won’t say that Brunswick was like a flourishing crockpot of culture or anything like that, but I do know it made me aware of other ways of being good. I don’t think it made me deeply empathetic or respectful or tolerant or anything but it kept my head out of the fog just enough to remind me that there are other ways to do it.
I had this pen pal named Johnny Findlay for a long time. We were best friends. His mom was Filipina and I don’t know maybe we connected someway culturally, but we were quite young and then he moved. Then for like six years we used to get letters from San Diego, FPO San Diego, and that was cool. I don’t know what Johnny Findlay’s up to now but I still remember the day he left and our tearful good-bye when we were in second grade. That’s neat. I think Maine has always been this way. Typically people in Maine, people outside of Maine, I think think of Maine as a place where there’s a sort of, not indigenous but very strong sense of provincialism and sovereignty, but Maine’s always historically been dynamic. This was the first stopping point in the exploration of the new world and there was fish markets and the beaver trade and people were always coming in and out of here but because of the landscape it has a quietness that makes it feel like we have belonged here forever or something. Both of those are based on stereotypes that we play around with quite a bit.
Dr. Lisa: You have one book out “Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants” which I would recommend to our listeners. If they haven’t already read it, they should read it. You have another one coming out this spring, “Roughhouse Friday”. What else is on the horizon for you?
Jaeb: Geez, I don’t know. I think I’m going to keep writing. I’m trying to structure my life now professionally so that I will never do anything but write until lunch time, so I do things like try not to check my email between 5 P.M. and noon so that I have a precious little pure brain to do my writing work. I have some book ideas that I’d like to undertake that won’t require much research or well, will require research but not much travel. I’ve got a book idea that would take place up in the Mekong Delta in Thailand that I’d probably drag my girls up to Thailand to live in some village for a while. I don’t know. We’ll have to run that by my wife.
Then, I’m not sure what’s next. I like the work I do now. I teach a little bit and I do a lot of carpentry type work off and on, but I have a sense that something is shifting. I know all the people that I really admire are civic leaders in some way and I don’t think I admire them without some kind of intention buried beneath that admiration. It doesn’t mean that I’m announcing my entrance into the next gubernatorial election, but it might be politics, it might not be anything explicit, but I do feel myself called to the kind of statesman period of my life. I’ve done a lot of hiding out and lurking in the shadows and now I feel like I’ve got some opportunity in the world as opposed to on the fringes of it.
Dr. Lisa: How can people find out more about your books or the work you’re doing?
Jaeb: I’ve got a website and I think at this point if you Google my name all the dirt is there. On my website there’s also an email address, and I always make this offer to audiences big and small that I meet with that feel free to email me. I always say that and I remember I spoke in front of, I don’t know, about 1,000 people at Florida International University a year and a half ago and I thought OK, these are all college kids, maybe I’ll get five or six emails. I think I got three, so I love to hear from people and it’s not a problem to be in touch. I really enjoy that element of my work. If that wasn’t there I don’t know what would be in it for me, ultimately.
Dr. Lisa: Well, thank you. We’ve been speaking with Jaeb Coffin, author and contributor to Maine Magazine and also I don’t think we mentioned this, but teacher at the Stone Coast MFA Program. We’re really grateful that you came in to talk to us about community on this pre-Thanksgiving show.
Jaeb: Great. Thanks for having me.
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