Please join the MWPA, Gretchen Legler, and previous chapbook winners for a reading and celebration of Mike Bendzela’s Notes from Above Ground.
Award-winning nonfiction writer Chloe Cooper Jones chose Mike Bendzela’s Notes from Above Ground as the winner of the 2024 Maine Chapbook Series in nonfiction, and now the book is in print thanks to editing and design help from Pink Eraser Press.
Cooper Jones writes: “From its opening lines, Notes from Above Ground captivates with an unusual, unforgettable voice—at once inquisitive and grounded. This chapbook explores mortality from unexpected angles, illuminating death not only as an end, but as a quiet, vital aspect of beauty, growth, and renewal.”
Previous chapbook winners will read from their work, as will Mike, and Gretchen Legler, author of Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life, will join Mike for a conversation about his winning chapbook.
Mike Bendzela lives in Standish on the historic Dow Farm estate restored by his husband. He teaches writing at the University of Southern Maine and is also the superintendent of a local cemetery. During the summer, he grows heritage apples for markets around Portland. In the past, he has worked on his husband's restoration construction crew and as an EMT in his town. He is also an American old time musician, playing fiddle and banjo. He received a Pushcart Prize for short fiction in 1992. His book of evolutionary fables, a hybrid work of fiction/prose poetry, Metazoan Variations, was published in 2020 by UnCollected Press. He is a monthly columnist for the website 3 Quarks Daily, from which the essays in this collection are drawn.
Gretchen Legler is a farmer, gardener, teacher, writer, and lover of the natural world. Her three booklength works of literary nonfiction include: All The Powerful Things: A Sportswoman’s Notebook, On The Ice: An Intimate Portrait of Life at McMurdo Station Antarctica, and Woodsqueer: Crafting a Sustainable Rural Life. Her writing has won numerous awards including the 2023 Maine Book Award for memoir, and the John Cole Award for Maine-based nonfiction. She has been awarded two Pushcart prizes, a Notable Essay mention in Best American Essays, and has been published in venues including Orion and The Georgia Review. She teaches creative writing and English at the University of Maine Farmington, where she is also the Director of the Campus and Community Garden.
Previous Maine Chapbook Series winners include:
Suzanne Langlois’s Bright Glint Gone (Poetry, 2020), Brandon Dudley’s Hazards of Nature: Stories (Fiction, 2021), Coco McCracken’s The Rabbit (Nonfiction, 2022), Sasha Goodwin’s Centipede (Poetry, 2023), and Aliza Dube’s The Dependents (Fiction, 2024).
