Scot Lehigh has spent nearly 40 years writing about Massachusetts politics, most of it for the Boston Globe, where he’s been a reporter and columnist for decades. Over the years, he’s covered countless political campaigns — from the 2022 race that saw Maura Healey elected as the state’s first female governor, to former governor Michael Dukakis’ 1988 failed presidential campaign, for which Lehigh was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
But when it came time for Lehigh to finally finish one of the novels he’d started and stopped over the years, he returned to a place that has occupied his thoughts since he was a teenager: Eastport, where he lived between the ages of 11 and 18.
“Eastport doesn’t really feel like home to me anymore, and yet, I go back to it in my mind — and specifically my high school years — all the time,” said Lehigh, who graduated from Shead High School in 1976. “It still feels very vivid to me.”
“Just East of Nowhere,” Lehigh’s debut novel, came out last month via Islandport Press, and tells the story of Dan Winters, a troubled young man from Eastport who was recently released after nine years in juvenile prison for assaulting a classmate. In a story that flashes back and forth between the past and the present, Dan and the other central characters begin to understand the personal trauma that has shaped their lives — and the lives of other townsfolk in Eastport.
Lehigh moved to Eastport with his parents and three siblings in the late 1960s, after living all over the country including upstate New York, Washington state, Idaho and, in Maine, Deer Isle. At the time, Eastport was still dominated by the sardine canning industry, though that too was in decline — the last cannery would close in 1983, and between 1900 and 1970, Eastport lost more than half its population. Though today it benefits from tourism dollars and a small summer population, like other Washington County towns, it struggles.
Lehigh’s portrait of the hardscrabble beauty of Down East Maine — its rugged coastline and its equally rugged people — feels lived in, raw and real, full of lyrical descriptions of a place that is once dazzlingly beautiful and yet suffocating for people who aspire to greater things.
It’s interspersed with moments of shocking violence, as its central characters work through both the challenges of navigating their teens and the generational trauma that has irrevocably scarred their lives. Anyone who grew up in a small Maine town will likely recognize many of the themes and types of people that Lehigh explores in “Just East.”
“I think with small towns, it can be incredibly hard to escape the kind of pull they have,” Lehigh said. “It’s kind of seductive, and yet it can be so claustrophobic. I wanted to convey that.”
Lehigh said that he found it challenging to reconcile his journalistic instincts with the creative freedom of fiction writing. Even when writing a work of fiction, he was compelled to quote his characters accurately — even if every word that came out of their mouths was created by him.
“It’s funny how hard it can be to turn off that instinct and give yourself the freedom to tell the story that way,” Lehigh said. “I think because I don’t come from the literary world, there were lots of things I just didn’t know about the process. But there are other strengths that come from all these years spent writing for newspapers.”
Today, Lehigh splits his time between Boston and Cape Elizabeth, and still visits the Eastport area when he can. He said he has many more ideas for novels waiting to be explored.
“I have started and stopped so many things over the years,” he said. “I want to dig some of them out and see what story to tell next.”
Scot Lehigh will read from and sign copies of “Just East of Nowhere” at 4 p.m. on Aug. 4 at Sherman’s Bookstore in Rockland, and at 5 p.m. Aug. 5 at the Eastport Arts Center. It is available wherever books are sold.
