Portraits Along the Way:1976-2024

What can we learn from what people say and do? Are we simply drawn to stories we enjoy hearing and repeating? Sometimes, we see ourselves in others. I’m always looking and listening. I write about people I observe because I don’t want to lose the experience. Writing is a preservation technique. I’ve kept the people in this book around me. We are a community. I want readers to know them.—PM

     A collection of portraits. Of family. Of heroes. Of folk. Of celebrities. Of those who shaped our lives, our places, our memories. From musicians and writers to actors and athletes, from victims and survivors to changemakers and politicians, we see the full social spectrum.

     Stretching back to the 1970s, these portraits-in-language include traditional renderings, sprawling treatments, snapshots, monologues, in-depth profiles, sketches, book reviews, a journal, an interview, a self-portrayal, and groups in their own frames.

     Readers will recognize Maya Angelou, Bob Dylan, Tony Conigliaro, Stephen King, Leymah Gbowee, Joan Baez, and Jack Kerouac. Beyond the known persons, readers will meet remarkable men and women, not household names, whom the author encountered up close or at a distance, like Jim Casselton, Katherine O’Donnell Murphy, and Hamid Ismailov.

Paul Marion (b. 1954) is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches (2017) and editor of Jack Kerouac’s early writing, Atop an Underwood (1999). His book Mill Power (2014) documents the twentieth-century revival of the iconic factory city where he was born, Lowell, Massachusetts. His recent book is Portraits Along the Way: 1976-2024, fifty profiles of people he has met in person or encountered in books, on stage, in history or otherwise, some of them public figures and others who are not household names. His work has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines in the U.S., Canada, Japan, Ireland, and England. With his wife, Rosemary Noon, he lives on a high hill in Amesbury, Mass., in sight of the seacoast and uplands of New Hampshire and Maine.