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FOOTNOTES
Joseph A. Dane ’69
Dogfish Memory: Sailing in Search of Old Maine
In Dogfish Memory: Sailing in Search of Old Maine (The
Countryman Press, 2011), USC Professor of English Joseph
A. Dane ’69 navigates the recollections of his life’s voyage.
“Dogfish Memory combines memoir, elegy, quest narrative,
sailing chronicle, and love story,” reviews English professor
emeritus Franklin Burroughs, “and is held together by a
remarkable voice—taut, frequently sardonic, precise, and
utterly merciless towards all pretensions, all comforting
illusions.” Dane, a native Mainer whose father was beloved
Bowdoin classics professor Nate Dane, paints a poignant
memoir between past and present, the imagined and
authentic. He ruminates on place, constantly questioning
the accuracy of his recollection, searching for what really
happened, just as he searches for a real Maine—the one
that is, rather than the one that is imagined.
Bowdoin: Had you always had the ambition of
writing a memoir?
Dane: No. It’s organized like a cruising guide, and that’s
kind of how it started. Putting stories in the way they
would appear in something organized geographically.
Bowdoin: What questions do you set out to
answer?
Dane: None. I don’t really have a lot of answers.
Bowdoin: What questions then do you deal with?
Dane: There’s a running critique all through it against
the language of sailing magazines, or cruising guides, and
I suppose that would also apply to people who write
memoirs who think they’re going to tell us some grand
lesson that they’ve learned, or lecture us on something.
Bowdoin: So it’s a critique of there being an
answer? Just one big question?
Dane: Or, yes, of the nature of expertise.
Bowdoin: What are some of the ways you deal
with memory?
6 BOWDOIN SUMMER 2011
Dane: Well it’s about details, isn’t it? Details that
combine together. I guess memory is trying to make
narrative out of these details, but the narratives we make
are probably not true.
Bowdoin: What about the idea of romanticizing
the past?
Dane: People think of Maine history and on the coast,
and they can’t go back to this authentic time. But,
if you look at Maine history, this authentic time is a
span of about twenty
years—[about] 1890 to
when the automobile
comes. This authentic
Maine is elusive; it’s
just this arbitrary period
when summer people
were coming here and
imagined that they were
one with the locals,
which they weren’t.
I think that’s a problem,
as in people want to
go back, particularly in
Maine history. They
romanticize this period. [None] of this really existed…
even if it did, it’s just this very, very narrow span of a
couple of decades.
Bowdoin: You cover many periods of life in your
memoir: is there a golden age of life?
Dane: If it weren’t for all the physical breakdowns, this
would be; where I am. This is a wonderful time of life.
But I don’t look back to any golden period of my life; it
all has its virtues, its vices.
Also see Bookshelf previous page for another recent title by
Joseph A. Dane ’69.