Producer/Hosts: Ron Beard and Liz Graves Theme music for Talk of the Towns Theme music for Talk of the Towns is a medley from Coronach, on a Balnain House Highland Music recording. Talk of the Towns: Local Community concerns and opportunities This month: What are the ways in which landscape inspires these writers.. one often starts with an experience and then looks for facts, the other starts with a fact and looks for ways to put it into context… both pay close attention to landscape and spark their readers’s own powers of observation and curiosity. What was the inspiration for Linda Cracknell to write about Erraid, off the west coast of Scotland and the setting for the opening chapters of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped? How did Catherine Schmitt come to write The President’s Salmon, and the story of restoration of Maine’s Penobscot River? What do these writers hope readers take from reading about landscapes that we inhabit or visit? What are the ways these writers teach others about writing? Guest/s: Linda Cracknell, author of Writing Landscape, published by Saraband Books, 2023 Catherine Schmitt, author of The President’s Salmon, published by Downeast Books, 2015 About the hosts: Ron Beard is producer and host of Talk of the Towns, which first aired on WERU in 1993 as part of his community building work as an Extension professor with University of Maine Cooperative Extension and Sea Grant. He took all the journalism courses he could fit in while an undergraduate student in wildlife management and served as an intern with Maine Public Television nightly newscast in the early 1970s. Ron is an adjunct faculty member at College of the Atlantic, teaching courses on community development. Ron served on the Bar Harbor Town Council for six years and is currently board chair for the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor, where he has lived since 1975. Look for him on the Allagash River in June, and whenever he can get away, in the highlands of Scotland where he was fortunate to spend two sabbaticals. Liz Graves joined Talk of the Towns as co-producer and co-host in July 2022, having long admired public affairs programming on WERU and dreamed of getting involved in community radio. She works as the Town Clerk for the Town of Bar Harbor, and is a former editor of the Mount Desert Islander weekly newspaper. Liz grew up in California and came to Maine as a schooner sailor.