A Frosty Start to the Year

Hi everyone.

Portland has had a rough start to the year.  The general strike happening on Friday, Jan 30, speaks volumes about the void of removal that threatens to tear apart our communities.

The Green Hand Bookshop is participating in the strike.  We will be closed on Friday January 30th, along with many other businesses in Portland.  We will be paying our on-shift workers, and they can opt to do whatever they feel is most important for them on that day.  

We encourage our fellow business owners to do the same.  The damage that is being inflicted on our city by the incursion of outside aggressors is not in any way acceptable, considering that they do not seem to be interested in following the laws that all the rest of us try to keep to.  Our fellow business owners and fellow workers are among those under attack.

What our participation in the strike speaks to, in my opinion, is a refusal to remain quiet in the face of this unprecedented invasion of our rights, and our neighbors' rights.  We are all suffering - let's not pretend otherwise.

Our participation speaks to the fact that we are paying attention to what is going on.  It speaks to the fact that what is going on is NOT NORMAL AND NOT OKAY WITH US.  

We are the ones who live here.  This is our home.  We built it up through our own hard work - all of us, including New Mainers.

What is normally a slow month has ground to a halt.  (scroll down for a personal note on this.)  The Green Hand Bookshop, as well as other businesses on the 600-block of Congress Street - and elsewhere intown! - all feel the pinch of January each year.  But this year we face additional barriers to survival.

Local New Mainers, our neighbors and co-workers, are realistically worried about the risk of being accosted and snatched off Portland streets, and watching as their friends and family disappear.  No one tells them where they are taken, or what has happened to them.  

If you have people in your life that are concerned, this authorization form should help surmount obstacles when family and friends try to find out where they disappeared to:  https://www.ice.gov/node/60831 (ICE Form 60-001: Privacy Waiver Authorizing Disclosure to a Third Party)  Please have them fill it out for you, and keep it handy in case of emergencies.

Here's a good place to send documentation if you witness ICE misbehavior: citizenreporting.OAG@maine.gov 

Maine's Attorney General is requesting citizen documentation and monitoring Maine ICE interactions for potentially actionable violations of both Maine and Federal Constitutions, and laws such as the Maine Civil Rights Act. 

We here in Portland, Maine, are upset and outraged. But we are following legal behavior routes. These "officials" are not. And the results are horrifying, and affecting all our neighbors on a daily basis. We are a city of immigrants, a city of hard workers. 

We have put our lives, our blood, sweat, and tears, into the State of Maine. It is a good place to live, and raise a family. We are watching our friends and neighbors, and their children, be needlessly attacked in a manner that goes against everything that we and the rest of America stand for. 

To remain silent and do nothing is to be complicit. This is your home. Eyes up, everyone. Voices strong and loud. 

Together we stand, divided we fall. HANG TOUGH. Help your neighbors. 

We're really, truly, all in this together. 

On a personal note, the Green Hand Bookshop has suffered business loss for the last few years due to the unfriendly scaffolding that obscures our shopfront.  The shop income is down, and expenses are up.  I continue to do my best to pay my few employees a living wage, rather than the "minimum."

I hold my space on the 600-block as a safe community gathering place, a place where people can find interesting books, interesting ideas, and room to roam amongst the shelves without worry for a few brief moments, or find the tools they need to keep going in the difficult world outside.  It is a place for exploration, learning, and connection with ideas and other people.  We cannot be everything to everyone, but we do our best with what we know to be good, and what we know our community needs more of.

This January, so far, has been a heavy struggle financially.  It has been a heavy struggle emotionally and civically with what the city of Portland, Maine, is experiencing economically and socially, spilling over from 2025 (which was expensive and exhausting, and seemed a very long year indeed).  It has been a heavy struggle personally, as I am not able to be there intown while helping my father-in-law with 24/7 with hospice care and Alzheimers care, 5 hours north in Aroostook County.  

This carries over to my employees, who are helming the bookshop in my absence, and holding down the fort.  This also means that our fellow peeps, half a block over at Coast City Comics, are also under this same duress.  Tristan, my husband, is the owner, and the t-shirt printer that silkscreens all those shirts you love with his own two hands, and creates shirt designs and a weekly newsletter out of his own wildly creative brain (and I do mean wild), not to mention a couple of podcasts for fun (because what is life without fun?).  His crew is likewise holding on for dear life as he tangles with the grief of watching his remaining parent die.

Our Portland family runs wide and deep.  Downtown Portland is where we live and work, and have for decades.  Our extended family, built alongside the work we've done in these streets and businesses, is epic and amazing.  

Starting with the current day and moving back in time, between the two of us, Tristan and I work arm-in-arm with people we love from many backgrounds: Congress Street's 600-block, the Parkside neighborhood (where we have lost many neighbors, both to ICE and to economic factors), our family that is part of the Portland music scene (Tristan is the drummer for Covered in Bees, and has played in many other bands including Man-Witch, Eggbot, Tin Tin's Rocket, and Dead Airbourne Goats), my Maine College of Art and Portland Public Library and Maine Historical Society cohorts, our buddies at the long-defunct and much depleted Granny's Burritos family, our University of Southern Maine classmates and colleagues, and 

... nestled in the heart of our history, our family at Videoport, the place where Tristand and I met, became friends, and eventually fell in love.

For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, we are all bound to Portland, and to Maine.  Nobody said it would be easy.  But nobody here is going to give up what we fought so hard to build.  It has been hard to see the city we love grow a rich upper crust that has pushed out most of our friends, and tried to push us out too.  In the last decade, this city (or parties within it) seems hell-bent on destroying and exiling the majority of the people that built it into the creative gem it was in the 1990s and early 2000s, and convinced the city to turn its eye to leer single-mindedly at the gleam of filthy lucre, forgetting that many of us here simply want to make a living.

There have been many moments in the last decade when I have thought about whether it is worth it to keep holding the line at the corner of Avon and Congress Streets.  I honestly don't know how long I can hold on.  But this hill, the hill where we Mainers meet outside forces, massing to attack and remove our neighbors forcibly and illegally, is a hill I must stand on, because it is a hill built on basic human rights, and the rule of legitimate American law vs. the laws of fearmongering, bullying, and greed.

You will all make your own choices.  Look to your hearts and minds to guide you.  Face the fear and do what you know is right anyways.