Openers: On the Magic of Lost Neighborhoods By Colin Sargent

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On The Magic Of Lost Neighborhoods-I knew there was something special about this issue when I walked into the office and Czeslaw Milosz was on the telephone, inquiring about our Ethnicity issue and the stories we were doing on Polish Echoes and the Lithuanian friars at the Franciscan Monastery in Kennebunk.

It isn't often that a regional magazine fields a call from a Nobel prizewinner, Milosz for his poetry in 1980.

But then he is a bioregional writer, his poetry savory and dark with the breathing spirit of Poland's villages, voices from 1,000 years.

And this is a bioregionalist issue, devoted to the generations of families whose important ethnic contributions make Maine's history resonate with deeper sensibilities.

We lucked into this wonderful issue concept through practice. After we did our story on "Little Armenia," in June of 1988, word spread quickly· through the local Armenian community and then across the country .

Armenian business people walked into the office with dark, rich photographs generations deep in family legend, meaning. I was impressed with the network: Subscriptions floated in from all over the country addressed to surnames ending· in "ian": Mezoian, Manoogian, Krekorian, Malconian, Goulasarian.

A year earlier our story on the lost neighborhood of Gorham's Corners had awakened the same interest from the loc~l Irish community. Overnight, it seemed, Maine's Lebanese community passed the word about our November 1989 feature on 70year-old businesswoman Kareemi

Atallah, and our story on highschooler Babak Nejad's courageous . emigration from Iran to Portland in our February/March 1990 issue got a similar lift from word of mouth.

And so this issue treated itself, rich with stories such as Maine's Polish

Echoes; Tribal Assets; Portland's

Greek Community; Three Generations of Franco-American Women;

Lithuania's North Star; Soviets on freighters ordering pizza from the

Rockland Domino's (Pizza Diplomacy);

Russian-American fiction; Maine's

Little Italy. We've loved these stories.It's easy doing an issue when the whole state deserves a byline.

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