Head to our online store now to peruse all our past print editions – especially if you subscribed to Take late in the game, or if you’ve only recently discovered us. Chances are you’re missing a magazine or two, and at $10 an issue, or a full print run for $42-$54, why not be a completest?

Though some of our print editions are nearly two years old, our philosophy was always that the content in print is timeless, meaning Nanette Vonnegut’s feature on Anna Schuleit Haber in our October 2015 print edition may be nearly two years old, but the information in the write-up is just as fresh and revealing as the day it landed in our subscriber’s mailbox. We guarantee the object profiles featured in our “un-gift guide” for the December/January 2016 edition will still inspire awe and envy.

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Top photo by Joanna Chattman

The post Get yourself back issues of Take appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our October 2015 print issue.

Craft is an ingrained value here, visible in everything from the historical society’s collection of eighteenth-century American furniture (well worth a look) to the Sharon Arts Center, which features dozens of local artists working across media and styles. Since 1907, leading artists have been coming to the exclusive, secluded MacDowell Colony on the outskirts of town. More recently, Michael Chabon and Jeffrey Eugenides wrote parts of their Pulitzer Prize-winning novels there.

Peterborough is an essential destination for literature and music, with plenty of readings and concerts throughout the year.The Toadstool Bookshop provides the kind of immersive browsing experience of books and records that online shopping will never rival. Start a conversation with manager Eric Gagne, who runs the music department; organizes the Thing in the Spring music festival; and tours with his own band, Footings. Gagne has encyclopedic knowledge and says he is “sincerely interested in knowing customers’ tastes and connecting them to artists that they may not know about, but will absolutely love.”

For live music, Harlow’s Pub is a local mainstay with universal appeal. The patio is ideal for seasonal beers during the day, while night brings a steady stream of musicians for weekly bluegrass jams and open mikes. Harlow’s is easily one of the best stages between Boston and Burlington, Vermont, and hosts an impressive array of regional and national acts on weekends, including a recent appearance by members of the band Morphine and an ever-growing roster of innovative groups drawing from genres like psych pop, indie rock, Americana and folk, jam, funk, jazz, and even world music.

Like the town itself, Peterborough’s secondhand shops fit precisely between the everyday and the pretentious. The Melamine Cup (six miles toward Jaffrey on Route 202) specializes in midcentury modern furniture and home goods, with a particularly good selection of barware—perfect for dressing up vintage cocktails in period vessels.

In town, the group shop Bowerbird & Friends cultivates a modern farmhouse aesthetic with industrial touches. Several pieces of folk art, especially the “tramp art” made by itinerant travelers, collapse the distinction between high art and handmade function. “A younger generation is returning to New England heritage but bringing fresh eyes,” says store owner Katherine Forrest. “When they come in, they respond with inspiration and surprise—there is a sense of discovery, but also recognition and familiarity.

Illustration by Chris Piascik

The post Fresh Eyes on Peterborough, New Hampshire appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally appeared in our October 2015 print edition. 

There are regional liquor appetites that border on the fetishistic. Before the near ubiquity of Fernet-Branca, San Franciscans drank a lot of it, and I saw firsthand the unslakeable thirst for Grand Marnier in the Baltimore–Washington corridor. The presence of Chartreuse behind nearly every bar in New Orleans still baffles, and I’ve heard that some parts of Annapolis are fond of Cherry Heering. But nothing prepared me for Allen’s Coffee Brandy.*

For more than 20 years, Allen’s Coffee Brandy has been the top-selling spirit in the state of Maine, besting the number two competitor by a margin of two to one. And that’s just the 1.75-liter size. Annual sales reports for the state routinely place all four sizes of Allen’s among the top ten best sellers. Each year, Somerville, Massachusetts-based M.S. Walker produces 130,000 cases of the stuff, shipping 96,000 up Route 95 to Maine. It is the stuff of legend.

And why not? It’s inexpensive, it’s sweet, and it packs a buzz and a punch. Flavored with 100% Arabica coffee beans, its coffee flavor is in your face while its relatively high 60 proof will try to set you on your other end.

Allen’s earned its name from Leo Allen, who joined M.S. Walker, his father-in-law’s business, soon after it was founded and prohibition repealed in the early 1930s. Fast forward about thirty years to the late ’60s, where Allen’s is sold and distributed mostly in “Downeast” Maine.

Allen’s Coffee Brandy was a hallmark of the salt-of-the-earth working poor, who gave it nicknames like “Fat Ass in a Glass,” “Downeast Panty Remover,” “Burnt Trailer,” and “Doublewide.” “Lily of the Forest” is one of my favorites. Picture it: as the winter snows recede along the snowmobile and skidder trails, the necks of empty Allen’s bottles begin to emerge.

But we live in interesting times, and what was once a solace for the chronically down-and-out is now a prop for the tragically hip. Ask for “The Service” at tony No. 9 Park in Boston, for example, and a shot of Allen’s is part of the package. At Portland, Maine’s uber-craft cocktail bar, Portland Hunt & Alpine Club, a happy hour menu once featured nearly half a dozen Allen’s Coffee Brandy drinks.

It’s a weird time, to be sure, when irony, locavorism, and fashion meet, and it’s hard to know how to feel about it. As I watch a young, smart couple dressed in almost-matching flannel-and-Carhartt outfits climb out of an Uber taxi, Portland bartender Leah Gagne blurts out, “The first time I had Allen’s, I fell through a smelt hole,” and that just about puts everything aright.

*The official name is Allen’s Coffee Flavored Brandy. No one calls it that.

All photos courtesy M.S. Walker

The post Maine’s Addiction appeared first on Take Magazine.

This article originally ran in our October 2015 print edition.

Texans have a name for expats from Massachusetts, and it ain’t Masshole. If you make the pilgrimage from New England to the Lone Star State, you’re a carpetbagger the second you cross the border, and you’ll remain one until you leave for greener pastures. Trust me, I’ve been lugging this baggage around for the past 15 years.

When my wife (then lady friend) and I migrated, I had ideas about Texas. I’d read all of Cormac McCarthy. I listened, drank, and wept to Springsteen’s Ghost of Tom Joad religiously. I once passed the flaming husk of an 18-wheeler on I-10 near Sonora at 3:00 a.m. on the return leg of a 20-day, cross-country drive.

In short, I thought I understood Texas. So we jumped into Crusher, my rusty blue ’88 Chevy Blazer; popped a Friends of Dean Martinez cassette into the deck; and headed southwest, stopping in Memphis to sleep through Y2K eve and TCB at Graceland.

Once in Austin, I looked for adventures. My expat buddy Tim and I attended a rattlesnake rustling competition, an event that yielded a great koozie and a glimpse into the socioeconomic drivers that spur folks to hook big ol’ snakes into a burlap sack for pennies. Really, we were outsiders pretending to be outlaws.

Later, my lady friend and I drove to Palestine (Pal-uhs-TEEN) to watch Robbie Knievel jump a steam train. Because Crusher had out-of-state plates and I was speeding, a trooper pulled us over in Jewett. As he swaggered toward us with his campaign hat, mirrored shades, and mouthful of chaw, we began to sweat bullets.

Obliging the slow twirls of his index finger, I rolled down my window.

“What’re you doin’ so far from Massatoosits, boy?”

“Taking my lady friend to see Robbie Knievel jump a steam train, sir.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so? Just slow it down, and tell ol’ Robbie I said hi.”

Then he drove away.

It was THE BEST.

We made it to Palestine in time to trek across fields and over barbed wire, alongside families with strollers, toward the locomotive pyre where Evel’s son made history as “Detroit Rock City” reverberated over the swale.

As the thrill of living in Texas began to fade, we settled into life in Austin. Sure, the nice self-mutilating tenants at our apartment complex occasionally dangled by their nipples from the mimosa tree in the courtyard. But the novelty wore off quickly; so we went about the tasks of making friends, establishing routines, and finishing our undergraduate degrees.

Here’s a fun fact I learned in my studies: Texas has had eight constitutions. The eighth went into effect during the Reconstruction to protect the state from carpetbaggers (I’m paraphrasing my professor here). Texas is determined to stay true to its maverick identity, even if much of that identity was stolen from Mexico. I suppose that’s a big part of what makes Texas so quintessentially American.

That said, Texas confounds me; despite its many flaws, it’s hard to resist its wily charms. I never thought we’d plant roots, but we’re still here because it feels like home. We’ve earned degrees here. We’ve made our fair share of lifelong friends here. Our family, careers, home. . . they’re all here. But while our little girl is a native Texan and Austinite, it’s likely we won’t raise her here. This state is just too damn red for us. Even so, thanks to the pilgrimage we made at the turn of the century, she’ll always have a place in Texas to unpack her bags and hang her hat.

Top illustration by Rob Kimmel.

The post Notes From An Expat: Pack Your Bags, Son appeared first on Take Magazine.

Some folks, like one of the main characters in New Hampshire writer Tim Horvath’s short story collection Understories, live life from the proverbial canopy, standing at the top and looking down and far afield at the vista. Others, Horvath included, prefer the understory.

In a forest, the understory comprises those shrubs and small trees that live beneath the larger trees, or canopy. Forced to make do with less light and higher humidity, these trees are often the scrappier characters in the play of forest life.

They also, to continue the character idea, are potentially the most interesting. Their vantage point is like no other. It is this perspective that drives Horvath in his writing.

“You know, Martin, it’s strange,” writes Professor Schoner to his friend, Martin Heidegger, in “The Understory.” “Trees have always defined the forest for me. I climbed in the canopy, because I thought that’s where the best, truest view was. But in the wake of the Storm of 1938, I find that the little plants of the understory have become very dear to me, dearer than I could have ever imagined.”

“That’s what underlies my work—the hidden stories,” Horvath says as we discuss Understories and his forthcoming first novel—about the conflicted relationship between two composers who first meet at music school in Hartford, Connecticut—in a quiet study room at, appropriately, the Hartford Public Library.

“For me, fiction is a way of accessing the sense that the universe is the possible, not just the actual. The possible and the plausible are equally active. So I’m more interested in the relationship of those two than the actual. I’m interested in what might have happened.” Horvath gives an example: what if Gauguin had gone to Greenland rather than Tahiti? “Would he have been a different artist or would he have Gauguinized wherever he went?” he ponders.

“I think I do believe that quote [by poet Muriel Rukeyser] that ‘the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,’” Horvath adds. “Stories are how we construct, how we give our lives form, shape, and purpose. They provide maps to help us find those things.”

“The Understory” illustrates another key driver in Horvath’s writing: he is an experiential writer. He took a forestry class that in part prompted the story, which is about a German professor of forestry. He has also taken up the trumpet because one of the characters in his novel in progress plays the trumpet.

Understories Cover | Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press | Published Nov 24, 2012

He moved to New Hampshire in 2003 to get his Master of Fine Arts at the University of New Hampshire. He lives with his wife, Mary Ann Cappiello, and their 10-year-old daughter, Ella, and the location figures large in his writing. “I love the role landscape can play in writing,” he says. “It can be more than a backdrop. It can be an integral character, an intimate device.”

Horvath grew up surrounded by writing. He lived in Bloomington, Indiana, until he was nine. His father was an editor at Indiana University Press. “One of our favorite family stories is about my father having breakfast with [Latin American writer Jorge Luis] Borges,” he says. “I was not aware this was a big deal. I totally missed the significance of it.”

When his parents divorced, Horvath moved with his mother and brother to Yonkers, New York. That’s where Horvath first started writing. “I had some great teachers who really encouraged that,” he says, noting his first “work” was about the move from Indiana to New York. “That was the big adventure in my life at that point.” Horvath loved fantasy as a genre, so another of his first “books” was “The Adventures of Peter Chesapeake.” “I hand wrote it, all six volumes,” he says. “It was a cross between [The Chronicles of] Narnia and The Lord of the Rings.”

Horvath says he identified as a writer in junior high and high school. Being a day student from Yonkers in Rye Country Day School, a tony private school, left him feeling a bit isolated. “It was a strange experience for me,” he says.

Some terrific English teachers helped make the road a little smoother, he says, citing Carol Lichtenfeld and Morrow Jones in particular. “We forged a real bond,” he says of Jones. “He taught an amazing creative writing class. We subscribed to The New Yorker. I didn’t really appreciate it at the time, but I was reading late [Raymond] Carver’s most successful stories.

“We were always engaged in these experiments,” Horvath continues. “One week an absurdist play, one week a poetic form like the sestina. I got into the habit really early of thinking of variety as being at the core of what one could hope for in writing rather than settling into any one thing.”

When Horvath arrived at Vassar College, though, he didn’t feel accepted as a writer there. “Vassar had a subculture of writers who seemed well established,” he says. “I didn’t feel a part of that.”

Instead he focused on philosophy, which he also studied in high school. “It really had a profound impact on me,” he says. “I put writing on the side burner. I still loved English and literature, but I figured if I don’t take philosophy I’ll never understand.” Ultimately, he majored in Philosophy and minored in English.

Horvath taught high school English after graduation, which left little time for personal writing. After a few years, however, he realized he missed writing, so he began taking some classes at The Hudson Valley Writers’ Center. “It felt like this wonderful indulgence, having someone talk about my work,” he says.

It was a summer at Bread Loaf School of English in Middlebury, Vermont, and a short story class with writer David Huddle that finally brought Horvath to add the word “writer” to his personal description. “For a final project, I asked him if I could do a creative paper,” Horvath says. “He granted permission, and that dubbed me a writer in a very miniscule way. So it was very gradual.”

Today—at least in the summer, when he is off from his teaching job at the New Hampshire Institute of Art— Horvath writes 1,000 words every day. As with all writing, some days go better than others. Taking notes for his novel in progress while listening to music recently, for instance, was a relative breeze. “I felt like my hand could barely keep up with my mind.” But plot—that’s often trickier. “I feel like I can write sentences well. I feel confident about my sentence-to-sentence ability,” he says. “I see novelists who are really comfortable with plot. That’s the biggest challenge. I like someone who can tell a great story, and I like someone who can tell it in gorgeous sentences.”

The working title of Tim Horvath’s new book, his first “official” novel, is The Spinal Descent. It’s about two composers who become roommates while in music school in Hartford, Connecticut. They spend a few years after college in a competitive, but still amicable, relationship. One of them, Leonard, is more avant-garde, while his friend/frenemy is more commercially successful. Ultimately they have a falling out. “Leonard’s people skills are not great,” Horvath says. Circumstances bring them back together later in life, and their reunion is the basis of the novel. Horvath chose this excerpt to give us a sense of how Leonard speaks. “I wanted something that would capture the voice,” he says, noting it’s written in close third person.

*   *   *   *   *

He’d saved every scrap of printed matter with his name from over the years. The first article, which came when he was still a college student, when he could fancy himself a kind of phenom, he’d sliced brazenly out of the Hartford Courant with a razor blade. This became his tradition thereafter. In his best years, his roaring late 20s, the paper clip holding them all together became splayed. He called them the foie gras years, the commissions and the performances and the recordings coming in a glut, one felt in the liver, as he was wined and dined and treated a bit like a goose himself. The thirties turned lean, though. He’d always figured he’d outgrow that first clip, but it had proved more than adequate for the task, and the clippings began to fade, the paper turning the yellow-brown of drought grass. One razor blade, one clip. Nothing to slice, except . . . but he wasn’t that despondent. It was a phase. His life’s second movement. Maybe it was what was needed. And so he awaited the third movement eagerly, anxiously.

In that single clip were the screeds, the glowing homages that missed the mark but which he’d take anyway, and everything in between. In interviews, he could be pithy and remorseless, but he spoke for a greater cause, Music, and if he had to tear down a couple of peers along the way, well, it was necessary, radiation trained on a tumor before it could spread. But when he got out of the hospital and went through the folder, a new sensation spoked through his chest that he could only think of as the tympani of mortality. He wondered whether he’d overdone it at times. He’d torn apart raftloads of “composeurs.” They knew how to manipulate sound but had “perhaps watched too many videos” (two was too many) and could not distinguish between music that was mere glaze and the meat itself. Music was the meat. It should have been. It should have been the thing that other things were built around, slathered over.

Follow Tim Horvath online and on twitter.

This article originally appeared in our October 2015 Print issue.

Top image author Tim Horvath | Photo by Anthony Grassetti

The post What Lies Beneath appeared first on Take Magazine.

Montpelier, Vermont, may be the only U.S. capital without a McDonald’s. But it’s the kind of place where you can find a practitioner of Maya Abdominal Therapy, aka uterus massage. I’ll call her Shayna.

My friend from high school, now living off the grid in Randolph, Vermont, got pregnant at 44 and gives full credit to Shayna’s technique. “It’s totally noninvasive,” she assured me. “She teaches you, and then you do it at home every day.” While I didn’t share my friend’s enthusiasm for a rustic home birth, I did understand being 40-something and wanting a baby.

So I found myself driving three-plus hours north on a frigid February afternoon. For us Bostonians, speeding up I-89 can be an exhilarating flip-off to Beantown’s rigid, overeducated routine. In fact, the farther I got from Mass General and all those other fine institutions ready with their somber lectures and disheartening statistics about “advanced maternal age,” the more fertile I felt.

In Montpelier, Shayna’s office was just around the corner from the capitol. In Washington, DC, its geographical equivalent would be the Supreme Court or the Library of Congress.

On the second floor of a little brick house, Shayna’s waiting area was all dusty wood paneling and creaky chairs. There was no sign of life except for a pair of Naots neatly parallel parked on a faded towel.

Shayna glided in, a gorgeous 50-something with flowing clothes and an eager face. She led me into a room with two more creaky chairs and a massage table. We’d talk a bit, and then the Technique, she said. Did I have any questions? I did have a question. The Maya Abdominal Therapy website claims that many women have a “wandering womb” that needs to be nudged back into position to restore “the flow of blood, lymph, nerve, and chi.” Isn’t that some quackery from ancient Greece?

But I stopped myself. Enough with the cynicism and cold, rational thought. Leave that negative energy at home.

Instead, I revealed to Shayna that I already had three children and that my husband had no idea I was here.

She compressed her long fingers into a sympathetic knot. I knew at that moment she wouldn’t judge me.

“Marriage is hard,” she said, inhaling deeply.

Shayna had been in the business of “psychospiritual bodywork” for a long time (I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like people touching you and being kind). She’d been doing the uterus thing for two decades.

She held up a plastic model of something that looked like a brain aneurysm. Turns out it was a happy and healthy uterus. Blood rich, properly situated, and ready to go.

She leaned forward. “Has any doctor ever said you have a tipped uterus—but not to worry about it?”

Yes, they had. Every year, in fact. At my annual, while my feet are in stirrups and I’m staring at the Harvard Medical diploma on the wall.

She held out the plastic uterus like she was gifting me a vase. I touched it and nodded.

“Whenever you’re ready.” She smiled and tilted her head toward the table. It was time to learn the secret handshake with the womb that would get me the baby I wanted. Shayna asked me to expose my abdomen to the extent I was comfortable doing so. Then she demonstrated a sequence of little nudges into my belly, her fingers contorting into shapes suitable for shadow tricks.

And that was it.

“That’s it?”

“Yes, that’s all you need to do.”

Earlier in my life, I had come to Vermont for Phish and cheese-slathered fries at Nectar’s, or to summit Camel’s Hump. Now, all I wanted was a little optimism, like one of those mini souvenir maple syrups, to stash in my bag and bring home.

This article originally appeared in our October 2015 Print issue.

Illustration by Bronwen Hodgkinson

The post Final Take: Fertile Ground appeared first on Take Magazine.