Stop Here, This Is the Place: A Year in Motherland

Winky Lewis and Susan Conley, a photographer and a writer in Portland, tried an experiment. At the start of every week for a year, Winky sent Susan a photograph: of their children, of the street where they live as neighbors, and of other green places in Maine. By the end of that week Susan sent a tiny story back that talked to the photograph. Stop Here, This Is The Place tells the story of a year in which children's arms and legs get longer, and traces of babyhood fade--a year that feels interminable to a ten-year-old looking forward and fleeting to that ten-year-old’s mother, who can always stop here, go back and remember. This delightfully evocative gift book is a reminder to stop and enjoy the precious time we have with our kids while we have them. Through Susan's recollections of moments from her childhood and the ongoing lives of her children, we’re reminded of our own childhoods, and of the necessity to stop and pay attention, to hold on.

Susan Conley, a native Mainer, is the author of The Foremost Good Fortune (Knopf 2011), an Oprah
Magazine “Top Ten” pick and winner of the Maine Literary Award for Memoir, and the novel Paris Was
the Place, a People Magazine “Top Pick,” Elle Magazine “Readers Prize” selection and Amazon “Big
Books for Fall” selection. Her books have been excerpted in The New York Times Magazine and the Daily
Beast. She is the co-founder of The Telling Room, a creative writing lab in Portland, Maine, teaching
thousands of kids a year (and featured this month in the Boston Globe). She has had pieces in Down East
Magazine and is also a TED speaker, a frequent guest on Maine’s NPR subsidiary MPBN, and the
Portland Press Herald’s awardee for “Greatest Women in Maine.”

Laura "Winky" Lewis’s photographs are regularly featured in places such as the Boston Globe, Yankee
Magazine, and Maine Magazine. Her recent photography book was published by the German Press,
Galerie Vevais, and edited by Jock Sturges. Winky’s work with Space Gallery, a Portland hub for art and
ideas, has made her a leader in photography in Maine, where she regularly exhibits her work. Features on Winky and her work have also been published in Popular Photography and Maine Home and Design. In 2015, she was named a PDN Photo Annual contest winner.