Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library is hosting its first Author Talk of the fall season with Maine author Claire Hersom. Join us on Thursday, Oct. 15 at 10:30 a.m. as Hersom discusses her debut novel, “Smithville Junction: A Maine Novel.”

The book centers around a small, rural town in 1940s Maine that grapples with reluctant forgiveness after difficult times. Hersom will share passages from the novel and will discuss her writing process, the joys and challenges of self publishing, and the history of her family’s farm, upon which the book is based.

Hersom is a native Mainer with two books of poetry published by Moon Pie Press—“Drowning: A Poetic Memoir” (2008) and “Dreamscape” (2017). Her poem “Dreamscape” was nominated by Moon Pie Press for a Pushcart Prize. She is a past recipient of Boston’s Saint Botolph Club Foundation’s New England Emerging Artist Award for poetry. In 2025, her poem “First Day at the New Field” was featured on Maine Public Radio’s Poems from Here and Now selected and read by Maine’s poet laureate, Julia Bouwsma. In 2026, Claire stepped away from her 11 years co-organizing the poetry venue The Bookey Readings turning attention to her recently published debut novel. Claire has three grown children, six granddaughters, and lives in Winthrop, Maine.

“Smithville Junction” is a work of regional fiction set in the 1940s. It follows a young family through a small, rural town’s journey toward a reluctant forgiveness surprisingly found through the innocence of an 8-year-old girl. Even in the smallest, uneventful Maine town, the world can hand out some tough challenges, and Smithville Junction is no exception, so when Roy Clench gives his 5-day-old baby girl away, the whole town is in an uproar, and if not for his two young boys, he might have been run out of town. But the world has a way of passing out everyone’s comeuppance when least expected and ironically, most deserved. “Smithville Junction” tells the story of this man as he navigates through a hard forgiveness he is forced to face in the worst of circumstances, and one little girl who brings him unexpectedly to the place he can find it.