Michele Christle

Michele Christle writes about culture, ecology, and place. Her work has been published in Cultural Survival Quarterly, Eater, Down East, Insider, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She served in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, received an MFA in Creative Writing from UMass Amherst, and has worked extensively in nonprofit communications. Recently, Michele worked as a producer/facilitator for StoryCorps’ One Small Step program through WERU Community Radio. Michele is the recipient of a Bodwell Fellowship and residencies at Hewnoaks and Shannaghe. She serves on the board of the Waldo Peirce Reading Room and is a member of the Maine Community Foundation’s Waldo County Committee. Presently, Michele works with community-based multimedia studio Torchlight Media in Belfast and Atlantic Black Box’s Walk for Historical and Ecological Recovery (WHERE), supporting communications. She is working on a book and an experimental documentary (with filmmaker Eli Kao) about freshwater eels.

Christle is pronounced “crystal.”

visit the elversphere

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visit the elversphere 〰️

For the past year, facilitating StoryCorps’ One Small Step initiative in “Maine” (for WERU Community Radio) has occupied my days. You can read more about that experience here. This work has led me to have a lot of conversations with people in rural “Maine” around resilience, connection, community, and renegades. These conversations are ongoing—sometimes I share snippets of them here.

In my writing, I’m exploring ecology, culture, and history through abandoned houses, migratory species (eels!), topaz mines, rural midwives, blueberry barrens, granite quarries, waterways. Oh, and Wilhelm Reich.

In my pocket, or on a dusty closet shelf, rather, is a manuscript I wrote about my experience crossing the Pacific Ocean with my father on a 906-foot container ship during typhoon season—35 days. No internet. 4 countries. 23 men. And me. This book is looking for a home. You can get a taste of it here.

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Glass eels arrive in freshwater in the spring but yellow eels (same eel, just a little older, they turn yellow during their midlife phase) are on the move, too. These ones were motivated to move into freshwater upstream from Boothbay Harbor. Today, a
Some notes on the newsletter I sent out last night: more research on the specific points I wrote about would have been nice—points are many layered places! I forgot to add Tunde Adenimpe’s album plus the latest episode of Question Everyth
A lot of talk on the river today about looking bycatch (lamprey, krill, fleas, salmon, alewives) and visitors (bald eagle, seal, crow, camera) in the eye or the teeth. #Elversphere
Here is a book that took a rib to write, written by my sister, @heatherchristle. Here is language from the jacket copy: “In this moving and poignant memoir, the acclaimed poet grapples with he past, her family, and the stories they tell one ano
To have and to hold is also a sister, here we are after another long time apart as seen through my kid’s hands and eyes and two days before the publication day for her book, IN THE RHODODENDRONS, A MEMOIR WITH APPEARANCES BY VIRGINIA WOOLF, whi
I remember getting in trouble in elementary school for failing to write summaries, making what were ostensibly long, narrative lists of details instead. Today is the deadline for a feature I was assigned. A draft exists and it is full of details and
A few years ago, I wrote a story for @downeastmagazine about the flock of birds, my father-in-law’s (Jeff Yorks’) grandfather, Frank Kilburn carved, and Jeff’s attempt to get them all back together again. A few weeks ago we got an e
Reporting notes: a dog breaks into the Guide’s Gallery and tries to gnaw on the old baby bear before he’s shooed out. There are more guides in the Grand Lake Stream area than anywhere else in “Maine.” You don’t get your

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