Recently I got an email from my friend, screen- writer Brian Daly:

Hi Colin,

I’ve started reading The Meryl Streep Movie Club by Mia March, a novel I found in Hannah’s old room. On page 26, I saw this: “Surely you could become an editor for a regional magazine, like Portland or Down East.”

Do you get many job applications from fictional characters?

Hunh.

When a visitation like that happens, we call our IT exec (and exorcist) Jason Hjort and tighten our spam filter.

Melissa Senate’s novel (March is also a fictional name) has Portland Head Light on its front cover. Its cast of characters has one thing in common: beloved film moments are their shared reality. By the way, she lives with us on the coast of Maine in real life.

Our staff is very real. Across the years, we’ve braved deadlines together, driven through blizzards together, eaten lobster rolls together at The Lobster Shack, shared pizza at mid- night. Our water cooler is the coffee machine! Like all businesses, we’re evolving through COVID, but we’ve never let our emotional connections to each other and our mission be- come remote. Portland Magazine is proudly owned by Mainers and has been headquartered in Maine for 37 years. Our very real staff wants you to know that our greatest collective joy is when our stories touch you, our readers. We’re so glad you’ve joined our party!

In this neck of the woods, fiction and reality are next-door neighbors. Though real to me, my novels Museum of Human Beings, The Boston Castrato, and Red Hands summer in the fictional universe.

Early in our history, we were contacted by the producers of Murder, She Wrote, who desperately needed copies of our magazines for their set designs. The reason? Our magazine made the coffee tables in Cabot Cove seem more real.

At Portland Magazine, our staff creates stories that help you travel to other worlds, bind- ing together the present, future, and past. Because our motto is “Extraordinary Perspective,” a sense of beyondness slips into everything we do, including going the extra mile for deep, sometimes absurdly exacting context.

Our staff does a heroic job keeping it real. No one could care more. You can see it, and feel it, on every page.

N.B. My favorite fictional magazine is Millennium in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo series by Stieg Larsson. I pay for my subscription with Bitcoin.