{"id":17028,"date":"2020-05-31T17:00:28","date_gmt":"2020-05-31T21:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=17028"},"modified":"2020-10-16T12:23:02","modified_gmt":"2020-10-16T16:23:02","slug":"ten-most-lincoln-peirce","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/ten-most-lincoln-peirce\/","title":{"rendered":"Lincoln Peirce"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none; width: 100%; height: 450px;\" src=\"\/\/e.issuu.com\/embed.html?backgroundColor=%23d2d2d2&amp;backgroundColorFullscreen=%23d2d2d2&amp;d=nov19_flipbook_final&amp;hideIssuuLogo=true&amp;pageNumber=44&amp;u=portlandmagazine\" width=\"300\" height=\"150\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\">November 2019<\/p>\n<h1 class=\"p3\"><span style=\"color: #000000;\">4.\u00a0<span class=\"s1\"><b>Thinkin\u2019 Lincoln<\/b><\/span><\/span><\/h1>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\">\u201cMy brain remembers things that aren\u2019t important.\u201d\u00a0<strong>\u2014Lincoln Peirce<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p class=\"p1\"><em><span class=\"s1\">By Brian Daly<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n<p class=\"p1\"><span class=\"s1\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-16869\" src=\"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/nov19_10Most-_4-Lincoln1-300x290.jpg\" alt=\"nov19_10Most _4 Lincoln1\" width=\"300\" height=\"290\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/nov19_10Most-_4-Lincoln1-300x290.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/nov19_10Most-_4-Lincoln1-36x36.jpg 36w, https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/nov19_10Most-_4-Lincoln1-200x194.jpg 200w, https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/nov19_10Most-_4-Lincoln1-362x350.jpg 362w, https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/10\/nov19_10Most-_4-Lincoln1.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/>W<\/span><span class=\"s1\">hen\u00a0<strong>Lincoln Peirce\u00a0<\/strong>(pronounced \u201cpurse\u201d) lived in Brooklyn from 1985 to 1992, he listened to old-timey country music on WKCR, the Columbia University radio station. One day he heard a song he liked called \u201cDon\u2019t Fix Up the Doghouse,\u201d but, to his disappointment, he didn\u2019t hear who sang it. Ten years later\u2014but still before the Internet made solving this kind of mystery easy\u2014he heard that voice a second time singing another song, and he had his answer. George McCormick.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Who?<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">He\u2019s a singer familiar to listeners of \u201cSouth By Southwest,\u201d a radio program devoted to honky-tonk, western swing, and straight-ahead country music recorded prior to 1975. Lincoln has hosted the show for twenty years every Monday morning on WMPG 90.9, the University of Southern Maine\u2019s community radio station.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Wait. Did he recognize the voice after\u00a0<i>ten years?<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cI have a good memory for music,\u201d says Lincoln, 56. \u201cMy brain remembers things that aren\u2019t important.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">But this\u00a0<strong>Colby College<\/strong>\u00a0grad remembers things that\u00a0<i>are\u00a0<\/i>important, too, including what it was like to be a kid growing up in Durham, New Hampshire. Those memories serve him well in his career as the creator of\u00a0<i>Big Nate<\/i>, the popular comic strip about the misadventures of Nate Wright, a sixth-grader who\u2019s a record-setter\u2014for getting the most detentions. \u201cPeople ask me all the time how I get my ideas, and my answer is boring: I sit down and think them up.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Lincoln also drew the eight popular\u00a0<em>Big Nate<\/em>\u00a0books, aimed at middle-grade readers. These hybrids of text and pictures held down a top ten slot on the\u00a0<em>New York Times<\/em>\u00a0bestseller list for over\u00a0<strong>140 weeks<\/strong>. Sales of the series plus compilations have topped\u00a0<strong>18 million books.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">Now, Lincoln is working on book two of a three-book series featuring the funny adventures of Max and the Midknights. Max is an apprentice troubadour in medieval times who wants to grow up to be a knight. These books are hybrids, too. As always, Lincoln does the design and layout by hand. When his editor at Crown Books for Young Readers calls for changes, Lincoln makes them the old-fashioned way. \u201cI enjoy trying to fit the words and pictures together. It appeals to the puzzle solver in me.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">With the thousand-plus pictures he has to draw for each\u00a0<em>Max and the Midknights<\/em>\u00a0book\u2014not to mention the 25,000 words he has to write\u2014Lincoln is a prime candidate for a digital device that would allow him to alter the size and placement of pictures and text simultaneously.<span class=\"Apple-converted-space\">\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>He hasn\u2019t found one, though, so he continues to work the old-fashioned way. Actually, he hasn\u2019t looked very hard. \u201cMy system is inefficient,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I work on deadline, and I worry about the time spent learning how to use technology. It isn\u2019t at all intuitive for me. I haven\u2019t been able to make the jump. If I did, though, I wouldn\u2019t have to stay up until one in the morning.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p3\"><span class=\"s1\">The room where he does this painstaking work is on the first floor of the colonial home he shares with his wife\u00a0<strong>Jessica Gandolf<\/strong>, an acclaimed painter, in the Deering Highlands neighborhood of Portland. It\u2019s filled with about 1,200 CDs shelved alphabetically, sports memorabilia, and pictures of their son Elias and daughter Dana. Tucked behind some books over in the corner is the blue ribbon Lincoln won for his apple pie at the\u00a0<strong>Cumberland Fair<\/strong>\u00a0in 2004. It was the only time he ever entered.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"p2\"><span class=\"s1\">\u201cI retired undefeated.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Big Nate&#8221; author and illustrator remembers things that are, and aren&#8217;t important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18612,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[955,12,943],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17028","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-most-intriguing-mainers","category-extras","category-personalities"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17028","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17028"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17028\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18627,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17028\/revisions\/18627"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18612"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17028"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17028"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17028"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}