Join The Briar Patch for an evening with Maine author Eleanor Morse in conversation with author Robert Diamante, discussing her most recent novel THIS FOREIGN LAND. This work of fiction is set in 2018 as immigration policy in the United States suddenly changed. It examines what one fictional man does when he doesn’t know what to do.
ABOUT THIS FOREIGN LAND
The book is set in the year 2018, when “Zero tolerance” became official U.S. Immigration Policy and children by the hundreds began to be separated from their parents at the U.S. southern border. It seemed that there could be no greater cruelty than this. Not knowing what to do was the seed that grew into the book. When Vincent hears about the new immigration policy, he puts a pack on his back and sets out to walk the 2,000 miles south from Maine to Texas. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when he gets there, and his sister, Bryn, doesn’t know where he’s gone. The early chapters of the book toggle between Vincent’s journey and his sister’s life back home. Later, an Ecuadorian mother and her daughter enter the story as they walk north toward the U.S. border. A portion of every book sold will be donated to the Rio Valley Relief Project, and the Maine Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project.
ABOUT ELEANOR MORSE
Eleanor Morse’s most recent novel, This Foreign Land, launched in July of 2026. A previous novel, Margreete’s Harbor (St. Martin’s Press, 2021), won the 2022 Maine Literary Fiction Book Award. White Dog Fell from the Sky (Penguin/Viking 2013) was a 2014 Publishers Weekly Pick of the Week and an AudioFile Earphone Award winner. Her novel, An Unexpected Forest (Down East Books, 2007) was the 2008 Independent Publisher’s Gold Medalist Award winner for Best Regional Fiction in the Northeast U.S. and won Best Published Fiction at the 2008 Maine Literary Awards. Her short stories have been anthologized in North by Northeast, North by Northeast 2, and Positivity Bias (Littoral Books, 2019, 2021, 2025). Two essays were anthologized in Creativity and Compassion (Good River Books, 2021). Eleanor earned a B.A. from Swarthmore College, a Master of Arts in Teaching from Yale University, and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has taught in adult education programs, in prisons, and in university systems, both in Maine and in southern Africa, and was a faculty member with the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing in Louisville, Kentucky from 2008 to 2022 (originally called Spalding University’s low-residency M.F.A. in Writing program). She has lived in many places: New York and Ohio growing up; later, New Hampshire, Botswana, India, and the Big Island of Hawaii. Maine is true north now, with a home on Peaks Island off the coast of Portland.
ABOUT ROBERT DIAMANTE
Robert Diamante’s short fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in journals, magazines, and in the anthologies Alive to This, North by Northeast, and North by Northeast 2. His photographs are in the permanent collections of the University of Southern Maine, the Brown University Library, and private collectors and have been published in books and magazines worldwide.
