HERE IN NEW ENGLAND Comes to The Music Hall Lounge

On Thursday, September 25 at 7pm, renowned editor of Yankee Magazine, Mel Allen will visit The Music Hall Lounge with his book, HERE IN NEW ENGLAND. With enormous empathy and respect, Allen peers into the lives of New Englanders. Horror writer Stephen King, sled dog racers in Rangeley, and Connie Small, the eighty-one year old lighthouse keeper, are all shown equal reverence. HERE IN NEW ENGLAND is an ode to the people and places that make our region spectacular.

The 7pm event includes an author conversation with Ian Aldrich, Executive Editor of Yankee, an audience Q&A, and is followed by a post-show meet-and-greet. It will be held at The Music Hall Lounge at 131 Congress St., Portsmouth, New Hampshire. 

From the time he published his first story in Yankee in 1979, to the day he retired as its editor in 2025, Mel Allen's writing has captured the unique essence of New England and the people who call it home. For Here in New England, Allen collected forty-five of his favorite pieces, adding intimate new introductions and postscripts to put them in context. The feel and flavor of New England lives within the covers of this engaging collection.

In Allen's own words, “In Mystic Seaport in Connecticut there is an exquisite scale model of Mystic in the mid-19th century. Arthur Payne worked on that scale model for more than 50 years. If you lean down and see it at eye level, it seems as if the whole town he has created comes to life—people working, playing, ships loading or unloading. 

I see the stories in these pages a little like that—miniature pictures of New England that reveal a larger life around them. To tell these stories, I have entered the lives of people for hours or days—and when they open their own lives, their hearts, the words they speak become intimate albums. They tell me details of their lives that they may not tell anyone else. And it is up to me to treat those words with deep respect.”

Mel Allen arrived at Yankee magazine in 1979. He became Yankee's fifth editor in the summer of 2006, after previous roles as writer, senior editor, and executive editor. He has spent nearly half a century finding fascinating people and places he wanted to write about and assigning countless others to the finest writers in New England. In 2018, he was inducted into the Folio Magazine Hall of Fame for editorial excellence. He has taught magazine writing and creative nonfiction for the past 25 years, divided between the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and MFA Bay Path. His previous book is A Coach's Letter to His Son. He lives and writes in New Hampshire.

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