Mel Allen in Person

Join us on Thursday, December 4 at 7 PM as longtime Yankee Magazine editor Mel Allen presents his new book, Here in New England: Unforgettable Stories of People, Places, and Memories That Connect Us All.

About the Book

From the time Mel Allen published his first stories in Yankee in 1979, to the day he retired in 2025 as only Yankee’s fifth editor in its storied 90 year history, his work, both as editor and author has captured New England’s unique sense of place and the people who call it home. The feel of New England lives within the covers of this book. Sometimes a book lets us see with new eyes. This is one of those books.

Mel Allen describes his book this way: “In Mystic Seaport in Connecticut there is an exquisite scale model of Mystic in the mid-19th century. One man, 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.
The most important words in this book’s title for me are “that connects us all.” We live now in a time where division has become the backdrop to our lives. But when I look at the stories here about people overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles, of others reaching out to help their neighbors, of entire communities pulling together when all seems lost, or of thousands of people searching a wilderness for a lost child, I see a common humanity that has always been part of the New England landscape. “

About Mel Allen

Mel Allen taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 27 children through months of Maine winters. From his first two stories in Yankee’s December 1977 issue to a January day in 2025 when he closed his office door for the last time, he spent nearly half a century finding people and places whose stories he wanted to know and assigning countless others to the finest writers in New England. He became Yankee’s fifth editor in the summer of 2006, after previous roles as senior editor and executive editor. In 2018, he was inducted into the Folio Magazine Hall of Fame for editorial excellence. Mel has taught magazine writing and creative nonfiction for the past 25 years, divided between the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and MFA Bay Path. He lives and writes in New Hampshire.