Brian Robbins

"If you were a teenage boy growing up on an island off the coast of Maine in the early 1970s, you didn't tell anybody you liked to write," says Brian Robbins. "Admitting to that would've gotten about the same reaction as telling your buddies that you liked wearing your mother's dresses, too.

"I had two teachers in high school that I shared my 'little secret' with ... other than that, I assumed anything I'd want to go to college for wouldn't pay many bills in the real world."

Robbins traded his high school graduation gown for a set of oil clothes in 1976, figuring his place was out on the waters of the Gulf of Maine, offshore lobstering with his brother. "We worked hard and we lived hard in between fishing trips," says Robbins. "We couldn't be cowboys, so offshore lobstering was the next best thing."

A letter to the editor of Commercial Fisheries News in the mid-80s sparked some interest in Robbins' writing style - and by 1988, he began to try his hand at making a living on land. One constant in the years since he "came ashore to stay" has been Robbins' "Bearin's" column in Commercial Fisheries News - what he refers to as "a monthly opportunity to flush things out, whether it be a personal thing that I just need to write about or some foolishness that's showed up in my brain. People have asked me for years if it's hard to start from scratch each month and where I get my ideas from. I've always maintained that I've been lucky to have a place to put it down ... those stories show up whether you want them to or not. In the case of the fictional stuff, all I'm doing is watching the movie in my head and writing it down as it happens ... and waiting to see how it ends."

For "Bearins: The Book", Robbins hand-picked 65 columns out of 20 years' worth of fiction, essays, and profiles - as it says on the book's jacket, a mix of "Bulkhead Wisdom, Quiet Smiles, Belly Laughs, and Good Ol' Salty Tears."

The key to Robbins' writing is that although it may be heavily flavored by his coastal Maine background, you don't have to be a veteran of offshore gales or round-the-clock stretches on deck to appreciate it. As he says, "We all think and feel, you know? I've sat with farmers from Kansas - get out the map and you'll see they don't have much coastline in Kansas - and talked about our lives. In the end, we laughed and cried about a lot of the same things; theirs just had more dirt on it and ours was stiff with salt."

Robbins is a regular contributor to Commercial Fisheries News, Fish Farming News, National Fisherman, and Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors. His writings about music (including feature articles and interviews, along with album and book reviews) regularly appear on Jambands.com and Glide.com, and in the pages of Relix and Hittin' The Note magazines. ("I recently had the opportunity to interview David Johansen of the New York Dolls and Merry Prankster Ken Babbs who's just written a new book himself ... those are a couple of the kinds of things I've been waiting to do since I was 15.")

Brian Robbins grew up in the town of Stonington on the southern end of Deer Isle, ME. These days he lives in the midcoast area of the state with his wife Felicity Myers (referred to as "Tigger" in the pages of "Bearin's: The Book") and faithful Chesapeake Bonnie.