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Nick Fuller Googins

Nick Fuller Googins

Nick Fuller Googins lives in Maine, where he teaches fourth grade. His second novel, The Frequency of Living Things, will be published this summer.

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Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Our Star

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as time. Then bang!—the first particles, cooling into the first atoms, clumping into the first nebular clouds, collapsing into the first stars, shining out the first light, unspooling over billions of years to make it all happen: the joy, the love, the pain, everything. Don’t ask how. Nobody knows. But here we go.

July 2025

The Great Transition

An Excerpt from Nick Fuller Googins’s First Novel

Ever since her school project Emi has been asking why we did not act sooner. Her mother has an easier answer. She grew up protesting with her family. Blocking oil trains. As for me, what can I say? My parents were loving people. Resourceful. Intelligent. They knew what was happening. My mother pointed out how the goldenthread blossomed months before the pollinators arrived. And the loons that used to winter on our shores—how long since we’d heard their ghostly calls?

Essays, Memoirs & True Stories

Maine Escapes

The deckhand helps where he can. He flips a few lobsters right side up. He tucks a stray antenna away from the pinch of the crate’s hinges. The lobsters, when he holds them, emit a faint buzzing noise — sort of like a scream, if you think about it, and the deckhand does.

December 2020
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