A profile of novelist Elizabeth Strout called "A Long Homecoming" in the current New Yorker, on the occasion of the release of Anything Is Possible (Random House), mentions a visit by Strout and her husband, Jim Tierney, to Gulf of Maine Books, Brunswick, Me., owned by Gary Lawless and Beth Leonard. Strout and Tierney, who the story emphasizes, loves to talk, say hello to Lawless, "a poet with a long white beard and hair, whose father was once the police chief in a town up the coast. 'I never get tongue-tied except when you're here,' Lawless told Strout. 'When Jim's here, I get ear-tired.' "
