KINGSFIELD — Kingfield writer Annie Twitchell released her fourteenth book, titled “The People We Know” on Thursday, June 1. Written during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitchell’s new book is a collection of short stories that stem from her newsletter that she would share with her audience.

“Pretty early on, people started asking me if I was going to publish them as a book as a collection,” Twitchell said in an interview. “I hadn’t really put much thought into it. I’ve been writing this series of short stories for a year and a half now, and people kept asking, so finally back in January, I decided I better sit down and put them into a book.”

In her press release, Twitchell described the book as “the ‘in-between’ moments here in our small communities.”

“I can’t always share these little stories, but they’re still stuck in my head, and that is where the inspiration for The People We Know first came from,” she said. “I started by taking a small snapshot from real life and building a fictional story around it, and I’ve been surprised at how much people have loved reading these stories. I’m just a girl from Maine, and to have my stories read and appreciated by people around the world is just mind-boggling and amazing.”

Influenced heavily by the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitchell said the pandemic was also the reason she had time to put the stories to paper.

“The isolation during the pandemic was really hard,” she said. “For me, I’m a very social person, I like to be around people, I just like spending time around people. And during the pandemic, obviously, we weren’t doing that.”

“I spent a lot of time just watching these little moments that did happen during the, during the pandemic,” she continued. “I spent a lot of time just watching these little moments, and then writing about them, because I needed for myself to have those stories documented somewhere, so I turned them into fictional stories that are just influenced by those things that I saw.”

Growing up homeschooled, Twitchell has been a lifelong writer, learning how to write thanks to the inspiration from her great grandmother.

“I started at a very young age,” Twitchell stated. “I taught myself to write cursive when I was five, because I wanted to write pretty letters, like my great grandmother wrote me. But about the time I was ten, I started writing stories.”

Twitchell began writing professionally at 19 years old, publishing several pieces of work in children’s fiction and poetry. Her first novel, titled “Through the Pages”, was published in July of 2018. Twitchell currently works as a journalist for the Daily Bulldog as well as a first responder.

For more information about Twitchell and her new book, or to purchase any of her work, please visit annielouisetwitchell.com.

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