If you asked someone to think of a Mainer on Substack, I’ll bet you $5 you’d hear the name Heather Cox Richardson. More than 3 million people subscribe to her “Letters from an American,” and she’s been widely described as Substack’s No. 1 most influential writer.

The Maine Substack creators who write about food and drink don’t have that kind of reach. But their variously funny, intelligent, nostalgic and literate newsletters are worth your attention.

None is raking in the big bucks. All say a book deal would be nice. Meanwhile, these four Substack writers like the platform for the creative freedom it offers, the community of other writers, and the opportunity to explore in depth the topics that interest them.

“It’s just this wonderful outlet where you’re allowed to pour your thoughts, your emotions and your creativity into,” Substack writer Megs Senk said, “and it doesn’t have to matter for any other reason than that.”

MOM GETS DIGITAL REBOOT

WRITER: Amie McGraham
SUBSTACK: Cook & Tell
HOME BASE: Southport
OUTPUT: Twice a month
FIRST ISSUE: Jan. 3, 2023
NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS: More than 1,000. “That is with no marketing. That is just continuous organic growth.”

AT A GLANCE: Cook & Tell is a digital reboot of a snail mail, paper newsletter that McGraham’s late mother, Karyl Bannister, wrote and charmingly illustrated for 30 years. Every post contains a Bannister essay about life on a Maine island, with a vintage recipe. McGraham adds her own brief commentary and occasional modern recipes.

EXCERPT, from Bannister’s essay on Saturdays and baked beans: “Rainy Saturdays are the best of all. All the way from coffee and toast (at home or out) to baked beans, the Saturday spent indoors, looking out through the prism of rain, is a day when the blessings of home come into clearer, close-up focus. The aroma of a Saturday is intensified and augmented by wet shoes and damp dog. If you can keep your head while all those around you are tracking in mud, you can wring a lot of poetry out of a soggy Saturday.”

THE SCOOP: Bannister was an influencer before there was such a thing.

From 1982 until 2013, she churned out Cook & Tell, a monthly, 14-page printed newsletter filled with her own recipes, illustrations and essays. At its peak, she mailed it to more than 5,000 subscribers worldwide.

Bannister died in 2021 after nearly a decade with Alzheimer’s. For most of that time, McGraham, her daughter, took care of her, chronicling the challenging period in essays and on social media. But after her mother’s death, “I was tired of writing about sadness.”

She changed her angle, as she put it, beginning a Substack called the Micro mashup, 100-word stories about happier subjects, mostly food and travel. She followed up with Cook & Tell. McGraham, 61, had found an entire room filled with back issues in her childhood home, the 175-year-old house on Southport she inherited.

“I’m organizing it all and thinking ‘Wow, this would be such a great way to pay tribute to my mom because what a horrible thing that happened to her, but how can I make it happier?’ ”

McGraham describes her Substack version of Cook & Tell as “a little fluffy. It’s not food-is-political type of stuff. My mom’s motto (was) ‘I believe cooking should be fun,’ and I’m all about that.”

She plans to re-evaluate her digital reboot at the five-year mark. In the early days, she loved Substack. Lately, though, it’s shifted to an emphasis on algorithms and making money. “I just get so overloaded with the whole capitalism crap.”

McGraham lives in Arizona and summers in Southport. One day, she’d like to return to Maine full time, and has an idea that would bring Cook & Tell full circle.

“I would love to just sort of be my mom and write a newsletter that’s on paper with a typewriter and mail it out.”

WINE UNKNOWNS GET THEIR DUE

WRITER: Margot Mazur
SUBSTACK: The Fizz
HOME BASE: Portland
OUTPUT: At first, as much as weekly. Lately, once or twice a month. “It just felt really too much,” Mazur said. “Now I’m getting into a quality-over-quantity mindset.”
FIRST ISSUE: Jan. 1, 2021. “It was a little bit of a New Year’s resolution for me.”
NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS: About 1,700

AT A GLANCE: The name “The Fizz” might make you think effervescent writing, amusing stories and charm. In fact, this Substack offers serious, intelligent deep dives into the (mostly U.S.) wine industry. Each post is a Q + A with a lesser-known figure in the wine world, ranging from sommeliers, winemakers and farmers to grape breeders and shop owners.

EXCERPT from Mazur’s interview with winemaker Shelby Perkins: “In this issue, we speak about how the Eola-Amity Hills AVA came to be, and specifically how Bracken Vineyard formed. We touch on Shelby’s farming practices — from keeping plastics out of the vineyard to her soil amendment methodology. We talk about her experiments in winemaking using her own honey and maple syrup tirage for sparkling wines. Overwhelmingly, the conversation circles around sustainability and climate change. Shelby’s transparency, curiosity, and connection to humanity outside of what happens on the crush pad is refreshing and inspiring. Her wines are no different.”

THE SCOOP: From the get-go, Mazur had a vision for “The Fizz.” Mazur hoped to boost behind-the-scenes industry people; expand their own knowledge through in-depth conversations with experts; and indulge their “nerdier” wine side — something Mazur’s editors at publications like Wine Enthusiast and Travel + Leisure weren’t interested in.

“It’s a way for me to see beyond the celebrity winemakers that we always hear about and to talk to the folks in the industry who are making it all go,” Mazur said. “To find those folks and get in the weeds about what they’re doing and why it’s interesting.”

Mazur, 34, is an accidental wine lover. During a college gap year, they drove across America. Mazur’s car broke down in Oregon, “and I stayed there.” While finishing up their degree in political science, Mazur got to know the state’s “amazing” wine scene.

Eventually, Mazur became a sommelier, a wine educator and writer. In 2021, Mazur moved to Maine, which they believe is on the cusp of its own amazing wine scene. Here, Mazur co-founded the Maine Wild Wine Fest (this year on May 16 at Wolfe’s Neck Farm in Freeport), and they lead tastings and classes.

“In the wine world, often people look down on American wine. A French wine is looked at as a better quality wine or a more elegant wine with more finesse or a more serious wine,” she said. “But American wine is absolutely fantastic and it’s our local product. People go to their farmers market to get their local carrots, but when it comes to supporting a local farmer with grapes, for some reason they think it’s a lower-quality product, which it absolutely is not.”

Most of Mazur’s readers live in the U.S., with the highest concentrations where you’d expect, in the better-known wine-making regions of New York, California and Oregon, as well as close to home in Massachusetts and Maine. Though Mazur has found Substack a “powerful way to connect with readers,” they have considered turning their material into a podcast and Mazur was once approached by a publisher about a book. The offer came at a busy time, so Mazur turned it down, but the idea appeals as a way of “having these live beyond the screen.”

RUMINATIONS ON SMALL TOWN LIFE

WRITER: Megs Senk
SUBSTACK: Pizza & Other Things
HOME BASE: Warren
OUTPUT: Roughly once a month
FIRST ISSUE: April 30, 2025
NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS: About 700

AT A GLANCE: Senk’s warm, engaging and beautifully written tales of small town and restaurant life will make you laugh out loud. The photos are excellent, too. She described her Substack as “almost like a millennial version of ‘Prairie Home Companion.'”

EXCERPT, from a post announcing her decision to open a cookbook store: “Ok so, a tiny used bookstore above a cozy, antique-filled pizza parlor? CUTE! Smart? Who is to say? Well, probably my beloved accountant, who somewhere in the world just fell to his knees and screamed at the sky, ‘NOOOOOOOOOO.'”

THE SCOOP: In just the last five years, Senk, 42, moved from one coast to the other; bought an old house in Warren; opened and closed Goods, a sandwich shop/market in Camden; then opened a pizza parlor in a historic building on Main Street in Warren, all while keeping her day job as a freelance advertising art director. Now she’s opening a seasonal vintage cookbook store at St. George Pizza, the restaurant she runs with her husband, pizza-maker and programmer George Korsnick.

Last April Senk somehow managed to carve out time to launch the delightful Pizza & Other Things Substack. “I wanted to be able to talk about the really unique and funny and lighthearted stories that happen every single week within our space.”

Also, “This may sound a bit silly or stereotypical, but I just feel when you’re a creative person there needs to be a level of personal output that’s just for you and is something that isn’t tied to work and a paycheck.”

Substack gave her that. Senk typically sets aside a couple Sundays to write a draft post, then drills down to revise. “By the time I publish I can pretty much recite what I’ve written, I’ve gone through it so many times.”

One year in, she has readers in 43 states and 25 countries. Mainers make up the biggest chunk, but she’s got a respectable following in Oregon, New York, Massachusetts, California, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Germany. Nigeria and Finland have one subscriber each. “I know, isn’t it crazy?”

“Despite the fact that I would say 99.9% of my readers probably don’t own a pizza place with their spouse in a small town somewhere, I just try to make everything feel relatable,” Senk said.

Only a fraction of her readers pay for a subscription, as is the case for most writers on Substack. The money Senk earns annually from Substack is “like a nice-little-weekend-away-at-the-end-of-the-year type money as opposed to ‘I’m paying my mortgage off.’ “

Getting a book deal based on her Substack essays “would definitely be the dream,” Senk said.

Meanwhile, does she consider herself a restaurateur, an art director or a writer?

“I think all of the above,” she said. “For tax purposes I’m probably an art director, for entrepreneurial purposes I’m a restaurateur and for creative passion pursuits, I’m a writer.”

GLOBAL FOOD PERSPECTIVES

WRITER: Nancy Harmon Jenkins
SUBSTACK: On the Kitchen Porch
HOME BASE: Camden
OUTPUT: Jenkins aims for once a week but cuts herself some slack. “I’ve had moments when I’ve just taken a rest and said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t do this any longer. Come back in six weeks.’ But there haven’t been many of those.”
FIRST ISSUE: April 9, 2022
NUMBER OF SUBSCRIBERS: 4,000

AT A GLANCE: “On the Kitchen Porch” strays far from the porch, making stops in Iran, Italy, the West Bank, Spain and Maine and roaming from 18th-century midwife Martha Ballard to Michelle Obama, from mice in the pantry to the olive harvest in Tuscany. Jenkins, who draws from her long, adventurous, international life, is at once erudite and personable. “I see food as a way of encompassing everything that we are.”

EXCERPT, from a post on snowstorms and gingerbread. “As with so many food history questions, historians are all over the place and very few are reliable. Oh, says one source, there is a recipe, the earliest known, from ancient Greece in the year 2400 BCE. Well, as a reformed archeologist I can tell you with rare certainty, no one—no one!—in Early Bronze Age Greece was writing down anything, let alone recipes for gingerbread.”

THE SCOOP: At 84, with more than a dozen cookbooks under her belt, Jenkins was struggling to get a publisher interested in a book about Maine food when she heard about Substack. “You have to keep up with the times,” she said.

“On the Kitchen Porch” launched with a post on maple syrup and was a way for Jenkins to write about the state’s foodways. The newsletter has since developed a wider lens, with a particular focus on Italy, where she lived for many years. “Italy is a big draw. Everybody wants to know about Italy.

“It makes me slightly uncomfortable because Italy is so devastated by tourism now,” she added. “So what I try to do is to write about experiences in the past, the kind of experiences that…talk about the culture of a place or what food means to a person or a family or a culture.”

Jenkins doesn’t shy from veering into politics on occasion, as when she wrote about Nowruz and Iran recently. Her posts are lengthy, discursive and take a lot of time to write. She tries to stay under 2,500 words — overlong Substack posts are truncated in emails — but one thing she likes about the platform is the freedom it offers from what she considers editors’ aggravating ideas on subject matter and length.

She said she makes about $10,000 a year on Substack, enough to almost cover her property taxes.

Jenkins is 88 now. Why not rest on her impressive laurels, including her cookbooks, her many articles for The New York Times, her sought-after expertise on olive oil and the Mediterranean diet? “I’ve been writing since I was probably 12 years old,” she said. “I keep doing it because I’ve never done anything else.”

She fears she is chronicling a vanishing world. “I’m trying to write it all down, to make it coherent in an interesting way, as a means of preservation.”

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TWO MORE TO CHECK OUT

Appetites. According to creator Jenna Rozelle, “‘Appetites’ is here for all the ways we’re hungry and all the ways we’re fed. Weekly stories, essays, poems, photographs, recipes, and a look behind the scenes of my life in rural Maine—foraging, hunting, fishing, growing, homesteading, cooking, writing, and talking with other hungry people.”

Delicious Musings. According to creator Sharon Kitchens, “This is intended to be a mindful space where I can promise there will be no politics or advertising, but plenty of love of books and Maine and cultural stuff and recipes.”