Emma Bouthillette: Writing Biddeford's History — and Her Own
The fog was so thick at Fortunes Rocks Beach Tuesday evening that the Atlantic Ocean seemed to disappear just beyond the breaking waves. Emma Bouthillette walked barefoot across the wet sand with Savvy (11) and Glinda (6), her two corgis, as we settled in for a conversation about Biddeford, writing, history, family, yoga and a life spent telling stories. Over the next hour, several dogs—and their people—would wander over to say hello, occasionally interrupting our conversation and providing a pretty accurate glimpse into an evening at the beach with Emma Bouthillette.
Emma grew up in Biddeford. She studied here, reported on the city, wrote a book about it, teaches yoga here and can trace branches of her family back to generations that arrived from Quebec.
"It's just in my blood," Bouthillette said. "I love to tell stories."
Growing Up at Fortunes Rocks in Biddeford
Fortunes Rocks isn't simply a beautiful beach to Bouthillette. When she was five, her parents, Peter and Diane Bouthillette, purchased property beside the familiar water tower, a landmark her father had known since childhood because his own family had a cottage nearby. As a little girl, Emma had one pressing question: Could that enormous water tower fall on their house? Her father offered the kind of reassurance only a dad could provide, "It might."
Both sides of Bouthillette's family had homes near the beach, and with grandparents helping care for her while her parents worked, much of her childhood unfolded along this stretch of Biddeford coastline. Her mother's parents, Madeleine and Lionel “Friday” Croteau, lived at the end of Bridge Road. Friday was a meat cutter, while Madeline worked in the city's finance department. Her father's family had a little cottage at Fortunes Rocks, just over 700 square feet. It was typical of what many coastal Maine cottages once were, simple seasonal places owned by local families fortunate enough to have a summer camp near the ocean.
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Bouthillette's family eventually inherited the cottage, but by 2021, rising property taxes and the cost of keeping it had become increasingly difficult. They were renting the cottage just to afford owning it and eventually made the painful decision to sell.
"It's still hard to have said goodbye," she said.
The goodbye wasn't complete. On Bouthillette's right forearm are the geographic coordinates of the cottage, incorporated into a tattoo featuring her grandfather's handwriting. The cottage may belong to somebody else now, but Emma found a way to carry it with her.
Writing A Brief History of Biddeford
Bouthillette grew up listening to her grandparents describe a Biddeford that didn't resemble the downtown she knew as a child. They remembered Main Street as the center of daily life, where people bought groceries and clothes, walked from store to store and picked up an outfit before heading to Old Orchard Beach to dance on The Pier.
"They didn't need to go anywhere else," she said.
The Biddeford of Bouthillette's childhood was different. "There was not really much on Main Street to be had," she remembered, naming Reilly's Bakery, George's, Pizza by Alex and McArthur Library among the places she recalls.
By the time she began researching A Brief History of Biddeford in 2015, the city was changing again. The resurgence sometimes called the "Biddesance" was underway, giving Bouthillette an unusual opportunity to research the city's past while watching another chapter unfold around her.
The book was published in 2017 and nearly a decade later can still be found on local bookshelves, including at Elements: Books Coffee Beer in downtown Biddeford. Bouthillette doesn't know how many copies have sold in total, although she personally sold about 200 during the first year.
People still recognize her because of it. She said, "I continue to hear people meet me and realize, 'Oh, you're the one that wrote that book.’”
UNE and a Love of Biddeford History
Bouthillette graduated from Biddeford High School in 2004 and the University of New England in 2008 with a degree in English literature and minors in history and fine art. In 2012, she earned a Master of Fine Arts in creative nonfiction writing through the University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program.
At UNE, professor Elizabeth DeWolfe transformed Bouthillette's interest in history. DeWolfe taught history through literature, and Bouthillette became so interested that she added the history minor largely so she could take more classes with her.
One project introduced her to the young women who left family farms to work in Biddeford's textile mills before the large waves of Franco-American immigration. They arrived with skills in sewing and weaving, lived in boarding houses near the mills, earned money for their families and experienced a degree of independence they hadn't previously known. "That's really where my love for history developed," Bouthillette said.
That curiosity followed her into A Brief History of Biddeford, where she investigated stories she'd heard since childhood, including the supposed "curse" of the Saco River. Her research led instead to a darker account involving British colonizers and the death of an Indigenous child, with no evidence that the chief actually cursed the river.
Bouthillette has another theory about why versions of the legend survived, particularly during years when the river's water quality was far worse. "I feel like this is a made-up story that parents thought, 'This is how we keep our kids out of the river,'" she said, laughing.
What Writing Obituaries Taught Emma Bouthillette
After college, Bouthillette worked for a weekly newspaper covering the Kennebunks before joining the Portland Press Herald. One of her first jobs there was writing feature obituaries. She was 24 years old.
Day after day, Bouthillette called people who had recently lost someone and asked them to talk about that person's life. The conversations could be difficult, but they gave families an opportunity amid their grief to remember a mother, grandfather, spouse or friend.
"It taught me that everybody has a story to tell," she said.
The people she wrote about didn't need to be famous or have accomplished something extraordinary. Their legacy might have been teaching someone how to cook a particular dish, passing along a love of books or simply being the person another human being could depend on.
"Everybody has an impact on somebody's life," Bouthillette said. "You may not know what that is. You may not ever know what that is."
There was something bittersweet about gathering all those memories after someone was gone.
"It's unfortunate that the person I was writing about never got to read all those amazing things," she said.
A Writer's Life: News, Bars, Dogs and Engineers
Bouthillette eventually returned to news reporting, including covering Biddeford and York County. Journalism gave her some remarkable experiences—interviewing a Tuskegee Airman, climbing into a lighthouse and covering Portland's Pride parade—but a plane crash on Hill Street in Biddeford helped convince her that breaking news wasn't where she wanted to spend her career.
She reached the scene before reporters coming from Portland, interviewed people and filed what she'd gathered. When she returned home, she recalled, "Three showers later, I still smelled like fire.”
Bouthillette eventually stepped away from full-time journalism and spent about a year and a half reviewing bars for the newspaper.
"You went from obituaries to bars," I told her.
"Which I feel like is a good summation of a writer's life," she replied. Her first assignment was Mulligan's in Biddeford: "I could write this one with my eyes closed. I spent a lot of time there."
She also spent about a year writing for the Journal Tribune, including a children's-style column called Adventures of a Dog Named Worm. Worm, her corgi-beagle mix, inspired the corgi obsession that eventually brought Savvy and Glinda into her life.
"They're big dogs in a small body," Bouthillette said. "They're wicked smart, wicked loyal and also stubborn as hell."
She even started Corgis in Maine, organizing meetups that have attracted as many as 25 corgis. Watching unsuspecting beachgoers encounter a pack of them is part of the fun.
"Instant happiness," she said. "Instant smiles."
Today, Bouthillette's professional writing happens at Woodard & Curran, a national engineering firm founded in Portland, where she has worked since 2018. She does marketing work with water engineers, telling stories about drinking water, stormwater and water-resource projects around the country.
Finding Yoga at Samudra Studio
For nearly a year after its opening, Bouthillette regularly passed Samudra Studio, then a tiny yoga studio on Main Street in Saco, without going inside. Sitting in traffic after work, she'd look through its windows and think, "I really need to go to a class there."
Eventually, she did. Bouthillette met owner Sarah Spiegel and began practicing consistently in March 2017. When Sarah Spiegel announced a teacher-training program a few months later, Bouthillette felt pulled toward understanding why yoga affected her so deeply.
"I need to understand why this feels so good in my body and in my mind," she remembered thinking.
Bouthillette, who has dealt with chronic anxiety since she was a teenager, completed her training in 2018 and has taught ever since. Yoga has helped her understand her anxiety, sit with difficult emotions and develop a different relationship with her own body.
Those experiences shape the way she teaches.
"My approach is always to make it a welcoming space," Bouthillette said. "However you show up, with whatever experience you have, with whatever body shape and size and functionality you have. I truly think yoga is for everybody."
Emma Bouthillette Is Writing Her Own Story
Bouthillette is also writing another book. This time, the history is her own.
She is working on a memoir about having a brain tumor at age five and navigating the conditions she developed following treatment. The tumor was surgically removed at Boston Children's Hospital in 1991, and Bouthillette has lived with the effects of that experience throughout her life.
The memoir will explore health, weight and her relationship with her body. Yoga has become part of that story, helping Bouthillette accept her body and appreciate what it can do.
That relationship continues to evolve. On August 8, Bouthillette shared that she had lost 80 pounds, writing publicly about an accomplishment that is especially significant within the larger story she is trying to tell about her health, her body and learning to care for both.
Writing this book is different from researching Biddeford. With A Brief History of Biddeford, she could work through documents and other people's lives; a memoir requires turning that same curiosity inward.
"It's a different beast when you're writing about yourself and excavating some hard subject matters," she said. There is no publication date. Bouthillette has instead set herself a goal: publish the memoir by the time she turns 50. That gives her a decade.
Johan Guerrero and the Biddeford Emma Sees Today
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Bouthillette to leave me with a story about Biddeford. After nearly an hour of barely being able to see beyond the beach, the fog around us was beginning to lift.
She thought for a moment and turned to the July 13 shooting death of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero by an ICE officer in Biddeford. Bouthillette attended the vigil that night and a protest later that week.
"I was just so moved to see how the community came together in outrage but also in support of each other," she said.
Modern life has changed some of the closeness that once defined Biddeford neighborhoods, Bouthillette believes. Extended families don't necessarily live on different floors of the same building anymore, and people may not know their neighbors in quite the same way previous generations did. But she still sees a city that shows up.
"The thing that this tragedy highlighted for me was the community that exists here in Biddeford and that we show up for each other," she said. "And we show up for each other when it's good too."
Then the historian in Bouthillette reached back a century. During the protest following Guerrero's death, Maine Speaker of the House Ryan Fecteau read from a 1924 account about a Ku Klux Klan parade and the resistance the Klan encountered when attempting to enter Biddeford. Bouthillette was struck by the connection between that episode and the community response she was witnessing a century later.
"We were seeing some of that grit come back," she said. "Not in our town, not our neighbors, you're not welcome here."
Carrying Biddeford With Her
Bouthillette still occasionally writes about her hometown as a member of the Biddeford Gazette Advisory Council. Her family arrived here from Quebec generations ago, and she grew up beneath the water tower and beside the ocean, listened to her grandparents' stories, studied history at UNE, reported on Biddeford and eventually put part of the city's history in a book.
Now she's trying to put her own history between two covers.
Near the end of our interview, Savvy and Glinda were still exploring the beach, the tide was moving out and the fog that had surrounded us for most of the evening was finally breaking apart. Around us was the same stretch of coastline Bouthillette had known since childhood, even if it—and Biddeford—had changed considerably along the way.
The little cottage her family once owned belongs to somebody else now, but the place that shaped her is still very much a part of who she is.
Emma Bouthillette has spent much of her life preserving other people's stories and the history of her hometown. Now, as she writes her own, she is proof that where we come from doesn't have to hold us in the past—it can give us something to carry forward.
Many thanks to Emma for her time on Tuesday, September 1, at Fortunes Rocks in Biddeford.
To purchase a copy of A Brief History of Biddeford, visit a local bookstore such as Elements - or - order online.
Emma is interview #48 - BrickTides.com celebrates the people, places and businesses that give York County, Maine, its character — through original photography, thoughtful interviews and local storytelling. Each week, we sit down with someone from our community, listen to their story and share a little more about the people who live, work, create and build things here. If you enjoy discovering the stories happening around you, subscribe to Brick+Tides and come along for the next one.