Courtesy of Jaed Coffin

“I love telling stories. I love listening to stories. I love thinking about why people tell the stories they do,” Jaed Coffin said. “I love the way that stories shape the world we live in.” Today, Coffin uses his storytelling passion to uncover stories within his hometown.

Coffin is a journalist who has been featured in publications from Downeast Magazine to the New York Times and who devotes this storytelling passion to sharing uncommon stories with a wide audience. An associate professor of creative writing at the University of New Hampshire, Coffin’s stories deconstruct commonly held and oversimplified ideas that people hold about the world.

Coffin grew up and currently lives in Brunswick. During his youth, he biked around Brunswick with his friends, exploring abandoned buildings and venturing down Maine Street. He was keen on exploring unfamiliar places and finding the tales hidden within. His exploration expanded to the College as well: Coffin fondly recalls perusing the American Literature collections in the Hubbard Hall Stacks, searching through novels and short stories in the midst of trying to write his own.

Coffin did not always see himself as a storyteller. Throughout high school, he was instead drawn to visual arts, finding comfort in the brush and pencil rather than the pen. Having grown up in a multilingual household, Coffin understood that English was not equally accessible to everyone, making him skeptical of literature and writing. Despite his apprehensions, his art teacher, Donna Coffin, who has no relation to Jaed, guided him toward storytelling through a quote on her wall: “Art is four-fifths seeing and one-fifth drawing.”

“She really taught me how to pay attention to the way things were built and what things looked like, to listen to what I saw and to slow down,” Jaed Coffin said.

These lessons would follow him into college, where he found himself disenchanted with the art classes he took, as he felt they prioritized “creating” rather than “seeing.” This dissatisfaction drove him toward journalism, as he felt it allowed him to pursue the true stories he was interested in.

“I like going to places where other people are either afraid to go, or uncomfortable going, or too held up by their beliefs to feel like they should go there,” Coffin said. “Writing, especially the kind of writing I do, is about listening, observing, seeing how the world is built, and trying to tell a story, either visually or through text, based on what’s actually there, not what you think is there.”

Coffin is currently working on a longer feature for Outside Magazine that focuses on the first generation of African asylum seekers in the United States to start downhill skiing. In his spare time, he has also been working on several essays about his links to Brunswick. Having shared his work in publications he aspired for, Coffin is now working toward writing the stories he wishes to tell, regardless of their reach.

“They’re not stories that I’m going to sell to a magazine, and I don’t care if anyone reads them,” Coffin said. “I just wanted to document experiences from this period of my life.”

Coffin has accumulated numerous hobbies and interests throughout his life, as varied from each other as the stories that he tells. From kayaking to lobstering, Coffin pursues hobbies that allow him to know more about worlds he’s unfamiliar with.

“Whenever there was a world that either I romanticized or I didn’t understand or I was afraid of, that was usually a signal to me to explore that world,” Coffin said. “I think when people don’t understand each other or are uncomfortable [with each other] or think that they belong somewhere, that it starts to cause problems.”

In one particular instance during the 2016 election, Coffin delved into these personal tensions in a profile on the owner of Smokey’s Greater Shows, a traveling carnival based in Fryeburg. People from various backgrounds worked and lived together on the fairgrounds in the midst of the charged political environment despite their contrasting political views and outlooks, reminding Coffin of the value of considering different perspectives.

“Interacting with that world really helped me understand more deeply how important it is to actually build places and look at things, to not live within channels of belief that just come your way because of whatever intellectual calculus you’ve made about how the world works,” Coffin said.