Marnie Reed Crowell is a natural history writer with a masters degree in biology. She came to Maine with her ecologist husband who was doing biogeography research on the islands off Deer Isle. One of the Island's acknowledged best cooks took Marnie under her wing and taught her authentic Island ways to deal with sea foods. When her friend Marsden one day bemoaned that folks did not really know what to do with his aquaculture sea scallops, this project was born. Marsden saw to it that Marnie was well supplied with scallops. Being married to an ecologist meant research and trips to conferences around the world for Marnie. Over the years she gathered recipes from Canada, Asia, Africa, South America and Europe. "What country are we tonight?" her husband more than once inquired gazing at his plate of her experiment of the day.

Marnie's books include Greener Pastures: In Praise of Traditional Country Living (Funk & Wagnalls), Great Blue: Odyssey of a Heron (Times Books), Flycasting for Everyone (Stackpole), and The Heron Witch (Green Writers Press). Her articles appear in numerous magazines such as DownEast , Redbook , Reader's Digest , Working Waterfront , and Audubon . Marsden Brewer has for the past two decades focused on figuring out how to make farming scallops work for Maine. He is a third-generation Maine fisherman and has been fishing all his life, whether it's what he calls low water urchining, scalloping, or offshore ground fishing, shrimping and lobstering. Knowing Penobscot Bay so well, Marsden sees that we are entering an era where the fishermen need to adapt to turn harvesting from today's ocean into a sustainable success story. With his son Bob he now farms sea scallops. See www.penbayfarmedscallops.

com. A former member of the Department of Marine Resources Advisory Council, Marsden served as selectman for the town of Stonington for six years and so has his wife Donna. She is currently a Stonington selectman while running Red Barn Farm, their retail shop featuring scallops, lobsters, and their farm products.