FARMINGTON — Crash Barry will read from his new memoir, “Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus, Maine,” at Devaney, Doak and Garrett Booksellers at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 30.

Matinicus, Maine, located 20 miles out to sea in the center of the world’s richest lobster grounds, has a reputation of being a tough island. Ever since the first white settler and notorious scoundrel Ebenezer Hall was scalped in 1757 by the local Indians who owned Matinicus, a mist of violence has loomed.

In 1991, Barry moved to Matinicus to work as a sternman aboard a lobster boat. Isolated and remote, the island was home to just 50 people. The state ferry visited the island nine times a year. Airplanes landed only when there was no rain, snow, sleet, darkness or fog. Matinicus was a world of heavy winds and vicious storms.

Two years living in a fish shack didn’t make Barry an expert on Matinicus, but it was long enough of an immersion for him to recognize the distinctive nature of the place. “Tough Island” is a guided tour of a unique society told through tales of danger and drugs, sex and violence, and death and sorrow — unfolding in a landscape of breathtaking beauty.

Barry is also the author of “Sex, Drugs and Blueberries,” a novel set in Washington County amid the Oxycontin-abuse epidemic. His column, “One Maniac’s Meat,” appears monthly in The Bollard, a Portland newsmagazine. He spent a decade as a print and radio reporter in Portland until receiving a writing fellowship from the Maine Arts Commission. He has worked as a sternman, sailor, bartender, demolitionist, janitor, alpaca herdsman, cow milker and blueberry raker. He lives in western Maine.

To read selections of Barry’s stories, visit crashbarry.com.