Jo Radner tends to make stories about the people and history of northern New England. Short or long, her stories favor characters whose lives defeat simple explanations and situations in which gravity and humor are bedfellows. Her biggest stories include “Burnt into Memory,” created from many oral histories she gathered from survivors of the 1947 wildfire that destroyed the town of Brownfield, Maine, and “Braving the Middle Ground,” which weaves together Native American oral traditions and stories told by her own New England ancestors.