By Adrienne Perron
From our March 2022 issue
She’s a cheerleader for the state today, but Erin Ovalle might never have moved to Maine if not for personal tragedy. In 2008, she was working as a news reporter and anchor in Florida when her dad, who lived in Massachusetts, was diagnosed with bone cancer. To be closer to him, she took a job at Portland CBS-affiliate WGME. After he died a few months later, she faced a decision: move back to Florida or continue “living her best life” in Maine, her father’s favorite place. “If my dad could see me now,” she says, “with my own shows about life in Maine, he would be overjoyed.”
As an intern at a station in Manchester, New Hampshire, Ovalle had loved working on the magazine-format program New Hampshire Chronicle, and after morning-anchor stints at two Maine stations, she was feeling “an entrepreneurial itch.” So, in 2016, she left news to produce her own show, MaineLife, highlighting people and places across the state. Now in its seventh season and airing on News Center Maine, MaineLife has found Ovalle skiing deep powder on Saddleback, exploring reclaimed tribal land near Millinocket, flying in a helicopter over Kineo (“one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen”), and much more. And the entrepreneurial itch endures: her production company, Maine Life Media, today churns out seven other shows and has more in the works, covering everything from dining to real estate to boating in Maine and New Hampshire. Now, Ovalle’s setting her sights beyond New England. Premiering in March on the New England Cable News network, Places and Spaces Travel focuses on homebuyers who’ve settled in their favorite vacation towns and brought Ovalle and her crew to South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, and elsewhere.
But Ovalle’s heart is still in Maine, where she and her husband, Jason, have been thinking about buying a camp. They’re looking at spots around Greenville, one of Ovalle’s favorite Maine places, where she loves to leaf-peep from floatplanes in the fall and snowmobile and snowshoe in winter. Wherever the camp is, it’ll be baby-proofed for the couple’s one-year-old, Brooks. Since her son was born, Ovalle says, she’s found new meaning in her work: “I want to show him that I am a hardworking and independent mom-trepreneur who loves what she does.”
Headshot by Derek Bissonnette
