What’s Peyton’s place? A new zine run by a 12-year-old and her father stirs the waters in Sanford BY SARA DONNELLY

Twelve-year-old Peyton MacPhail lives in a little blue house at the edge of tiny town which itself sits on the edge of nothing in particular. The backyard of the little house in Shapleigh that MacPhail shares with her parents is littered with evidence of her playtime — a soccer goal lies overturned in the bushes, soccer balls rest in ruts on the faded brown lawn, a single wooden chair faces a doused campfire. Inside the house, Peyton sits in one of her two rooms in the attic in her green-and-white softball uniform, which she has not taken off yet today even though her game was rained out several hours ago. Here, the skylight and wide windows let plenty of daylight shine on this family’s only child. The light illuminates the Harry Potter posters on the wall, the yellow tickets from the Kiss concert she attended with her father (who she says is not her best friend at all, but who she spends, like, all of her time with), and the poem over the girl’s bed, which was written, in her honor, by her grandmother.

"Peyton" the poem is titled.

"To challenge every hill of life

She’s as strong

As the sea.

She’s soft and gentle,

She is the most beautiful."

Peyton is sure this poem about her is right on, so there’s no point in talking about it. See, Peyton knows she’s great. She doesn’t really know why she knows, but if you really need proof you can just open your eyes and look around at all of the awards she’s won. First off, she’s been playing the drums in her father’s band Zander since she was six, so that has helped her a lot with her self-confidence. Plus, she’s been on TV in Maine for playing the drums and she came really close to being on TV nationally before she was cut in an early stage of NBC’s America’s Most Talented Kid competition in 2003. Because her dad Alex MacPhail is a rocker and a show promoter, she’s met like everybody, including Godsmack, Warrant, and Jenny Paquette. She can play not only the drums, but also the guitar (like dad) and a little bit of the violin and the keyboards.

As far as sports go, she’s really, really good at those. She won the Game Ball in the state finals for the Little League All Stars in 2004, she won the Sanford Soccer Shoot-Out Kicking Contest the same year, and this month she won "Good Sport of the Year" in the Sanford Little League. She also received a personal letter from President George W. Bush a few months ago after she wrote to him and told him about all of the bottles she’d collected from the side of the road to save up for a new laptop computer.

The laptop, which now sits on her bed, is important for Peyton’s latest big thing, her own newspaper Peyton’s Fort, which in March caused some trouble when Peyton blamed area fires on a serial arsonist who was later arrested. Not that it’s an award or anything, but Peyton has also met a lot of local reporters — including Shannon Moss, Kevin Mannix, and Vivian Bean — which is great because journalism, at this point, is her chosen profession.

But the police major overseeing the investigation of the arsonist Peyton references in her paper isn’t thrilled with Peyton’s latest accomplishment. In the March edition of Peyton’s Fort, Peyton theorizes that a serial arsonist is at fault for lighting dozens of fires in Sanford since 1998. She does not name the person but says the fires are all connected. According to Major Gordon Littlefield of the Sanford Police, five of the fires can be traced to a man named Aaron Perry, who was arrested on March 31 and charged with five counts of arson. But the rest — the majority of the fires mentioned in Peyton’s article — have nothing to do with Perry and are not considered suspicious. He believes the newspaper, which is distributed without any note indicating that the principle publisher is only a preteen, is spreading false information.

"They’re taking certain elements and coming to a conclusion that in our estimation has no basis in fact," says Littlefield. "It was irresponsible journalism. In fact, all I think it did was upset people needlessly over fires that aren’t really connected."

The fact that Peyton’s home-school project is referred to as "journalism" is a testament to the fluid definition of a form whose roots date back to the town gossip gabbing in medieval taverns. Traditional journalists usually work with a system of checks and balances which includes, at the very least, an editor who verifies facts and maintains a proper tone for the article. Most news outlets also know their businesses are on the line if they lie or print inflammatory information on purpose. But the definition of what is news and who are newspeople has always been loose and a paper like Peyton’s, printed up in neat black-and-white type, could look pretty official to a reader unfamiliar with the backstory.

For a while, Peyton’s Fort was just a fancy name for a photocopied example of the latest essay that Peyton’s home-school tutors had judged to be "Excellent! Good work!". In the beginning, Peyton’s Fort printed stories like "Rachel Carson: Pioneer of Ecology" and "Some Things Never Change, Just the Price: My First Kiss Concert."

But in March, Peyton’s journo project got a make-over. She and her father used Peyton’s laptop to create a bold mast for the newspaper — "Peyton’s Fort: Sanford’s Investigative Newsource [sic] Since 2005." Peyton’s byline was upgraded to publisher and so was her father’s. Five thousand copies of the one-page paper were printed, front and back, and distributed at a dozen local gathering spots in Sanford like the Hannaford supermarket and the Sanford House of Pizza, both on Main Street. According to the elder MacPhail, copies were even dropped off at the offices of the local weekly, the Sanford News, and the local daily, the Biddeford Journal Tribune, for "authentification purposes."

MacPhail maintains he didn’t drop the paper off to imply that Peyton’s Fort is competition, although in a business which lives and dies on nailing the story, any rival registers on the industry radar. And with a folio as definitive as "Sanford’s Investigative Newsource," a circulation which rivals that of Metro magazine in Portland, and a Web site dedicated to the paper (a luxury the established Sanford News lacks), it’s hard to imagine the publishers of Peyton’s Fort don’t hope the town’s journalists will take notice.

The first edition of the refurbished Peyton’s Fort features a cover photo of a burned storefront taken by the namesake herself, a sensational headline — "Sanford’s Ring of Fire" — and what proved to be, well, a legitimate scoop.

"While there has been no public indication from local law enforcement that a serial arsonist may be at work, nor word from the Sanford Fire Department connecting these blazes, questions related to them linger," Peyton writes in the conclusion of the edition dedicated to a string of fires which have occurred in Sanford since the late ’90s. Buried in an article which sites several fires that have never been proven to be suspicious, Peyton mentions a fire that occurred at LeBeau’s Pub and Grille on Main Street in January and several dumpster fires in the downtown area, which she says are the fault of a "serial arsonist."

Peyton’s Fort warns that the alleged arsonist could strike again in the Ring of Fire she and her father have identified in downtown Sanford. The Sanford News and the Biddeford Journal Tribune had made some mention of the various fires around town, but had not linked them to a serial arsonist.

Two days after Peyton and her father distributed the "Ring of Fire" edition of Peyton’s Fort around town, Perry was arrested outside of a fire in a dumpster near a McDonald’s on Main Street, smack in the middle of the Ring of Fire. His charges include fires at LeBeau’s Pub and in several dumpsters around town.

It appears Peyton’s serial arsonist may actually exist.

Sure, the Fort mentions several fires which seem to have no real connection to Perry. And, sure, some of the language in the newspaper is incendiary enough to potentially fuel panic among the paper’s readership (". . . many of Sanford’s most recent fires are so closely related and concentrated in one area, with no explanation why and no apparent end in sight, one is left to wonder if their home or business may be next!"), but Peyton did connect the dots and cry serial arsonist before any other journalist in town.

And she’s only 12.