Our home was an old farmhouse and barn surrounded by six acres of fields, gardens, orchards, and hedgerows. Two of my three brothers (my youngest brother was not born until I was sixteen years old), my sister, and I played in the hedgerows and orchard all summer long. We built little houses called ‘hide-outs’ in the hedgerows. We made them out of scrap lumber we found in the barn. We called our town ‘Grassy Hills.’

These times of play nurtured my imagination.

Our dad loved to be outside so almost everything we did was out-of-doors. In summer, we went hiking, canoeing, and fishing. We played family baseball games in the backfield. We helped our dad plant the gardens and harvest apples in the orchard. In winter, we went skating and ice fishing on nearby ponds. We built a skating rink on the garden. We went sledding down the little hill behind the barn.

These outdoor experiences gave me a love of nature and the seasons.

Our mother loved music. She was always singing. She sang lively action songs and quiet lullabies to us when we were small. She sang the poetry of Robert Louis Stevenson from A Child’s Garden of Verses. She sang songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals.

Her singing gave me a love for the sound of language—its cadence, its voice.

But it was my maternal grandmother who most greatly influenced my writing. When we went for walks together, she quoted poetry—A.A. Milne, R.L. Stevenson, Longfellow, and Tennyson. And when I started to write poetry of my own, she gave me a little hard-bound blank book called a “Scribble-in Book.” I would take my Scribble-in Book into the orchard. I made a platform in the big crabapple tree where I could sit and write in secret. I also wrote under a favorite apple tree. Little warblers would flit on the branches a few inches from my face!

My grandmother also gave me a love for wildflowers. She gave me a wildflower book when I was ten years old. I took it with me wherever I went. “Please stop the car,” I’d ask my dad when we were driving along a country road. “I just saw a flower. I want to know what it is!” When the little book got tattered and the binding fell apart, I stitched it up with green thread. I kept a notebook of the names of the wildflowers I saw each year and the date I first saw them. My dad would call me ‘Bot’ for botany because I loved plants so much.

And my grandmother gave me a love for the piano. We didn’t have a piano in our house when I was young, so I would pull out a drawer of a large bureau and pretend to play. Whenever I went to my grandparents’ house, I would sit at their piano and try to play. When I was eleven years old, my parents bought a piano and I started lessons. From then on, if I wasn’t writing poetry or studying plants, I was playing the piano.

I wanted to be a botanist and study plants, especially to write wildflower books for children. Books that answered questions about wildflowers that my wildflower books didn’t answer. I also wanted to be a poet and I wanted to play the piano. Three p’s were paramount in my life when I was growing up: plants, poetry, and the piano!

Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White was just off the press when our great-grandfather sent a copy to my sister. It was 1952. When our dad first read it to us, we thought it took place on our farm. We had ornery sheep, “garrulous geese,” a cunning rat, a spider web in barn doorway, a swing, and a pig on our farm! We read the story over and over again. Its characterization, dialogue, simplicity, and voice profoundly influenced my writing.

The Giant Golden Book of Elves and Fairies selected by Jane Werner.
This collection of fanciful stories and poems about little people (and not-so-little) kindled my imagination.

POETRY BOOKS
For birthdays and Christmases, I always received books of poetry. My first poetry books were A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson and When We Were Very Young by A.A. Milne. By the time I was a teenager, I had a bookcase full of poetry books. My favorites were the poems of Walter de la Mare, Robert Frost, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, anthologies, and a collection of sonnets. But Millay was my kindred spirit. She had a passion for poetry and nature. As a child, she also had dreams of becoming a poet. When I was in high school, I composed a sonnet, “To Edna St. Vincent Millay,” in her honor.

I was ten years old and in grade five. When our teacher give us a poetry assignment, I found it fun and couldn’t understand why the other students were having trouble. It was then that I started writing poetry. Poems became my companions. I would go for walks in the orchard to compose my poems. I would speak them and they would speak to me. I learned right away that writing is first oral and must appeal to the ear. By grade seven, I was writing poetry all the time. I submitted many poems to our school literary journal and started entering poetry contests. And when I was a senior in high school, I printed my first book of poetry, Wind in my Pocket. My sister, a few of my classmates, and I set the type in the Colby College Graphic Arts Workshop. My best friend illustrated the book with her linoleum cuts.

When I finished high school, I went off to college to study botany and music. After my second year, when I was twenty years old, I went to Labrador for the summer. I worked as a camp counselor in a small town on the coast. This changed my life. I returned the next summer and the next and the next. I loved the people, the landscape, the wildflowers and berries of Labrador.

In 1969, when I finished college, I returned to Labrador to teach school and to study its flora. In 1973, I married a man from northern Labrador. We had three children. I lived in Canada sixteen years, ten of which were in Labrador. In 1988, my three children and I moved to Old Town, Maine, where I worked as a piano teacher, organist, and writer for fifteen years.

I live in Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, with my husband, Robert Elliott, who builds boats and Windsor Chairs. We live in the country amidst fields and woods, orchards, gardens and hedgerows, very similar to the farm setting in Waterville, Maine, that inspired my first poems when I was a child. I have four grandchildren. Two live in West Virginia and two in Nunavut, Canada.

Nature and the northern seasons inspire me. The sun, sleeping like a red fox on the side of day. The red-breast sky with its cloud-feathered back. The island, a green ship waiting for someone to pull its anchor up. The porcupine hill. The cookie moon. And writer rain.

I enjoy researching a natural history subject and finding a voice for it. And when I write fantasy, I ground it in a northern place. Maine and Labrador are the settings for most of my work. Other ideas come from my experiences as a child (e.g. Twelve Kinds of Ice) and the experiences of my children and grandchildren (e.g. A Letter from the Snow).

But underneath all my writing is the knowledge that everything I create comes from God. Whatever I write is giving back to Him what he has given to me. I must continually remind myself of what King David prayed in the Old Testament, “All things come of thee and of thine own have we given thee.” (I Chronicles 29:14b)

Poetry is the genre that comes most naturally to me. Writing a poem is like carving. I carve the lines until they say what my poem wants to say. Writing sonnets in high school helped me to develop the discipline of word choice. Reading Emily Dickinson helped me to see that if I could say something in ten words, I didn’t need fifty. I kept the following anonymous poem in the inside cover of my writing journal.

When I write a poem, I let the subject dictate whether I will use rhyme or free verse. Neither rhyming nor free verse in itself makes a poem good or bad. How the rhyming or the free verse is employed is what makes the difference!

Here are two examples from my poetry.

Free Verse

Writer Rain
The poem descends the page with a quiet cadence to give the sound, the sight, the feel of summer rain.

Rhyme

Grass Song
The poem is intensely rhythmic, repetitive, and rhyming, giving the poem momentum. The reader skips along with the lines, naming different kinds of grass. Can you identify the twelve different kinds (species) of grass in the poem?
Students in a primary grade class in Amherst, Nova Scotia, once performed Grass Song for me. They danced the poem as they recited the lines in rap-like rhythm.

Like our lives, poems often have many layers. Sometimes I do not know the layers in a poem until I have finished writing it. This is what happened with Sky Carver. I wrote the poem when I was living in Nain, Labrador. I was telling how spring comes to the north. I was comparing the process to carving because there are so many excellent carvers among the Inuit in the north. Afterwards, I saw that there was one more layer. The poem also speaks of how I work as a writer!