posted in: Back From Tobruk
0
Review of Croswell Bowen: A Writer’s Life, A Daughter’s Portrait
posted in: Croswell Bowen: A Writer's Life
0
TOM ATWELL, PORTLAND PRESS HERALD REVIEWS “Croswell Bowen: A Writer’s Life, a Daughter’s Portrait.” By Betsy Connor Bowen. Potomac Books. September 2014. 270 pages. Hardcover. $23.96. Often, reading about the times in which the subject of a biography lived is … Read More
SPRING BEAR: A NOVELLA
posted in: Spring Bear
0
MY LIFE
posted in: A Literary Life
0
Why anyone becomes a writer is a mystery. How is another story entirely. Here are some of the things I’ve done along the way.
Croswell Bowen
posted in: Croswell Bowen
0
Croswell Bowen (1905-1971) was born in Toledo, Ohio, the son of a newly wealthy real estate entrepreneur and an Irish-American southern belle, and was sent east to the elite schools of Choate and Yale. After a “grand tour” of Europe, he … Read More
Back From Tobruk Q & A
posted in: Back From Tobruk
0
By TOM ATWELL, Special to the Maine Sunday Telegram Croswell Bowen, a successful magazine and book photographer, signed up to take photographs for the American Field Service in 1941, before the United States entered World War II. He was assigned … Read More
Wisconsin WGTD-FM, Hello!
posted in: Back From Tobruk
0
Going to be on the Greg Berg Morning Show talking about my father’s WWII memoir Back From Tobruk (Potomac 2013) — this coming Tuesday, 12/3, 10:00 am ET, for half an hour. The station is WGTD-FM/Milwaukee WI, NPR affiliated. Last week, talked about … Read More
A Book is a World
posted in: Back From Tobruk, Book Events
0
A home town crowd of over fifty packed the room and spilled into the hallway for a Back From Tobruk book talk yesterday. Songs of the British Eighth in the air. Images helped tell the story, projected onto the wall. Creamed chipped beef … Read More
A Liberal LIfe
Just released: Croswell Bowen: A Writer’s Life, A Daughter’s Portrait My bio/memoir about my journalist and biographer father, CROSWELL BOWEN: A Writer’s Life, A Daughter’s Portrait has just been released by Potomac Books. The book tells the story of my … Read More
What Makes a Liberal? Birth or Fate or Both?
“What’s a liberal?” I asked my father. We were in NYC, I was 22, and it was 1966, and I was leaving the luscious sylvan acres of my women’s college to go west of the Hudson for the first time … Read More
Liberal-Conservative Gridlock, Genes, and Hope
I found my fire-breathing liberal journalist father 220 light years away, in the constellation Perseus, on the edge of a black hole with the mass of 17 billion Suns. It didn’t surprise me he’d ended up here, about to be sucked into … Read More
Liberalism, Smog, and Climate Change
Is climate change a liberal issue? It appears not. “Let’s go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt!” satirized this 1936 Peter Arno cartoon in the liberal New Yorker.
Liberalism, Tobruk, and a Shared Woodbine
In food memories we store our autobiographies. In food memories, too, we find material for biography. Memories of empathy among former enemies reinforced my father’s liberalism: his hope for world peace; for the social safety net. Born in the last … Read More
Palestine, the Arab Spring, and World Peace
posted in: Back From Tobruk
2
The year was 1942; Croswell Bowen was returning to wartime New York. From the ferry’s deck he watched as the Statue of Liberty grew small and blurry in the morning mist. He pondered what he had seen. He … Read More
Reading and Signing at the Top of Maine
posted in: Book Events, Spring Bear
1
UPDATE -5.18.12 – The Fiddlehead Focus, Aroostook’s online newspaper, ran positive student ink on my school visit to Fort Kent. I can blog till I’m blue in the face, but what students take away is what counts. So for the … Read More
Creative Writers All
posted in: Book Events, Spring Bear
2
Here’s what happened. It was 12:20; lunchtime. They could have been over in the cafeteria, clumped up tight around the tables, but here they were, hanging out in Christina Benedict’s classroom. A few girls sat around a laptop, absorbed. A … Read More
Quite a Workout
posted in: Book Events, Spring Bear
0
Up at 6 a.m. and driving on snowy roads by 7 to meet Amber Jeskey’s class, which had just read Spring Bear. She turned out to be a top-notch, no-nonsense English teacher with a sharp literary mind and the skills of … Read More
Gloomy day yesterday but Waldoboro visit is next Friday!
posted in: A Literary Life
0
So! Have an author visit to Waldoboro a week from today. I will talk to Amber Jeskey’s class. Bob’s driving. He somehow came by a paper copy of a Maine Atlas so we won’t have those infernal conversations about whether … Read More
Class Trip
posted in: Book Events, Spring Bear
0
SPRING BEAR found its audience one warm spring day in in this high school English class in Winthrop ME . It was one of the happiest days of my life. (I’m the lady on the left in the purple blouse, … Read More
A Trailer in the Making
posted in: A Literary Life, Spring Bear
0
Day dawned cloudy and raining. Just what we wanted. Up at first light. Fetched Dave Bubier, holding down the lead role of Lester Darrow. He brought the guns. Drove to Roberta and David Manter, gracious providers of the perfect location. … Read More
Back From Tobruk: Daughter, Editor, Biographer?
posted in: Back From Tobruk
0
Croswell Bowen was my father. He began writing and taking photographs for Back from Tobruk in 1941 while en route with his unit of American Field Service volunteer ambulance drivers to serve alongside the British Eighth Army in North Africa. Armed with camera … Read More
Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause
What a powerful story Heath Lee has to tell in Winnie Davis: Daughter of the Lost Cause (Potomac: 2014). Even in 1864 as Yankee gunfire pounded Richmond, the birth of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ daughter Winnie was hailed as a … Read More