How is another story entirely.
Here are some of the things I’ve done along the way.
I was born in New York City in 1944. My first job was as a VISTA volunteer working with Mexican Americans in Colorado. For fifteen years, I worked in academia, studying, writing for academic audiences, and teaching literature. Then an irresistible spiritual urge led me to find out about the rest of the world, so I masqueraded for a short while as an investment analyst for firms in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston.
My real life as a writer began as a local reporter for a small Maine paper, the Livermore Falls Advertiser. Some of those pieces got reprinted here. Inspired by the power of visual storytelling, I produced a video documentary, Oak Hill Road Wars (2001), on environmental and social justice issues in Maine’s lakes district, which won a Telly Award for documentary and has been used by legislators to revise Maine law. I contributed heavily to a book on the Shaker community at Sabbathday Lake, Maine.
My first fiction, a novella Spring Bear (2009), is a gritty backwoods tale about the struggle of a young girl, Evvie Mallow, to protect her unborn child. It won a Maine Literary Award.
Discovering and editing for publication my writer father Croswell Bowen’s long-lost WWII memoir Back From Tobruk (Potomac, 2012), about the brutality of war and the resilience of the human spirit, propelled me towards a biography of him, a man born into privilege who dedicated himself to the cause of the common man.
Croswell Bowen: A Writer’s Life, A Daughter’s Portrait will appear in September 2014, from the University of Nebraska Press under the Potomac imprint.
I live in Maine with my family, continue to write, and serve on the boards of organizations involved with filmmaking, the environment, and historic preservation.