I’m a Franco-American poet who grew up in Waterville, Maine, and graduated from Colby College, later earning degrees from USM (MS in Instructional Leadership) and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA in Poetry). My teaching career spanned thirty-four years, including seven years in Prague, six of them as English Department chair at the International School of Prague.
Now I live in South Portland with my husband, the composer, Philip Carlsen.
My newest book is Self-Portrait as Homestead
You can order it here. Read what others have to say about Self-Portrait as Homestead here.
SELF-PORTRAIT AS HOMESTEAD focuses on family and heritage, specifically the Franco-American culture I experienced growing up in Waterville, Maine.
“Homestead” is a motif as suggested by street addresses (“12 Gold Street” and “2 Moor Street”). Homestead also becomes “household,” a woman’s place, as in “Route 201, Fairfield” and “Wife as Beekeeper: 1955.” In this sense, the collection alludes to the confinement by role, home and religion of the women characters, and their pushing against those constraints.
Particular details enrich the map suggested by street addresses: my grandmother’s dishes, my father’s barber shop, my mother’s constant halo of smoke. Real people inhabit these poems. Here is my grandmother. Here is my father. I am especially in love with the “girl cousins” who show up in several poems, like a Greek chorus.
The main character, a girl/woman, mother/grandmother, carries on, as Leslie Ullman says, reclaiming “the flare of self-ness that has been tamped in women over many generations.” SELF-PORTRAIT AS HOMESTEAD represents a woman’s journey. We might even call her a heroine, but she would balk at that designation.
