Betsy Connor Bowen lives and writes in central Maine. “A life journey of many decades led me to a place in my imagination named Soper’s Mills, where the people who live there are not ‘fast food.’ They are your mother’s meatloaf – baked in a woodstove, with gravy like nobody else makes, garden vegetables – you can’t get it anywhere else. Not in a million years. I love these people and I love writing about them. I love to tell about the choices they make, their fragile souls diminished by the world sometimes, enlarged at others; about their unnoticed moments of grace. They are all heroes to me.”
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.
I was born in New York City, grew up a train ride out, and spent glorious summers on a small farm in Connecticut, where I first learned to love the country. I went to a great undergraduate school, Vassar College, studying literature and philosophy. 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 want to find out about the rest of the world, so I masqueraded for a short while as, of all things, an investment analyst for firms in New York, Los Angeles, and Boston.
My real life as a writer began with a ten-year apprenticeship as a member of the Radcliffe Seminars Writers’ Workshop and a local reporter for the Livermore Falls Advertiser, Farmington, ME. Then, happily inspired by a Digital Video Journalism course I took at the International Film and Television Workshops, Rockport, ME, I produced a video documentary, Oak Hill Road Wars (2001), a 55-minute film on the environmental and social justice implications of public easements in Maine’s lakes district. I made it on a $3,000 budget in order to learn all phases of film making. It’s reached a small local audience, won a Telly Award for documentary, and has been used by legislators to revise Maine law.
For a while, I did video blogs for the online Kennebec Journal and then produced a 48-minute documentary on The People Nobody Believed In (2009) for the Greater Augusta Pastors’ Association (may I interest you in the 13 minute trailer)? It’s the story of a prison ministry and post-release program in Skowhegan ME with a highly successful record of keeping ex-offenders returning to society out of the cycle of relapse and recidivism.
The Maine Alliance for Road Associations is an information and advocacy website I dreamed up whose purpose is to enable private road associations to protect Maine’s lakes, rivers and streams from the degradation in water quality caused by poor road maintenance.
I serve on the North Wayne Schoolhouse Committee, restoring a one-room schoolhouse that was falling into disrepair. People who attended still live around here, though aging a bit. In August, it’s also home to a summertime movie-making festival and a hotly competitive adult spelling bee. In the spring, we bring our younger generation in for a one-room school-day experience. Each pretends to be one of the children who went there. “I wish I could go to a school like that all the time,” one said!
Visual storytelling is powerful, but words will always be my passion. Projects I’m working on now are a collection of Soper’s Mills stories, a biography, and a gathering of local ghost stories.
