The time had come to bring Spring Bear home.

The Thompson Free Library booked me into a comfy B&B in Dexter. I took along copies of the book, a GPS device, a cell phone and a supply of cough drops. For three days, I drove from Dover-Foxcroft to Guilford to Milo, talking about writing, the creative life, self-publishing and, of course, Evvie Mallow. The students were shy, surprising, funny, serious, awkward, graceful. (A single word describing middle and high schoolers just does not exist.) Simply being in their lives for a moment is a gift. The teachers and librarians all shoulder a big mission: to bring literature to young minds.

What’s not to love about that?

More trips coming this fall and spring, with books for classroom use funded by the gracious Maine Arts Commission.

So I’m giving it my all.

In just two weeks I’ll be speaking on “Living a Creative Life in Today’s World,” on Tuesday, March 15 at 7 p.m at the Thompson Free Library. I’ll also read from my work, sign books and speak to students in high school classrooms in Dover-Foxcroft, Guilford and Milo on March 15, 16 and 17.

For sure I’ll read from Spring Bear, set in a place very much like the three Maine towns I’ll be visiting. But I probably won’t be able to resist a paragraph or two from the introduction to Back From Tobruk, my father Croswell Bowen’s long-lost WW II memoir, about Rommel’s brutal destruction of Tobruk, which Potomac Press will publish in 2012.

And I’m closing in on finishing Truth Teller: Portrait of a Liberal in Times of Fire, on how history transformed my father into a crusading liberal journalist.

Just have to read a bit from that, you bet.

But what will I say to those kids? Here’s what I’m thinking.

“Just like any of the arts, whether it’s painting or poetry, songwriting or making movies, writing is not about getting recognition. It’s about taking chances, keeping at it, taking joy in learning how to communicate things you care about to other people. I didn’t ‘get serious’ about writing until a catastrophic accident made me decide life was too short not to do what I love to do. For me, that’s writing. The digital revolution has changed everything for artists, making it possible for just about anyone to get their creative work ‘out there’. But the most important things are still the same: honoring your creativity and learning how to express it.”

Sound good?

• People have choices to make in life, and deciding what choice to make
  can take time and a lot of thought. Have you ever made a decision as
  difficult as Evvie’s or known anyone who did? What was the decision
  and what were the factors that you/the person considered?
• Do we always know if we’ve made the right decision?
• Did Evvie make the “right” decision?
• What were the factors that she weighed in making her decision?
• What makes a “right” decision?
• Was Evvie’s life happy?
• Would making a different decision have given Evvie a happier life?

FAMILIES

• What went wrong in Evvie’s family?
• What was right about Evvie’s family?

TIME AND PLACE IN THE STORY

• Could this story take place now? Why? Why not?
• Could it take place in a city?

SEQUEL/PREQUEL

• If you wanted to write a sequel to this story, what would it be?
• A prequel?

Just as for me, the internet made his research so much more possible, helping him get in touch with members of his extended family — Henry Gorrell’s grandson and through him, Henry’s three children.

One problem he had, I did not have. Chunks of his text had been razored out by the censors. Croswell Bowen ignored censors (although he didn’t always get away with it).

An inspiring evening.

I’m going to a Virginia Festival of the Book talk by Kenneth Gorrell, who discovered in an attic the manuscript that became “Soldier of the Press: Covering the Front in Europe and North Africa, 1936-1943.” It’s a WW II memoir written by his grandfather’s cousin, UP reporter Henry Gorrell, and just published by the University of Missouri Press.

Gorrell and my Dad had much in common. They were both storytellers — Gorell with his dispatches; Dad with his camera and notebooks. Both could not find publishers for their memoirs when they came home, so they simply dropped them and went on with their lives. They married, had children, found work they believed in. Gorrell started a newspaper in Washington DC; Dad worked as a journalist and biographer. Both suffered from the psychological wounds of war, and I’m wondering if Kenneth Gorrell, like me, thinks there’s a story in the subtle ways those manifest themselves even among the “tough guys.”

Kennebec Journal reviewer Bill Bushnell wrote:

It is  not often  that  a  fiction  writer  can  capture  the  complete,  vivid  flavor of  a  full  story  in  less  than  100  pages,  but  Betsy  Connor  Bowen  has  done  it  with  her  debut  book,  SPRING  BEAR.    Bowen  is  a  journalist  and  filmmaker  who  lives  in  central  Maine.  Although  she  has  published  numerous  articles  and  made  several  short  films,  this  is  her  first  novel,  a  gripping  Maine  tale  of  “rich  land,  poor  people, hard living.”  This  slender,  self-published  novella  is  a  masterpiece  of  concise  writing  where every  phrase  and  sentence  is  important.  No  words  are  wasted,  yet  she  does  not  sacrifice  the  story’s  plot,  atmosphere,  suspense  or  emotion  for  brevity.    This  is  a  grim  story  of  a  family  falling  apart  under  the  weight  of  poverty,  hard  times,  bad  luck  and  worse  decisions,  and  a  young  teenage  girl’s  desperate effort  to  make  things  right.    Evvie  Mallow  is  a  fourteen  year  old  girl,  born  and  raised  in  the  Maine  woods.  Her  father  was  badly  injured  in  an  accident  and  is  basically  alive  but  unaware  of  anything.  Her  long-suffering  mother  is  stoic,  trying  to  make  ends  meet,  fearful  of  being  alone.  Evvie  is  smart  and  feisty,  and  she  hates  Lester  Darrow,   rough  woodsman  who  traps  and  kills  bears  illegally and  who  is  making  the  moves  on  her  mother  while  her  father  sits  in  the  living  room,  silent  and  unblinking.    Evvie  is  desperate  to  escape  this  unhealthy  home,  but  gets  pregnant,  making  her  options  fewer  and  her  desperation  greater.  Evvie’s  two  life-determining  decisions  focus  on  the  baby  and  Lester,  and  her  actions  are  stunning  and  final – setting  her  up  for  a  lifetime  of  guilt  – but  knowing  she  did  the  right  thing  in  both  cases.  And  only  a  kindly,  perceptive  game  warden  knows  the  truth.    This is a fabulous story well told.

Bill Bushnell lives and writes in Harpswell, Maine.

(c) Bill Bushnell, Kennebec Journal ON BOOKS Sunday, November 15, 2009

Kirkus Discoveries wrote:

Survival of the fittest in a remote Maine village.

In her first novella, documentary filmmaker Bowen sympathetically depicts the hardscrabble life of 14-year-old Evvie Mallow, one of the otherwise forgotten residents of tiny Soper’s Mills, Maine. The lives of the entire Mallow family change dramatically the day high winds fell a giant oak, crushing the cab of Henry Mallow’s truck and part of his skull. No longer capable of speech or performing the simplest of tasks, Evvie’s father, Henry, nonetheless remains his family’s primary breadwinner as Evvie and her mother, Bessie, now survive mainly on his insurance money.

Henry’s unlikely tragedy draws the attention of Lester Darrow, an unsavory bear-poaching local, who opportunistically comes to roost with Bessie, much to Evvie’s disapproval. In Evvie’s view, Darrow exacts on her and her mother the same degree of heartless cunning he employs while trapping a mother bear whose young cubs huddle round her dying body for warmth. When Evvie learns she is pregnant a couple months after her very first summer romance has ended–and the father, whose last name she never learned, has left the state–she decides the best way for her unborn child to escape this unrelenting circle of hardship is to be given up for adoption. Ever the antagonist, Darrow steps in to thwart Evvie’s escape plan, at which point she takes over, summoning courage and a resolve she didn’t know she had.

Bowen’s roundly atmospheric setting nicely complements the slow-brewing tension among characters, offering as full a portrait of her intimate cast of characters as of the daily challenges of their class and naturalistic village ways. The book engagingly explores loneliness and the moral relativity involved in valuing one’s fellow creatures, and is engaging from the very first page.

A potent backwoods tale.

SPRING BEAR launched in my home town of Wayne, Maine at the Cary Memorial Library on July 5, 2009.

The audience was spectacular. Book lovers to a one, so many of them dear friends –  it was a very happy day.

First, I read from the book. This is from the last chapter.

Then, the best part — the questions.  Here are some of them.

What is the meaning of the title?

Did you know how it was going to end when you started out?

How did you create Lester Darrow?

Where did you find your voice?

How long did it take to write this?

Do you see things other people don’t see?

What is the meaning of what happens to Evvie Mallow?

Did you dream this?