Annie Finch made her visit to the MWWC book discussion group on the fourth day of National Poetry Month, and on the “second day of life,” as she put it, of her new book, Spells: New and Selected Poems. With a pristine copy from which to read at this, their first outing together, Finch began with the spell, “A Blessing on the Poets.” When she finished reading, she paused and then told the audience, “It’s the poet in you that feels the poetry. Any time you feel moved by a poem you are being a poet. You’re increasing the power of poetry in the world. And that is a kind of magic to me. Poetry had its origin in magic, and that’s one of the reasons I call my book ‘Spells.’  The original poets were not just entertainers, not just word spinners. They were spinners of reality.”

Finch’s poetry is rather unique today in that it conforms to traditional poetic forms and celebrates meter. She comes to her work with a deep consciousness of the poetry and poets of earlier times. “They had access to truth that others in the community didn’t have. Going back to my own roots, to the ancient Celtic bards, there was no one allowed to criticize the king except for a poet.” Meter, rhyme and repetition, Finch says, bring us back to a time of spells, when the poem and poet enjoyed a position of influence. “As a poet, my job is to make language as powerful as possible, to adjust reality to make it more in line with our hearts.” Within the lines of the second poem Finch read, “Earth Day,” we heard the counsel, “All we need is to live with the memory of a future we want to imagine.”

In the formulation of her spells, Finch is careful to avoid getting into or dwelling on the negative. In poems that speak to the precarious existence of bee colonies, prairie grasses and other of the earth’s fragile inhabitants, she fashions spells to strengthen and protect her subjects, rather than devoting energy to indicting the negative forces that imperil them. In the case of threatened apiaric colonies, she explains, “I want to inhabit the spirit of the bee and to use the tools of the poetry and the repetition to move it forward into a very powerful place. That’s the kind of spell that I want to do with my poems.” The beneficiaries of her spells receive her passion for their triumph, not her anger or despair at their demise.

Finch finds that her poems and incantations happen to her, in a way. “Rather than have the attitude, ‘I can get a poem out of that,’” she says, “I want the poem to be walking around getting me.” “When my daughter Althea was in my womb, I was in a nature preserve with many species of butterflies. From this came the poem, ‘Butterfly Lullaby,’” which Finch then sang for us. Finch also draws much inspiration from the work of other women poets, and has two poems dedicated to Emily Dickinson in this collection. She read “Tribute for Emily Dickinson” twice, allowing the lines to unfurl and her voice to hang on the air. At the request of a guest (whose dog happens to be named for Dickinson!) Finch later gave us the other poem as well.

Next came Finch’s reading of a piece in the poetic form known as a “carol,” which was traditionally sung by people dancing in celebration, and was at one point outlawed by the Church. It was written for poet Carolyn Kaiser, in gratitude for Kaiser’s helpful response to Finch’s first book. “Carolyn said I was writing in form because I was mad, and it was a way for me to ‘contain the madness.’” Kaiser encouraged her to see the spells as poems and include them in her books.

After the reading, Finch engaged the group in conversation.

One member commented that when listening to poetry, often a particular phrase or two will stand out to her. From the reading she had just heard she cited the lines, “Now I am the one with eyes,” and “Did I have a face? And did it lie in shadow?” Finch was pleased and explained, “I think some poems have a mental glacier under the tip, and some have an emotional glacier under the tip.” “Now I am the one with eyes” has as its mental underpinnings in Finch’s study of feminist theory and women’s poetry. “Did I have a face? And did it lie in shadow?” from “A Dusk Song,” stems from the more emotional issues of seeing and being seen, and knowing how to exist in relationships. In creating the poem, she says, feelings must be transformed to thoughts, to ideas, and “little nuggets happen at the intersection between the feeling and the thought… and when they connect there is a spark.”

On the subject of giving poetry readings, Finch said that she loves reading her work. She agreed with poet Stanley Kunitz’s reflection that, for an author, enjoyment of reading is grounded in his/her own appreciation of the work. It was such a pleasure to see the joy Finch took in re-meeting and greeting her poems as she flipped through her new collection (it having been long “a long gestation,” she said), even affectionately cooing to one, “Hi, sweetie!”

Finch wants the reader to be able to have the same experience of the work as she does, and she finds that reading the poem aloud allows one to make it one’s own, as if one is playing a piece of music on the piano. Finch promises that it is not difficult to learn how to read her poems aloud; it simply takes developing the habit of checking in at the end of a line. “With free verse, you’re supposed to ignore the line breaks. With meter, you have to acknowledge the line break is there. The only knack to it is knowing when to end.”

To demonstrate, Finch invited a volunteer from the audience to read one of her poems to the group. The woman who came forward flipped through Spells to make her selection at random, and before beginning she grinned and shared she’d never done such a thing before! She did a lovely job and enjoyed the experience.

Bridget Healy, daughter-in-law of the founder of the Maine Women Writers Collection, asked Finch, “Is a poem a mini-drama?” “In a way it is,” Finch replied, “especially with lyric poetry. And if you’re reading it alone, it can be a dramatic performance for yourself.”

Another member of the group commented, “I write fiction and essays, and am woefully ignorant when it comes to poetry. I find your poetry very accessible…I find poems in the New Yorker so obscure, they infuriate me.” Finch’s fascinating response included both an historical context for the current trend toward the complex in poetry, and her own evolution from free verse to meter.

“My feeling is that poets like to have challenges; they like difficulty…Poets are partly puzzle-solvers…and partly what you want to do is to make something clear and beautiful out of conflict and paradox and difficulty… And my feeling is that, in every culture all over the world throughout human history, the difficulty and the challenge has been provided through form. Meter, rhyme.” To illustrate, Finch shared that an eight-line poem in Celtic form in Spells took her months to write. “It strikes me that poetry began to get so obscure at exactly the same time that poets stopped writing in meter. I feel that the difficulty of understanding it is a replacement for the difficulty of meter. I know that’s true because, when I started writing in meter, my poetry became much less difficult, much more accessible.”

Finch outlined her theory on why meter was abandoned, explaining that iambic pentameter had become so prevalent, so restrictive, so dominant, and the goal of poets such as Ezra Pound became to “break the pentameter!” In the process, Finch laments, they ended up breaking all the meters. Poets then turned to obscurity to make poems, to fill the vacuum. “People are in a bind right now and I think they are satisfying their difficulty jones by writing obscure language.”

From her own personal experience, she is certain that, “If it weren’t for form, I don’t think I would have survived. I physically need it, as a poet…Some poets need it. Not all poets, but some poets physically need it. It’s how we’re built…If you don’t have meter, you don’t have part of your pulse.”

To learn about opportunities to hear Finch read from Spells, and to explore Finch’s poetry, prose and collaborations, visit her website: anniefinch.com.

Sarah Knock (Cumberland, Maine).  A Day in June. Photograph.

Medora Hearn Batstone (Addison, Maine).  Hitching.

Edy Bishop (Portland, Maine).  Beginnings. Marble sculpture.

Beverly N. Greenspan (Maine).  Pictures of the Island.

Karen Saum, producer (Union, Maine). Video still from Working Women of Waldo County – Today.

Mary Ann Meade (Shrewsbury, Massachusetts).  A Natural Process.

Maria Jimena Lasansky, dancer (St. George, Maine).  Photograph by Anne Elzas-O’Keefe (Maine).  Featured in the Portland Press Herald on Thursday, April 26, 1979.

Lee Sharkey (Skowhegan, Maine).  progenitor.

The Maine Association of Women in the Fine and Performing Arts (MAWFPA) grew out of the energy following the Women in the Arts Workshop held in Augusta in June 1977 at the Maine State Meeting of the Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year.  After attending this meeting, there was a desire by attendees to know more about the activities of women artists around the state.  Later on that same year, Anne Hazelwood-Brady founded MAWFPA as a statewide nonprofit organization whose mission was to support Maine women artists.

In the spring of 1979, MAWFPA organized a three-day arts festival and conference at what was then Westbrook College in Portland called Spectra 1.  MAWFPA received a $5,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) towards their efforts.  With Hazelwood-Brady serving as Director, Eric MacLeod as Artistic Director and Janet Beerits as President of the Board, they put forth a panel of impressive jurors: May Sarton for poetry and literature, Dahlov Ipcar for painting, Andrea Stark for dance and Bernice Abbott for photography.  The Joan Whitney Payson Gallery on campus held the Spectra 1 art exhibition of painting, sculpture, graphic art, photography and film.  Along side the visual arts was a publication of poetry and prose and four performances of music, theater and dance.  There were workshops for artists and a printed catalogue for the fine arts.

As Spectra 1 came to an end, the desire for connection and community among female artists in Maine remained.  After that spring, small regional meetings of MAWFPA were held across the state with the intention of maintaining a shared artistic community in the more isolated areas of Maine.  In addition, MAWFPA organized statewide annual meetings open to all members.

In 1981 with nearly 200 members, thoughts towards another Spectra began to emerge.  In October of 1982, after many months of meetings, planning and fundraising, the month-long arts celebration Spectra 2 opened at the University of Maine at Orono with Anne Elzas-O’Keefe at the helm as Project Director.  Once again Spectra 2 consisted of a multitude of media: a visual arts catalogue, an anthology of poetry and prose and an abundance of performances, workshops and events.

Although MAWFPA elected a Board in 1983, Beerits resigned as President and the activities of the statewide organization seem to have come to an end.  In 1989, Hazelwood-Brady asked Beerits to write a brief history of MAWFPA capturing her time as President from late 1979 through January 1983.  She concludes by writing, “At its peak, about 300 paid members made MAWFPA a real force in the life of women artists of Maine.”

Carrying on the tradition of MAWFPA, the Maine Women in the Arts, one of the original small regional groups, continues to meet in Kennebunkport and can be explored online at www.mainewomenarts.com.

Monica Wood, author of When We Were the Kennedys: A Memoir from Mexico, Maine, visited with us on Thursday, March 7, for a lively discussion of her recent memoir.

Before reading from the book, Wood wanted to talk a bit about her process of revising the text. “All writing is revision,” she explained. Having been a novelist up until now, trying her hand at memoir was a new challenge. Once she had finished her first draft, which she had felt pretty confident was complete, Wood asked her sister Cathy read it. Cathy’s feedback was that “the people of the story were not really in it,” and Wood realized that she had perhaps kept too much distance between herself and the figures in the story. Where it was a memoir and not a novel, she had been hesitant to include thoughts and dialogue that did not adhere strictly to what she knew or remembered to have happened. In revising the narrative she found that, once she gave herself permission to treat the real-life people as characters in a novel, they came alive. She based her imaginings of inner lives and spoken words on truth, on what she knew about the people, and with that awareness she took creative license.

“I didn’t know how much I didn’t know until I started to do this kind of writing,” Wood said of moving from fiction to memoir.

Once Wood had finished reading from the text, the room was filled with questions and comments for the author, and she generously responded with illuminating answers and entertaining anecdotes.

One guest asked, “Did you deliberately place the scene where the family uses the last sheet of paper (of the supply remaining from her late father’s work at the paper mill) where it is, about halfway through the book?”

“I’m sure it was very deliberate but can’t remember now why or how,” Wood replied. “I didn’t change the chronology to the story. Writing memoir is a lot about what to leave out.” Wood then shared a story from a recent reading that an audience member told about herself and her husband. They both planned to read the book, and it was the woman’s turn first. As she was reading in bed one night she began sobbing, and her husband asked her why she was crying. She replied, “They just ran out of paper!” Of course, being so out of context, the husband couldn’t understand why that would be so tragic. Wood added, “At the time, I didn’t even realize that you could actually go and buy paper!”

Another group member asked, “Why did you title the book, When We Were the Kennedys?”

“The book is not just about our family, but about when America was a certain way at a certain time,” Wood said. “It was a time of endings and beginnings. (The assassination of the president) was the end of a kind of innocence for the country…when things were suddenly this way and not that way.”

Wood also said that before the book was published she had a drink with a friend who asked what the title was going to be, and “I told her the bad title I had in mind!” Wood shared. The friend was less than enthused and encouraged Wood to list some of the chapter titles. When she mentioned “When We Were the Kennedys,” the friend picked up on it and suggested she use that for the book title, with a subhead that included Mexico, Maine, to create intrigue from a couple of angles.

One guest shared that he grew up in Madison, a similar Maine mill town, and that he was “old enough to be (Wood’s) father.” His personal history contains many elements parallel to Wood’s—his father died when he was nine, just as Wood’s did; he himself worked in the mill; and his high school team played against Mexico. He praised the accuracy of Wood’s depiction of the inner workings of the mill in her book, and asked, “How did you come to such a depth of knowledge?”

“Thanks, I did a lot of research,” Wood said. A friend who worked in the mill (and who, incidentally, was recently laid off) was very helpful in describing the ins and outs of the process. In addition, by an interesting chain of events she ended up meeting one of late father’s coworkers. While working on a history of Rumford, the small Mexico Historical Society invited her to come and speak to them. Once she had finished her talk, one of the group volunteered, “You have got to talk to Bunny Carver! He worked in the mill and knew your father, and took his place when he died.” Wood went to Harry “Bunny” Carver’s house, and on greeting her at the door he said, “Oh, one of Red’s little girls!” (Red being Wood’s father’s nickname.)

In addition to providing her with information as to the workings of the mill, Carver gave Wood something even more precious. In sharing with her the reaction in the wood yard to the news of her father’s death that morning, he offered her a view into the story that she hadn’t even considered until that moment. She’d only been able to recall that day from her own 9 year-old experience – being in the house, people coming and going, the home filling with food and flowers. She’d never considered what those same hours had been like at the mill. “When my father was two seconds late that day, they knew that something dreadful had happened. My father was never late.” Carver filled in such details. “It was very touching to me,” Wood reflected.

Later in the discussion MWWC curator Cathleen Miller shared that she found in When We Were the Kennedys many similarities with her own story, growing up in a part of western Pennsylvania dominated by the coal mining industry. Wood agreed, saying, “Everywhere I’ve read with this book someone says, “This is just like my town,” referring to the presence of all kinds of various manufacturing, not just the paper industry. Wood has seen that “people are not only attached to their towns, but also to their industries. The industry itself feels like a person with influence over you.”

One guest was curious as to the reaction to the book by the Woods’ landlord and landlady, whom the story describes in detail.

“Their grandson now lives in their apartment and says that people have been going by to take pictures of the house.” This elicited quite a reaction from our group, and Wood went on to say more about this fascination with her childhood home. On her way to Haystack one day she stopped at the bookstore in Blue Hill, where the book has been heavily promoted. As she was signing stock for the shop, a couple from England who were great fans of the story explained that they had just made a pilgrimage to Mexico to see the house and town for themselves. Wood seemed quite surprised!

As the gathering was winding down, a question came from a visitor from the San Francisco Bay area, who referred to himself and his wife as Wood’s “unofficial publicists.” In commenting that she had shared a bit about how her fiction writing influenced this experience of writing autobiographically, he wondered how her memoir writing might influence her writing of fiction going forward. Wood replied, “I don’t know right now. I’ll have to see…writing characters in a memoir is a thousand times easier than creating characters in a novel. It took me half the time to write this, and I’m so glad I waited until I was older to write it. This is my favorite book and I’m glad I waited until I had the skill to do it.”

Currently Wood is working on a play, explaining, “I wanted to do something collaborative. I’m tired of working by myself. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet.” When asked if she would write another memoir, Wood said that she might write more about her sister Betty, who has developmental challenges. She loves to write about her, and recently published pieces about Betty in Reader’s Digest and Yankee Magazine.

When We Were the Kennedys is now in its fourth printing, and Wood has just received the 2012 May Sarton Memoir Award for best memoir by a woman writer published in the US or Canada. Congratulations, Monica!

The weather is warming, the sap is flowing and maple syrup is on its way! Here to tempt you yet again, I have another delicious (and easy!) maple recipe. This one comes from The Maine Sporting Camp Cookbook by Alice Arlen. The cookbook is divided up into seasons and, naturally, the maple recipes are all in the spring season chapter. This particular recipe is an easy French toast bake that you assemble the night before, refrigerate and then bake in the morning. With added cream cheese, it’s sort of a cross between a cheese danish, French toast and a bread pudding. The ingredients are simple and assembly is a snap. Perfect for springtime guests!

Cobb’s French Toast

• 1 tbsp butter
• 1 loaf day old white bread, cubed
• 1 8 oz. package cream cheese, cubed
• 12 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cups milk
• 1/3 cup pure maple syrup

Butter a 9 x 13-inch baking pan. Spread half the bread in the pan. Sprinkle half the cream cheese cubes over the bread. Repeat with remaining bread and cheese. Whisk together the eggs, milk, and maple syrup and pour over the mixture in the pan. Cover and refrigerate overnight.

In the morning, preheat the oven to 350°. Bake, uncovered, for 30-40 minutes or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the French toast stand for 15 minutes. Serve warm with additional maple syrup and/or preserves or fruit compote.

A few of my own notes:

I sprinkled a bit of raw sugar on top before baking to give it a nice crunchy texture – maple sugar would be even more fitting! Next time I make this, I would perhaps add a bit of vanilla or some spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, maybe cardamom? It needs a little something…more, in my opinion. But I must say that serving it warm with a bit of butter melted over the top and a wee drizzle of additional syrup made for an excellent (and surprisingly filling) breakfast!

At the end of last year, I shared with you some holiday recipes from our collection of cookbooks. Now I’m back to share some delicious maple recipes – lovingly tested by yours truly. The cookbook is Farm Journal’s Country Cookbook that once belonged to A. Carman Clark, whose papers are here at MWWC. This 1959 volume contains almost 400 pages of down to earth, classic recipes, including chapters on Company Specials, Cooking for a Crowd and Homemade Relishes. Showing its farm roots, there are two (yes, two!) dairy chapters – Butter and Cream and Milk and Cheese. The recipes I chose come from the Special Sweetenings chapter in a section titled Sugar Country Treats.

When I went looking for a maple recipe to make and share with you, I had a few basic requirements:

• It had to be new enough that I could actually make it  – no “add a teacupful of sugar” or “bake in a moderate oven until done.” Cookbooks have gotten more precise over time and though a hundred year old recipe might be tasty, I’m not entirely confident in my ability to recreate it with vague instructions.
• It couldn’t contain an obscene amount of butter/sugar/eggs/cream/etc. While this maple gingerbread is no health food, it’s not as bad as some recipes I ran across – one contained 11 egg yolks!
• It had to be relatively simple. As cookbooks have gotten more precise, some recipes have gotten quite complicated. With two small children at home, I wasn’t about to attempt meringue sculptures or frizzle anything or weave pie crusts into elaborate shapes.

What I came up with was this maple gingerbread topped with maple pie topping (whipped cream).

It was a delicious pale gingerbread – lighter than I was used to because of the lack of molasses – and very moist and tender. The maple flavor is almost entirely masked by the ginger but gives the perfect amount of sweetness to the cake. It paired nicely with the slightly sweet, slightly maple-y whipped cream topping. My coworkers can attest to the deliciousness – the batch was gone before day’s end!

Pouring out the delicious maple syrup.

Combining the syrup with sour cream.

The batter! Very lightly colored, and somewhat stiff.

The finished product, fresh from the oven.

My electricity-free whipped cream making method – place the heavy cream in a mason jar and shake until thick and creamy. Add maple syrup and shake some more!

Gingerbread with topping.

Do you have any favorite maple recipes you’d like to share?

Bring your lunch, bring a friend, and bring your questions.

Line by line, Ramona lays out her expectations – the uses of shared space, who retains control over the kitchen and her willingness to, “…in sickness and in health to continue to protect his egg shell ego as per my record of the decades.” I was unable, much to my amused pleasure, to tell how much of it was serious, and how much was tongue in cheek. What is clear, however, is Ramona Barth’s wit. Whether or not the barbs directed at Joseph were sincere did not change the sentiment behind them. Barth had expectations and boundaries and she was not about to defer to her husband. Feminism was not simply a political ideology for Barth, but rather an integral part of the way she lived her life. That it bled into her marriage so acerbically is not a surprise.

For the past few months, I’ve been processing the Ramona Barth collection and the above mentioned contract is one of my favorite discoveries, and perhaps one of the more revealing pieces of material. Feminism had long been a part of Barth’s life, particularly in it’s applications to marriage, motherhood and religion. A graduate of the Jackson College for Women at Tufts, and the Meadville Theological Seminary at University of Chicago, Barth spent most of her adult life writing about and organizing around second wave feminism. The newly processed collection contains her work from grade school to graduate program, and Barth’s passion for feminist theory, and critical thinking shines through it all.

When Barth attended Tufts in the early 1930′s, secondary education was still unusual for a woman. But Barth embraced the intellectual atmosphere with gusto and she took to the notion of cultural, political and personal critique like a fish to water. In 1931, Barth had an essay published in the Tuftonian, the university’s literary magazine, entitled Formula C2K. In it she pushes her classmates to ask questions of everything. “Now is the time to doubt,” she writes, “to question, to wonder just how much we should accept and how much we should reject from the many and complex beliefs that have been handed down to us.” This was a philosophy she took to heart, and carried with her into her married life, into her political life and her spiritual life.

The daughter of a congregational minister, religion and spirituality were strong presences in Barth’s life from the very beginning. She preached a sermon from her father’s pulpit in 1930, when she was 19 years old. It was the first time a woman had ever preached in the 150 year history of this particular church. A prolific writer throughout her education and beyond, Barth’s collection is dotted with gems of feminist, Unitarian thought. In 1974, she wrote an essay entitled “Why We Burn: A Feminist Exercise in Exorcism,” which detailed all the multitude of sexist and misogynist passages from a wide variety of religious tracts. “Why burn?” she writes, “The answer is simple. Read your Bible – your Bibles of the world, and then ask, how else raise the theological consciousness of an obtuse, callous, sexist society?” It became clear to me, while processing this collection, that writing was as much a part of Barth’s activism as the protests she attended, and the events she organized.

As a young mother, Barth engaged her feminism through writing and publishing articles on motherhood and domesticity. She held lecture series with her husband, Rev. Joseph Barth, during which the pair would debate topics such as “Meaningful Marriage” and “Men and Women – Do They Play An Equal Role?”

Later in life, Barth took part in protests in connection with the National Organization for Women (NOW) and ultimately helped found the Maine chapter of NOW. Her reverence for historical icons such as Margaret Fuller and Anne Hutchinson led her to organize a multitude of events commemorating such figures. She took part in performances, celebrations and memorials, and clearly drew much of her political and spiritual inspiration from these women. Another large presence in her papers is the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom Barth held in high regard. She became closely involved in the centennial celebration of the poet’s life, and wrote on her extensively. Barth’s passion for and personal connection to these women is obvious throughout the collection and I found it powerful to see so clearly the source of inspiration for a seasoned activist like her. She devoted time, energy and much of her writing to them, and seemed to get much in return.

Barth’s papers are a treasure trove, and an interesting glimpse into the thoughts and life of one of the many women who made up the larger movement. Her commitment to the cause – fighting to advance equal rights for women – rings out in everything she wrote, from her school papers, to that five year plan and contract. Barth knew what she had to offer and she worked hard to make her voice heard. That voice is a very distinct one and her message is clear: Question everything you take for granted, and never back down.

Last Thursday, during my processing of the Maine Women in the Fine and Performing Arts (MAWFPA) collection, I had a lovely thing happen.  I am getting towards the end of re-housing all the materials in acid free folders and boxes, working my way through the remaining couple boxes of loose and disorganized papers.  I had been putting off looking through this one overly full folder of items that had a title that I knew had nothing to do with anything else in the collection.  When I opened it, I found it full of papers that made no sense together at all, as if some one swiped this pile off a desk corner (or two) and shoved it in a randomly titled folder.  I checked in with Cathleen and together we decided it should be taken apart and sorted according to the series structure I had carried over from the organization’s filing system.  So I pulled it all out and put financial things with other financial things and the couple artists’ bios and resumes in the right folder.

Also in there was this one piece of paper filled half way with someone’s story.  It was a printed font, but not the typewriter font of many other documents in this collection, as it dates from about 1977 through 1983.  The page was numbered 16 in the top right corner.  For some reason I recognized the font and even a bit of the story or the rhythm of how it was typed out, as I still had not actually read the writing through.  I hung on to it and pulled out the Membership & Submissions series that I knew contained the artists’ submissions to Spectra 2, the organization’s multidisciplinary month-long art exhibition and showcase that took place around the state of Maine in October of 1982.  I located the folder with the poetry and prose submissions (a rather stuffed one) and started to go through page by page.  Each submission is numbered though some are only one sheet with a poem and others are short stories or essays that are any where from a few to twenty pages.

So I kept going page by page and I found this lovely poem entitled Leaving by Rosa Lane.  I had not paused to read anything yet, but I felt compelled to read this poem (see it below) and I quickly fell for it, so much so that I had to write it down for myself.

Turning back, I then kept going through the folder.  I got to submission number 28, a short story called Smoke by Lucy Honig, the last one in the folder amazingly.  I immediately recognized the distinct font and started flipping through the multi-page submission…page 5… page 9… page 15… I added page number 16, the last page of her short story.  Last week, this was my small and pleasing moment in the archive.  I am happy knowing that I put her story back together and will leave it in one whole piece.

Below is the poem I found along the way…

]]> http://blog.une.edu/mwwc/2013/01/29/page-16-and-a-poem/feed/ 3 http://blog.une.edu/mwwc/2013/01/25/on-making-mistakes/ http://blog.une.edu/mwwc/2013/01/25/on-making-mistakes/#comments Fri, 25 Jan 2013 21:15:34 +0000 Cathleen Miller http://blog.une.edu/mwwc/?p=1585 Over the past few weeks, I have been taking the opportunity of a quiet campus to clean up a little bit, follow up on things left hanging and things put off.  It has been productive and a good opportunity for self-reflection on just how I’m doing here after over two years on the job.

I noticed that I have started to settle in, to find my own rhythm and path here, and rather than simply trying to figure things out each day, I finally have what feels like a grasp on the scope of the collection and what needs to be done.  So we have begun to implement systems and workflows, and even started to have staff meetings!  And in this process, I am finding ways that I have failed to see what needed to be done, and so now have to backpedal.  Or, I saw what needed to be done and half-heartedly tried to make it happen but didn’t follow through with enough perseverance.  All of this is fine–it’s learning.  No one has died from my mistakes, nor has anyone suffered really, but it’s certainly time to go forward with more of a plan.

So now, with a workflow in place, there is less guess work about what needs to be done with a particular collection.  No more saving up the photocopying until there is nothing better to do because there will always be something better to do.  Now, when we process a collection, it will also get a catalog record because everyone knows what is being funneled through the processing pipeline.  Part of the trepidation that accompanied putting processes in place was, perhaps, a bit of uncertainty about my own expertise and knowledge.  What if I created a plan that didn’t make sense and then we’d have to do it all over again?  As I’ve grown into this role a bit, I see that what is key is making definitive decisions even if they are wrong, and building professional networks so that when I have questions about the best way to do something, I have people to ask out in the broader field.  Each place works differently, of course, and our little collection has plenty of quirks, but the more examples you have to compare, the better.  In this third year of my work here, my plan is to move outward, to build more networks and alliances.

Along with networking, another part of my plan this year is to gain more leadership skills.  I have always bristled at these two words–maybe because of my working-class background and the corporate ring that “leadership skills” holds for me–but, after two+ years of managing this collection, I’ve got to acknowledge that leadership skills are something I actually need to have.  I never set out to be anyone’s boss but my own, but here I am, and while I do the best I can, I know there are places (perhaps many!) that I have made mistakes.   So, when the Maine State Library District Consultants sent out an email about a webinar on how to “Be a Great Boss,” I signed up.  It starts next week, and I have started reading the first chapter on Attitude.  This one (so far) feels pretty easy to me, but I know that there are going to be places where this course pushes my comfort zone.  Luckily, according to the author of the book we’re reading,* “…no mistake is final.”

Hakala-Ausperk, Catherine.  Be a Great Boss: One Year to Success.  Chicago: American Library Association, 2011.