Monson native’s ‘Ancient Trail to Home’ reflects rural life
By Mike Lange
Staff Writer
MONSON — Wendy Anderson, a 1974 Foxcroft Academy graduate, has fond memories of her childhood in Monson, even though life wasn’t easy at times.
“For me, it was a special place to grow up. My playground was the woods behind the house,” she recalled. “My dog, Wiggles, and I used to spend a lot of time there.”
Wendy Anderson
Living in Monson, best known for its Finnish heritage, farms and slate quarries “gives you a grounded perspective on life in general,” she added.
Anderson now lives in Chicago and has put some of her childhood reflections into a collection of poetry: “An Ancient Trail to Home.”
Finishing Line Press, a small regional publisher, is taking pre-orders through Aug. 1 with publication set for Sept. 12, Anderson said. The book will be available through Amazon.com after it is published.
She became affiliated with Finishing Line after entering a poetry contest sponsored by the firm. “I didn’t win, but they liked my material well enough that they offered to publish my book,” she said.
Anderson’s book has already received some excellent pre-publication reviews.
“In this rich collection of poems, Wendy S. Anderson quite literally returns home, remembering intense moments from childhood in a small town in rural Maine, where ‘loons shot across [lakes], men worked the slate quarries/carrying lunch pails and blue hands,’” wrote South Carolina poet laureate Marjory Heath Wentworth. “Intensely imagistic, these narrative poems are balanced by poems about motherhood. Taken as a whole, the poems in ‘An Ancient Trail to Home’ are about the big issues — love, loss and growth.”
Anderson’s brother, Lauri, is also an author. He has written eight books, all with Finnish themes and characters, including “From Moosehead to Misery Bay,” a memoir about growing up in Monson, serving in the Peace Corps in Africa and teaching in northern Michigan.
“He’s 14 years older than me,” Anderson said. “He was getting ready to leave home when I was still a kid, but I always looked up to him since he was my big brother.”
Anderson graduated from Beloit (Wisconsin) College and later accepted a position with Pioneer Press in Chicago as an editor and creative writing instructor.
She has also taught in the grad-level journalism program at Northwestern University and has interviewed and written about Pulitzer Prize-winning poets and bestselling authors.
Anderson is now the online content creator for Grant-Thornton, the sixth-largest accounting network in the world, also headquartered in Chicago.
“I don’t think I ever intended to be in Chicago for as long as I have been,” said Anderson, who is married with two daughters. “But I still try to get back to Monson each summer. My sister and little brother still live there.”
For more information about “An Ancient Trail to Home” visit www.finishinglinepress.com.
Daddy’s Face Was a Neighborhood
of clotheslines strung from the back porches
of a town in northern Maine,
a neighborhood where men worked the slate quarries
carrying lunch pails and blue hands
open to the kids jabbering in Swede and Finn
who ran to meet them when the whistle blew.
His hands were a landscape
of Homer Hill and Lake Hebron
where loons shot across
when he held his arms open to the sky.
A peddler’s wagon wound its way from shack to shack
along the ruts in his palms,
stopping at the Philbrooks and Ponkalas,
at Fat Sara’s where homemade sausage
spitting on an open fire said welcome.
Trout leapt up the brooks in Daddy’s arms,
and bear cubs touched noses
by the pool of his shoulder blades.
His thick neck was Borestone Mountain
where pine trees swayed on misty days.
Blueberries ripened on his chest,
wild flowers overflowed,
and hawks caught the wind to soar.
His legs were a cave
we hauled ourselves through as children,
gathering grass stains
one handful of trouser at a time
as he stood laughing in the yard.
Daddy’s lap was a nest
where we stopped a while from flapping,
never dreaming that one day
his flight would stun us all.
W. S. Anderson