At 98 years of age, Emily Muir, the artist, architect, activist, environmentalist and eminence grise of Stonington/Deer Isle, has earned the right to speak her mind. Her life, which spans nearly the entire 20th century, is the subject of a new memoir, The Time of My Life, recently published by the Institute and the Farnsworth Art Museum. In this lively memoir Emily recounts her artistic trials and triumphs, her politics, her travels with her beloved artist husband, Bill, and her love of the Maine coast and its people.
The book was also the organizing principle for a book signing party in Stonington last month where over 100 of Emily Muir’s neighbors, friends and admirers came to celebrate her exemplary life. This event also marked the official launch of the Emily and William Muir Community Fund at the Island Institute. Emily created the fund with a generous contribution of her own and joked, “The lawyers made me do it.” But anyone who knows Emily’s determined independent mind and spirit will appreciate the humor of her statement, for no one has ever made Emily do anything she did not want to do. We also appreciate knowing that the Muir Fund will benefit from a major capital contribution from her estate. In the near term, the Fund will help support the kinds of community projects that Emily has been interested throughout her long life, including local school and library programs that enrich arts and environmental science education, as well as community planning initiatives in the communities Emily admired and respected.
In the largest sense Emily’s generosity serves as an example of how all of us can help create a sustainable and inspiring future, one in which we want others to be able to live. Establishing a named fund at an organization like the Island Institute is a powerful vehicle for investing in a future in which we’d like our children to be able to live, and their children, and their children’s children down through the corridors of time. It has often been remarked (and it is even more true today) that it is our deeds, and hopefully our good works, that live on after us. In Emily’s case, this new fund will add to her literary and artistic legacy another kind of legacy – one that will benefit the people of the coast and islands well over the horizon of our present sight and insight.
We hope Emily’s exemplary life will inspire others, not only to add their own support to this fund, but also, where appropriate, consider establishing other named funds to leave the kind of lasting legacy for the kind of future we all want to help create as best we are able. No matter which of the many island or working waterfront communities along Maine’s inspiring and diverse coastline might be of particular concern, there are as many different ways to structure such funds as there are people who might be interested.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.