Brunswick, Maine: Thornton Oaks Retirement Community, 2004.
Paperback, 80 pp. $10.
Some very good writing emerges from ordinary experience. When residents of the Thornton Oaks Retirement Community in Brunswick formed a writing group a few years ago, they seem to have decided to focus on personal experiences – observations of nature, local history, remembered places, summer sails, individual connections to great events.
Through the eyes of a group of experienced writers we see a peace conference in the 1920s, take part in the Normandy landings in 1944, experience a flood on the Ohio River, and travel aboard a ship avoiding still-uncleared minefields in the North Sea in 1946. The essays and poems here are very short – three pages at most – and they take the reader from the ship-like noises of a house in a windstorm to the Ukraine just before World War II. We learn about cormorants, cats, navigation, the mating behavior of woodcock, summer rain and what happened when a motorboat sliced a sailboat in half one Sunday on Barnegat Bay in the 1930s.
Literary backgrounds represented here vary from a published poet and writer to a variety of journal-keepers, reminiscence-writers and individuals who wrote stories and poems for their grandchildren. But the quality of the writing is good throughout this book, suggesting that the foreword’s reference to “the scrupulous work of the Publication Committee of the Thornton Oaks Writers Group, which meets monthly to listen to, look at, and discuss writings by residents” means just what it implies. A lot of care went into this little book, and it’s evident on every page.
The book is illustrated with engaging line drawings by residents, as well as by 14-year-old Charlotte Recknagel.
Copies may be ordered from Thornton Oaks Retirement Community, 25 Thornton Way, Brunswick, ME 04011, or from Archipelago at the Island Institute in Rockland.