If Jane Crosen had not spent 1975 through 1978 at the Scottish spiritual community Findhorn, she might not have become a mapmaker, editor, cook and cookbook author.
Although as a child, she had imitated a grandmother cooking, making what
her grandmother referred to as “Janie’s little messes,” Crosen discovered a love of baking while planning and cooking vegetarian meals for Findhorn’s then 150 members. “My favorite thing was desserts,” she recalled. Like her Hancock, Maine grandmother who added “a little of this and a little of that” instead of explicit measurements, Crosen said, “I follow my intuition. If it comes out well, I can usually remember how much I used.”
After spending her junior year of college in London, she visited Findhorn and decided to stay. While there, she also worked at the community’s publishing house where she learned graphic design, layout, illustration, editing, and essay writing.
Upon returning home to Cumberland, Maine, she put her experience to work in 1979 after answering an ad for an “in-house editor and girl Friday” at Yarmouth’s DeLorme Publishing Company.
While at DeLorme, she edited, wrote, and typeset descriptions of
“wonderful places” to hike or canoe and “spent the better part of a year
gathering information on these places in Maine for a new edition of the
Maine Atlas and Gazetteer.
“I had to learn how to read maps so I could tell the cartographers where to place symbols [for things like lighthouses and waterfalls],” she recalled, and added, “One of my greatest passions now is geology.”
While doing the editing work, Crosen helped the cartographers trace rivers on Mylar and lay patches of swamp symbols. In this way, she learned how to draw maps “by osmosis. I was having fun,” she said. “It felt right,” and noted she’d always liked doing calligraphy.
With all this information about great hikes at hand, Crosen explore on weekends. Knowing that Findhorn friend Zilla Daniel lived in Brooklin drew Crosen to visit the Blue Hill peninsula where, she said, “I was enchanted by the natural beauty.”
Two years later, as the job at DeLorme wound down, Crosen got part-time work at WoodenBoat magazine as a typesetter. Typesetting grew into copy editing, a job she still holds. She needed more income at the time, so she took on part-time copyediting at Canoe magazine. She also made maps of canoe trips, using her own calligraphy for labels.
“In every issue I did at least one map,” she said, adding, “After a couple of years, I was figuring better ways to do them.” When she got access to a typesetting machine with different fonts, she found herself thinking: Wouldn’t it be fun to make a map of the Blue Hill peninsula.
Dick Gorski, of WoodenBoat’s art department, encouraged her, suggesting she make a postcard-size map people could carry with them. She worked on
the map after hours and weekends and recalled, “WoodenBoat was always been encouraging to freelancers.”
She published her first map in 1983. Selling it, “was stressful. It took a lot of guts.” But she also said, “That first map was so well received, I was encouraged to do others.” She would do a new map, after getting a certain number of requests for a region. To date, she has self-published 22 hand-drawn map postcards and 17 posters of Maine coastal and lake regions.
Crosen met future husband, Richard Washburn in 1985, and said, “At last,
I had someone to hike, explore, and go camping with.” That year she also
began making maps printed on T-shirts. She also added freelance editing, primarily for Globe Pequot Press, The Mountaineers Books, and the National Park Service.
Both Crosen and Washburn, a boatbuilder who has also worked in restaurants, enjoy cooking together. In 1988, the year they married, they wrote and self-published a small cookbook for family and friends, so it seemed natural when, in 2002, Crosen began editing cookbooks. Four years later a friend asked, “Weren’t you going to write a sequel to your cookbook?”
That was all it took. She began compiling her notes for dishes, meals, and camping, and saved camp menus in a baggie. In their cooking, she and
Washburn sought: “a simple approach with healthy foods using good ingredients.” They wanted their cookbook to include family favorites as well as international dishes.
As a cookbook editor, Crosen realized that to write the cookbook the way she wanted, she would have to self-publish and market the book along with her maps. She wanted a personal touch such as mentioning the addresses for ordering special seeds, area organic farms, health food stores, and co-ops.
The result is a professional, if unusual, cookbook: Maine
Mapmaker’s Kitchen: Creative, Healthy Recipes for Home, Camp, and
Afloat, by Crosen, with Richard Washburn.
The book includes essays titled, Good Cookies, Heirloom Beans, Home Grown Herbs, and how to Cope with Disappointing Yogurt. Because Crosen and Washburn live in a rural area and camp on a lake in a more isolated one, she offers advice on a well-stocked larder, putting food by in different ways, preparing for a camping trip, and many thoughtful, helpful suggestions. In total, the book, cross-referenced and indexed, contains 350 recipes.
For more information, go to: www.mainemapmaker.com.