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About the author 2 Q&A with Melissa Coleman

About the book 5 Why Now? Insights, Interviews Read on & More . . . 11 Author Recommendations 13 Questions for Discussion

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Q: Tell us about your life after you left Greenwood Farm.

A: While leaving the farm was devastating at the time, it brought a myriad of life experiences. After the book ends, I joined my father, sister, and stepmother, Gerry, in Topsfield, Mass., where my father ran the Coolidge Center for Experimental Agriculture. We lived in Topsfield for three years, during which time my brother, Ian, was born, and my sister Clara and I visited our mother, Sue, in California on vacations. In 1981, we moved to Vershire, , where my father became the farm manager at The Mountain School, a high school semester program owned by Milton Academy in Milton, Mass. I attended Milton Academy as a boarding student from 1984–’87. After getting a BA in English from the University of Vermont, I interned at Chelsea Green Publishing, where my father’s first book, The New Organic Grower, was published. I then headed west and worked as a park ranger, magazine fact-checker, and dog musher before becoming the managing editor at Aspen magazine in Aspen, Colorado. In 2002, at age thirty-two, I moved back to with my future husband, Eric, and we got married near my birthplace, where my father and stepmother, Barbara Damrosch, have built a modern house and developed what is now Four

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ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 2 1/18/12 7:54 AM Season Farm into a model of . My mother is happily remarried and lives with her husband, Tom, in Cambridge, Mass. Eric and I settled in Freeport, Maine, and twins, Heidi and Emily, were born in 2005.

Q: What do you see as the most important themes in this book?

A: It addresses the basic human need to make sense of the past in order to live fully in the present and future. Often the greatest tragedies in our lives are hiding within them the most important gifts. This book also brings perspective to today’s renewed interest in food, farming, the environment, and simplifying modern life. It specifically looks at the origins of the movement and the struggles my family underwent to grow our own food at a time when processed foods and chemical agriculture were considered the new miracle by mainstream America. In 1971 there was only one farmer’s market in the state of Maine and about as few health-food stores. Today there are many of both, and hundreds of small organic or sustainable farms. Food writer Mark Bittman recently noted in the New York Times that there are 50 percent more farms in Maine now than there were in 1992. It’s important that these farms exist for the ecosystem, as well as for people who want to eat quality local food.

Q: What do you think is the appeal of your family’s story? 

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A: Perhaps that it’s a universally American story about a family’s pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, and the adventures and challenges of trying to live as the pioneers did, but in modern times. It also provides a window on the fantasy of going back to the land. Variations on the back-to-the-land movement are documented as a recurring phenomenon in history, from Gilgamesh to Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Borsodi, with an estimated one million people moving to the countryside in the 1970s. This is a story for anyone who has ever wanted to leave the city for the simple life—both for those who have already taken the leap and those who never will.

Q: When taking on difficult and personal subjects, some writers turn to fiction to tell their stories. Did you ever consider writing this as a novel?

A: I never saw this book as fiction, since the story is so real to me, but I knew I couldn’t tell it through my memories alone, as much of it happens when I was very young, and some even before I was born. Instead I needed to reconstruct the story by filling in my own understanding of the events with the more detailed recollections of my parents, family members, friends, and apprentices. This was a challenge for me, but also provided one of the best rewards, as discussed in the essay that follows.

Q: What would you like readers to take away from this book?

A: I’d like people to enjoy a good story as well as learn about a family and world that existed parallel to mainstream America. While it was a very different way of life, the basic human desires and struggles are universal. And I hope that anyone who has ever lost a child or sibling will find the same solace in reading this book as I did in writing it. 

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ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 4 1/18/12 7:54 AM Why Now? About book the People often ask why I wrote This Life Is in Your Hands, and why now? I don’t talk much about this in the memoir itself, saying only that I was writing to find “the secret of how to live.” I now realize there are as many secrets of how to live as there are lives, and in the end we often find that the search is the most valuable part of the answer. Or as my childhood neighbor liked to say, quoting from Robert Louis Stevenson, “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.” When we moved away from Maine at the end of the book, I put my early years in a drawer and never talked about them. There was the sorrow of the loss of my sister, for one, as well as the feeling of being different from my peers, having grown up on a homestead without electricity and running water when most everyone else was watching The Brady Bunch. All I wanted was to be “normal.” I wanted to trade my lunch of a home-grown organic carrot and whole- wheat sandwich for the Wonder bread and Ho Hos in my classmates’ lunch boxes. I wanted to stop at McDonald’s on family road trips instead of driving miles out of the way to find a health-food store. Now I realize that in rejecting what made me different, I threw out the one thing I had going for me—myself. I could never seem to find my footing in life, because I wasn’t standing on my own two feet. It wasn’t until my thirties—after living out West, meeting my husband, 

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and moving back to Maine—that I began to feel more comfortable with my early years and see them for the amazing adventure they were. I also began to understand that we all lose the innocence of childhood at some point in our development into adults. It was just that for me, that loss had a huge exclamation point, coming as it did with the death of my sister, the breakup of my family, and the end of my childhood paradise. However, when my own children were born, identical twin girls named Heidi (after my sister) and Emily, I found myself bumping against my biggest unspoken fear of all—that I was somehow accountable for my sister’s death. It was around the time of the twins’ birth that I read a depiction by a neighbor suggesting I ran off and left my sister at the pond the day she drowned. I began to fear I’d blocked something out. I already had so much guilt from saying things to Heidi like, “Do that and you’ll die,” or not helping her up to the woodshed loft to play with me that day, as well as a distant and unbidden memory of her falling into the water. This was certainly not a healthy place to be in as a new mother. I began to worry that if I couldn’t save my little sister, how could I save my own children? And I felt an increasing tension with my mother, who had come to help with the new babies. Her guilt and fear of not being a good enough mother, of not being able to save her child, was getting

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ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 6 1/18/12 7:54 AM mixed up with my own. This is when my ever-wise husband, Eric, said, “You are a writer, that is how you process things. You need to write this.” While I’d often thought I wanted to write about my childhood, I always came up with excuses not to—I thought I didn’t have enough memories, and I didn’t want to write difficult truths about my family. But as I struggled to become a parent, I found myself wanting to better understand my own parents, to see the story from their points of view. So I began asking a lot of questions. At first I didn’t even realize I was doing research; I was simply listening to my parents instead of always challenging why they did things the way they did. And they seemed to enjoy sharing memories that had been obscured by the tragedy and divorce. My dad said the early homestead years were the time in his life that he felt most alive, and my mother said they were some of her happiest. As well, there were things they were still upset about, and some skeletons in the closet. As I pieced everything together, I became ever more cognizant that the truth is made of many truths and many points of view. I began to weave together the stories of my parents and family members, neighbors and apprentices, lines from my mother’s journal, news articles about us, and books by the Nearings, my father, and others noted in the following pages. I strove to find the cord of truth that ran though it all. The result was my version of a story shared by my family 

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and the many people we knew, as well as the many more who knew of us. During this process, I had the chance to grieve in a way I’d never been able to before. I’d find myself crying over my laptop, and with that release of emotion came a huge amount of empathy for both my parents and myself. Acceptance of loss brings an acceptance of life, and as eventually happens with grieving, you break through to the joy behind the loss. Through writing, my sister came back to life for me, as did the experiences of my young parents. While the research phase was cathartic in many ways, I wasn’t prepared for that sudden feeling of exposure when the book came out. My mother, who had shared so many of her stories with me, was upset by online reviews that blamed her for being a bad parent. “Don’t read those,” I warned her. “They’re other people’s way of connecting to the book and have more to do with the reader than with you.” But she felt I had not portrayed her fairly, or in the way she saw herself. The only thing that got us through this difficult time was the healing our relationship had experienced earlier during the writing of the book. She was able to share something with me, and by doing so, shifted a burden off my shoulders to her own. It was the ultimate maternal gesture, one that helped her make peace with her own guilt, as well. My father has always maintained that this is my version of the story and has

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ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 8 1/18/12 7:54 AM supported my telling of it, but that doesn’t mean it was easy for him to revisit painful events in his past. A strong-willed character during the time of the book, he is now a white-haired grandfather and much-loved icon of the organic food movement. On the day the book was reviewed by Janet Maslin in the New York Times, a man came up to him in the post office and asked if he’d seen the review of his daughter’s book. He’d been in town that morning, so he said, no, he had not. The man looked at him uncomfortably and said, “Well, it made you sound a little arrogant and self-righteous.” I have to insert here that as it was not my intent to criticize my parents, comments like this make me uncomfortable. My father, however, looked the man squarely in the eye and said, “At least they got that right.” Of course, the story of a family doesn’t end with publication, but keeps evolving and growing. The hardcover printing of this book was subtitled “One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone.” Like most subtitles, it attempted to capture the complexities of the story in a way that would attract people’s attention. However, while my family was initially undone by things that happened, we’ve reconstructed ourselves into the family we are now—one that was heartbroken over losses in the past, but has gone on to find joy and redemption in the present. So the subtitle is now “One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family’s Heartbreak.” I’m often reminded that love, nature, 

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family, and children are all very beautiful, and very fragile, but most of all very resilient. The losses my family experienced didn’t happen because of our alternative lifestyle; these sorts of things can happen to anyone, anywhere. The reason they hit us so hard is that we didn’t have a faith in something bigger than homesteading to guide us through life’s difficult turns. Since that time I’ve been able to find my faith, my understanding of God, and with that, the understanding of something that helps me through hard times. The secret I rediscovered is not just that spring will always return, but also that “ Happens,” as stated on a bumper sticker I saw recently. Compost is made from a pile of leftovers, scraps, weeds, mistakes— the detritus of life. With time and the help of earthworms and millions of microorganisms, this mess is transformed into black gold—as my father calls it—a rich, fine soil filled with the nitrogen that plants need to grow. To truly understand that your garden will sprout up, bear fruit, wither, lie dormant, and grow again next spring from the compost of the past year is to trust in something deeper. Through this whole process, I’ve gotten myself back, and it’s a wonderful feeling. And while I can’t save my sister, I can write about her and celebrate her short life, and marvel today in my own children, and my amazing, multifaceted family. 

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The following books were helpful and/or inspirational in the writing of this book. Helen and Scott Nearing The Good Life (Living the Good Life and Continuing the Good Life) The Good Life Album of Helen and Scott Nearing Our Home Made of Stone The Making of a Radical: A Political Autobiography, Scott Nearing Simple Food for the Good Life, Loving and Leaving the Good Life, Helen Nearing Eliot Coleman The New Organic Grower Four-Season Harvest The Winter Harvest Handbook Organic Farming and Food An Agricultural Testament, Sir Albert Howard The Living Soil, Lady Eve Balfour Make Friends with Your Land: A Chemist Looks at Organiculture, Leonard Wickenden Silent Spring, Rachel Carson The Garden Primer, Barbara Damrosch Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Barbara Kingsolver The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan 

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Back-to-the-Land Walden, Henry David Thoreau Flight from the City: An Experiment in Creative Living on the Land, Ralph Borsodi Maine Farm: A Year of Country Life, Stanley Joseph and Lynn Karlin Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life, Jean Hay Bright At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America, Rebecca Kneale Gould

Inspiration Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey A River Runs Through It, Norman MacLean Edie: American Girl, Jean Stein and George Plimpton The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers Time of Wonder, Robert McCloskey Charlotte’s Web, E. B. White Heidi, Johanna Spyri Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder The Narnia Chronicles, C. S. Lewis The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, J. R. R. Tolkien Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson The Tale of Despereaux, Kate DiCamillo Poetry by ee cummings and T. S. Eliot 

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1. What does the title of the memoir refer to? Whose life is at stake? 2. The author’s parents, Eliot and Sue, were inspired by the book Living the Good Life, written by Scott and Helen Nearing: “Their philosophy held the promise of a simple life, far removed from the troubles of the modern world. The good life.” How did that philosophy hold true for Melissa Coleman and her family? How did it fail them? 3. How would you define “the good life”? Do you think it can ever be achieved? Did Melissa’s family find it in the years they lived in the Maine woods? What factors led to the end of their dream? 4. At the end of the prologue, Melissa Coleman writes, “I’m seeking—the secret of how to live.” Do you think she finds it by the memoir’s end? What insights would you offer someone on a similar quest? 5. Compare the America of the late sixties and early seventies to the state of the country today. How are the two periods similar? Was the “back to the land” lifestyle truly feasible forty years ago? What about today? How can we adapt Eliot’s philosophy to our modern lifestyle without heading to the woods? 6. What type of people were drawn to the lifestyle back then and why? What about today? What do you 

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think of the “back to the land” ideal? What benefits does this kind of life offer? What are its drawbacks? Describe the people who arrived at the Nearings’ and later, at the farm with Sue and Eliot. What effect did these apprentices have on Greenwood Farm and its family? 7. Melissa Coleman writes, “Small drops, we see, like raindrops on stone, can eventually change the course of a river. These small forces, too, can change the path of a life.” What are the forces she is referring to in This Life Is in Your Hands? Using examples from the book, trace the “small drops” that changed the course of her young life. 8. People like Scott and Helen Nearing and Eliot and Sue Coleman are often mocked and looked upon with suspicion by more traditional-minded people. Why? What is it about them that threatens those who adhere to the status quo? What have we learned from these people who were then called “kooks” and “hippies”? 9. Describe Eliot and Sue’s parenting style. How did their outlook color Melissa’s own? Did she and Heidi have too much freedom? 10. In 1973, Congress passed the Farm Bill championed by then Secretary of Agriculture Dr. Earl Butz. How did this legislation affect American farming and the food we eat? Contrast those changes with Eliot’s ideas and beliefs.

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ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 14 1/18/12 7:54 AM 11. In talking about God, Melissa Coleman quotes her mother: “ ‘Even though we do not belong to any organized religion, we are very religious people. We believe in the individual who can be trusted, who is capable of loving, who can carry his own weight and who had a basic goodness.’ ” Did Melissa’s parents live up to their own beliefs? Did they have too much faith in themselves, their way of life, and the righteousness of their cause? 12. What was Telonferdie? Explain its significance to Heidi and Melissa. 13. Does Melissa treat her parents differently in the memoir? What are your impressions of her father, Eliot, and her mother, Sue? Do you understand their motives and their actions even if you may not agree with them? 14. Was anyone or anything to blame for Heidi’s death? 15. At the memoir’s end, the author quotes T. S. Eliot. “ ‘This is the use of memory,’ Eliot also said. ‘For liberation— From the future as well as the past.’ ” What does he mean by this? How can memory on’t miss the next liberate us? Why do so many people D struggle to forget difficult events? book by your favorite 16. What did you take away from author. Sign up now for reading This Life Is in Your AuthorTracker by visiting Hands?  www.AuthorTracker.com.

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