About the Author About the Book Read On

P. S. 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 ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 1 1/18/12 7:54 AM About the author Q&A with Melissa Coleman 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, Vermont, 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 Maine 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 2 ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 2 1/18/12 7:54 AM Season Farm into a model of sustainable agriculture. 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 organic farming 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? 3 ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 3 1/18/12 7:54 AM About the author Q&A with Melissa Coleman (continued) 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. 4 ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 4 1/18/12 7:54 AM Why Now? the book About 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 Scott Nearing 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, 5 ThisLifeIsInYourHandsPS_4P.indd 5 1/18/12 7:54 AM About the book About Why Now? (continued) 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 6 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.

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