Gardening enthusiasts should jot down Wednesday, July 22 on their calendars. That is when Maine resident Margot Anne Kelley will be in Windham to give a presentation about her book “A Gardener at the End of the World” at the Windham Public Library.
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| Author Margot Anne Kelley will be at the Windham Public Library from 6 to 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 22 to give a presentation about her book 'A Gardener At The End Of The World.' COURTESY PHOTO |
“I had some very ready inspiration. I was part of a local task force, and one of the people on the task force said ‘well, you know, there weren’t any pandemics until we had agriculture,’ Kelley said, replying with, “you just ruined my garden for me.”
“She said you had to have a certain density of population for diseases to pass,” she said, explaining that as agriculture expanded to support larger populations, the opportunity for diseases to spread grew as well. “I started thinking about how this thing that is giving me solace, gardening, is also one of the reasons why we have pandemics. Then I started the deep dive and never came back.”
The book is set from March 2020, when the pandemic hit and the world began to shut down, through December of that year, when the first vaccine was given emergency authorization by the Food and Drug Association (FDA).
“I decided that the book was going to start in March when lockdown happened and it was going to end in December when the first vaccine got emergency authorization, because that is also pretty much the same arc as the gardening season in Maine,” Kelley said. “You can’t do much before March, and if you have carrots, you pick your last carrots the first week of December.”
While discussing COVID can be a very heavy topic, filled with difficult emotions, Kelley notes that there is hope infused in history.
“If in every generation that has endured a pandemic before, enough people survived that we’re here now, we’d survive this” she said. “I can also find a little bit of hope in there.”
“We went through the Bubonic Plague,” she said, discussing that if humankind can survive a pandemic which “decimated” the population of Europe at the time, we can likely survive anything, especially together.
“We are for each other. We are because of each other,” she said.
As the lockdown spread, many people turned to new hobbies to pass the time, and gardening is one pastime that experienced sudden growth.
“We have a huge population that’s doing it currently and COVID definitely contributed to it,” Kelley said. “A lot of people who did it then kept going. Once you’re doing it and you get the satisfaction from it, whether it’s from flowers or food, people keep going.”
While promoting the book, Kelley has heard frequent reminiscences from readers about their experiences during the long months of the pandemic, including from one woman recently who made a distinct impression on the author.
“A woman came up to me and, not in a cruel way, said ‘while you were working in your garden, I was trying to teach grade school kids on ZOOM,’” she said. “She started tearing up. I felt both really moved that she shared it and deeply apologetic that, even though she wanted to read the rest of the book, she was definitely triggered.”
After a career educating students as a professor of both English and photography, Kelley has written and published four non-fiction books, co-authored a book with another photographer, and has completed three other special edition books.
Two of her books are half-writing, and half-photography, Kelley said, explaining that teaching and displaying her photography professionally helped lead her into writing.
“I learned how to write tight vignettes and then paired those with photographs. One of the greatest compliments I got about the writing was when my show was up in a prep school in Massachusetts,” she said. “I talked to the curator and he said, ‘no one ever stops to read the little tags next to pictures, but they’re reading yours every single time.’ If I can get high school kids to read the little bit besides the picture, this is working.”
The author is also expanding her repertoire as she will be publishing a mystery book in 2027, her first foray into fiction writing. Her husband, Rob, writes thrillers and he introduced her to the expansive crime writing community in Maine. That community helped inspire her to take on a new challenge.
“Maine has an amazing crime writing community. There are so many people up here who write crime, and they are so supportive of each other,” Kelley said. “I would go to his conferences and the people were fabulous. They have huge hearts, and very dark imaginations. After a while, I thought I would like to try this. If I’m going to keep coming to these conferences, I might as well ante up.”
Attending the conferences not only helped Kelley to be able to work on her draft with other writers in the community but also witness the level of detail that the genre’s authors put into their work.
“I kept learning from the people who go to those conferences,” she said. “I’d go to panels and they would talk about what exactly you would see if you came upon a crime scene, or what you should be looking for; or panels about how to introduce red herrings without it being really obvious that it’s a red herring. They address everything that happens in the real world of crime investigation to know how to write the different details of it.”
After spending many vacation hours in Maine throughout her life, Kelley moved to Maine in 2010 and settled in Port Clyde with her husband.
Transportation for Kelley’s presentation may be available from Age Friendly Windham by calling 207-892-4649. For more details about the presentation, visit the library’s website at www.windham.lib.me.us. <
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