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Presentation with Robin Clifford Wood, Author of The Field House

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The Stockbridge Library Association is pleased to host Robin Clifford Wood,  author of The Field House: A Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine. on Saturday, July 24, 2021 at 3:00 p.m.

National Book Award-winning writer Rachel Field gets long-overdue recognition in first-ever biography of her life Genre-blending biography-memoir reveals two women, connected across time.  This book, compelling blend of biography and memoir, “The Field House” (She Writes Press, May 4, 2021), recounts the remarkable life of writer Rachel Field from the perspective of a woman who lived in Field’s old, neglected island home in Maine, sparking a unique sisterhood across time.

Born of illustrious New England stock, Rachel Field was a National Book Award-winning novelist, a Newbery Medal-winning children’s writer, a poet, playwright, and rising Hollywood success in the early twentieth century. Her light was abruptly extinguished at the age of forty-seven, when she died at the pinnacle of her personal happiness and professional acclaim.

Fifty years later, Robin Clifford Wood stepped onto the sagging floorboards of Rachel’s long-neglected home on the rugged shores of an island in Maine and began dredging up Rachel’s history. She was determined to answer the questions that filled the house’s every crevice: Who was this vibrant, talented artist whose very name entrances those who still remember her work? Why is that work—which was widely celebrated in her lifetime—so largely forgotten today?

ROBIN CLIFFORD WOOD has a BA from Yale University, an MA in English from the University of Rochester, and an MFA in creative writing from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. During twenty-five years as a full-time mom, she published local human-interest features in New Hampshire, New York, and Massachusetts and spent seven years as a regular columnist, first in Massachusetts, then for Maine’s Bangor Daily News. She began teaching college writing in 2015. Her articles have appeared in Port City Life magazine, Bangor Metro, and Solstice literary magazine, which published her powerful essay “How Do You Help Your Parents Die?” in its spring 2019 issue. Her award-winning poetry received national recognition from the 2020 Writer’s Digest Competition. Wood lives in central Maine with her husband and dogs. The Field House is her first book. For more information, visit www.robincliffordwood.com.