Martha Andrews Donovan: One Writer's Excavation

The Maine I Love

Click on the link above to see a slideshow gallery of my photographs of Maine that appears on the website of Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors as part of their “The Maine I Love” series. This photograph of an early spring evening in a small fishing village on the far edge of Mount Desert Island appears in the July/August print issue of MBH&H.

My daily practice of photographing the beauty before me is one way I strive to be more attentive to what surrounds me. There is much ugliness in our world right now, so I also write letters and make calls and march and speak up. Art and action – we need both so dearly. These photographs are part of my humble offering.

Birch Trees

Click on the link above (just below the photograph) to view a slideshow of photographs I took today of the birch trees along Jesup Path in Acadia National Park.

“There is an unexpected shift. The clouds are moving, the trees are moving, the sky is moving. Clouds shift across the sky, cast themselves onto the land below. What does this teach me? I am not a cloud. I am not a hill. I am not a tree. I am not the wind. I am not that bird that just flew past me…. I want to be paid in time. Give me time – not money, not possessions. Give me the invisible – the wind – written in the dancing of the land – the trees, the grasses, the fields, the marshes, the wild flowers. The shimmering leaves, the rustle of the earth, the swish of the wind through screens, this air that is moving, moving, on to someplace else.”

~ Martha Andrews Donovan, “Moving” (from “The Words on My Back / a memoir in fragments and photographs” in Off the Margins)

Windows, doors, thresholds

Click on the link above (just below the photograph) to view a slideshow of photographs of windows, doors, and thresholds that I have taken on Mount Desert Island and across northern New England over the past year and a half.

With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked…
~ Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I want to be Mrs. Ramsay’s child, sitting on the floor at her feet, cutting out pictures from a catalogue, believing for a moment that life will unfold exactly as I imagine it might. Ah, such joy, such intense joy, to live fully in the present – and, should we think beyond today, to trust that it will be fine tomorrow.

This is what I strive for, even if I am rather like Mrs. Ramsay, recognizing that the moment before me is vanishing even as I look. But still – still – I stop each day to wonder at the beauty before me. I am drawn to marshes and mountains, windows and doors. I stand at the threshold of what was and what will be.

For now, I stand still, right here.

Clouds

Click on the link above (just below the photograph) to view a slideshow of photographs I have taken on Mount Desert Island and across northern New England over the past year and a half. Since moving to the small fishing village of Bernard (on Bass Harbor) in September 2016, I have been drawn to the edges of land and sea, and also to the movement of clouds, the shifting of the sky.

There is an unexpected shift. The clouds are moving, the trees are moving, the sky is moving. Clouds shift across the sky, cast themselves onto the land below…. Give me the invisible – the wind – written in the dancing of the land – the trees, the grasses, the fields, the marshes, the wild flowers. The shimmering leaves, the rustle of the earth, the swish of the wind through screens, this air that is moving, moving, on to someplace else.                                                                             

~ From the section “Moving” in my essay “The Words on My Back” in Off the Margins (2017)

Light

Click on the link above (just below the photograph) to view a slideshow of selected images from my recent travels across northern New England.

Marsh

Click on the link above (just below the photograph) to view a slideshow of this marsh at different times of the year.

Seventeen months ago, I moved to a small fishing village on the back side of Mount Desert Island and found myself drawn, day after day, to the beauty here at the edge of this marsh.

I have been away from the island a month now, traveling across northern New England where dear friends have warmly welcomed me into their homes to visit and share stories and write. In my writing and in my dreams, I keep returning to the changing light, the changing days at the edge of land and sea.

My travels draw to a close the end of this week. Soon I will be back in Bernard, wandering through the woods off Leffingwell Road, scrambling across the seawall at Back Beach, standing before this marsh on Lopaus Point.

Here on this island where the land has been shaped and marked and protected, here at the edge of this marsh where the sea speaks to me of danger and desire – here, I feel on the threshold of something that is tender and sweet and complicated and uncertain and hopeful.

Six Scenes from Mount Desert Island

Click on the link above (just below the photograph) to see six photographs of Mount Desert Island