Betsy Bowen
Nonfiction
Hallowell, ME
I was born in New York City, and in my life have worked in two vastly different worlds: academia and business. I hold a Ph.D. in literature and an MBA in finance from Columbia University. I studied writing at the Radcliffe Institute, digital video journalism at Rockport ME, and taught at Queens College, C.U.N.Y. and Tufts University.
Looking back over my seventy-plus years, I see my work as a writer as having been carved out of a series of improbable circumstances. Spring Bear, a novella, was the fusion of an imaginative immersion in the struggles of a backwoods teenager and my own love affair with the state of Maine. Here’s more on that. Then came the discovery, in a Connecticut barn, of my photo-journalist father’s unpublished memoir about his time with an American ambulance corps in WWII’s North Africa campaign. Here’s more on Back from Tobruk. There followed A Writer’s Life, a Daughter’s Portrait, about his struggles as a crusading New Deal journalist who wrote his way through the major events of the mid-twentieth century. Here’s more on that.
For several decades, I and my husband, now deceased, lived a country life in a house surrounded by acres of forest, lakes, and streams. Our companions were wild turkeys, foxes, the random porcupine, and a herd of deer; even a bear. I have lived with the effects of a spinal cord injury for over thirty years and now use a mobility scooter to get around. I am at work on a novel about W.P. Maddox, Boston lawyer turned farmer, bumptious, family-proud, painfully at odds with his two sons. The eldest, headed for partnership in the family law firm, has riddled his personal life with infidelities. His other son, Kemp, drug user and dealer turned survivalist, returns after a long estrangement to turn an abandoned hunting camp on his father’s land into an armed bug-out shelter against the coming collapse. A climate-change exacerbated ice storm devastates the community and turns the locals against the survivalists. Working title: The Entangled Mind of W.P. Maddox