PETERBOROUGH, NH – On Saturday, September 28, from 4-6 p.m. New England writers will gather to read essays and passages from the books of their dear friend and fellow writer, Edie Clark, who died July 17.
Free and open to the public, the event will be held at the beautiful Unitarian Universalist Church in downtown Peterborough. Refreshments and conversation will follow the program.
Writers Howard Mansfield, Sy Montgomery, Katrina Kennison, Debra Joy and Richard Adams Carey are among the readers.
For decades Yankee Magazine readers received their issue in the mail, and immediately turned to read Edie Clark’s words.
The beloved writer received more fan mail than any other writer in the history of Yankee which first went to press in 1935.
Clark’s first Yankee column, “The Garden at Chesham Depot,” established her as the magazine’s own E.B. White, friend and Yankee editor, Mel Allen said.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Clark wrote profiles and essays, as well as long investigative pieces on abuses in local governments and churches, and environmental issues. Her penetrating profiles brought her subjects to homes of readers around the world.
Her column, “Mary’s Farm,” is perhaps where she connected with the most people over her long career. As well as with her many books, which will be available for purchase.
“From a knoll on her beloved Mary’s Farm in Harrisville, she spent years looking out to a sweeping meadow and Mt. Monadnock, collecting the stories of people she knew, the changing weather, the wild animals who visited, and the misadventures of Dune, Mayday and finally Harriett, the dogs who were her constant companions,” wrote her friend Mel Allen.
From her obituary, “Edie Clark, whose essays about her life in rural New Hampshire inspired thousands of readers across the country to feel she was a close friend, even a member of their family.
“I listen to people’s stories, and I never tire of it,” she once wrote. “I am constantly amazed at people’s lives, how the most ordinary people come alive with the most unusual stories.”
The last years of her life were spent at the Jaffrey Rehabilitation Center. Though caring nurses attended to her needs, Edie felt she had lost everything dear to her: her Mary’s Farm, her mobility to go where she wanted and most of all her ability to write and, as her eyesight declined, to read.
But even when Edie was unable to write, she never lost her laughter, or her delight in some delicious morsel or the sight of hummingbirds in the nursing home’s garden. Friends brought her to Sunday church and on outings. She called these “jailbreaks.”
Clark’s readers never forgot what she meant to them. Whenever Yankee reprinted one of her essays and urged readers to write her, they responded. Hundreds of cards and letters poured in, which friends would read to her. These notes could make her smile and tear up at the same time
“These readers, nearly all people she had never met,” wrote to Clark, “Although we have never met, I feel like I know you in so many ways”; “Reading you makes me smile every single time”
During the pandemic, many wrote to say that even in their dark hours, when they opened one of the anthologies of her Yankee essays, their days brightened, and they felt hope return. That, too, remains Edie’s legacy.
