The Work of Edie Clark

Edie Clark has been writing and editing from her home in New Hampshire for the past thirty years. She has written extensively about New England in feature stories for Yankee magazine, where she served as Senior Editor for ten years and then Senior Writer and Fiction Editor for another fourteen years. Her multiple part series on topics such as land development, water pollution, the Christian Science church and the Connecticut River have gained widespread attention. In her hundreds of articles published by Yankee, she has established her reputation as one who writes about ordinary lives changed by one extraordinary act or circumstance.

For the past 17 years, she has written a popular monthly essay for Yankee. Known as Mary’s Farm, the column is rooted in the place where she lives, an old farm in the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire. The farm, which once grew corn and flax, sheep and horses, once belonged to a woman named Mary. Edie bought the farm 10 years ago, and now grows only hay. And stories.

Her work has also appeared in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Northeast magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Hope magazine and Reader’s Digest. She has taught workshops and lectured frequently about writing and reporting.

She has received the New Hampshire Writers and Publishers Project’s award for Excellence in Journalism and for four years in a row, her essays have been listed in the Best American Essays. In 1998, she was named “Writer of the Year” by the City and Regional Magazine Publishers Association. She has written the text for an orchestral work entitled Monadnock Tales, a fusion of music and poetry, which had its world premiere in 2001 and continues to please audiences.

Edie has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, as well as at Hedgebrook Writer’s Retreat on Whidbey Island, Washington. She has also been in residence as the Visiting Writer at the University of Northern Michigan.

Edie is the author of The Place He Made, a memoir about her husband, Paul Bolton, who died of cancer at the age of 39. Though the book takes a wide-eyed look at cancer and at death, The Place He Made is a love story, more about life than it is about death. In its review, the New York Times Book Review called The Place He Made “a triumph of the human spirit . . . sure to take its place among the best of the literature.” The book, published in hardcover by Villard, was issued in paperback by Bantam Books and translated into Korean.

Last fall, she published The View from Mary's Farm, a collection of the essays from the last page of Yankee magazine, and a new collection, Saturday Beans and Sunday Suppers, essays about favorite foods, will be published this coming fall.

Currently, she is Contributing Editor for Yankee magazine. She teaches writing and has taught many workshops. For several years, she taught in the MFA program at Emerson College in Boston. Edie is available for freelance assignments and speaking engagements.