Mary Freeman

Mary Freeman (1943-) was born in Portland, Maine and brought home to Parsonsfield, to a large Federalist house filled with lots of dusty old books and wonderful relics of lives of ancestors who had lived there reading those books for a hundred and fifty years before she arrived. Because her mother was a perennial student who attended many colleges and universities, and her father was a landscape architect for the National Park Service, her earliest years were spent migrating annually between Charlottesville Virginia's UVA and Orono Maine's UMO, always returning each summer to her mother's family homestead in Parsonsfield, Maine, where her family lived for eight generations, until 1973 when her mother sold the house, unable to pay the rising property taxes.

In Orono she loved visiting the cows and lambs and bulls in the university barn, playing Bolero in the student lounge, and reading science fiction in the library when she wasn't fishing or swimming with her brother. In Charlottesville she spent her time roller-skating past Edgar Allen Poe's room (which reminded her of the house in Parsonsfield) and playing cowboys and Indians with the neighborhood boys (she scorned playing with the girls, it was too dull). She loved going to the movies. As adolescence approached, she developed the habit of seeing the movie and reading the book, all in hopes of re-living the romantic moments of the movie. Since in those days most movies were based on classics in literature (War and Peace, Hamlet, Wuthering Heights, etc.), she had read most of the classics before she entered the university, either directly after movies or in high school when she should have been doing her homework.

In Parsonsfield, she spent a lot of time swimming and fishing and rowing on West Pond, climbing trees and reading in the tree houses she built up there, and going through all the stuff people in her family had never thrown away and had stored in the shed chamber. Her heroes at the time were the Lone Ranger and Tonto, and Tarzan. She aspired to be an Indian when she grew up, and this desire evolved into a deep interest in anthropology and archeology. When she discovered her university did not offer these subjects as majors, she chose her second loves as a double major--English literature and history. She married the summer after her first semester--she was eighteen (school of course continued). This marriage lasted eight years and produced four daughters; the second produced three sons and two more daughters before it too ended eighteen years later. She was very, very busy indeed, but never stopped reading and writing.

Between 1963 and retirement in 2005, she raised nine children, taught school on all but a few levels, and earned degrees in English and Literacy education in 1969, 1976 and 1994 from the University of Maine. Despite living by the skin of her teeth and concentrating on feeding, clothing, and sheltering her children, during this entire time she wrote poetry, plays, essays, memoirs and novels while independently studying human evolution, history, philosophy, science, literature, philosophy and keeping current with politics. During this time she discovered the ideas of the Stoic philosophers Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius exactly suited her and in fact deduced (through both internal and external evidence) that their ideas most likely had been the basis for how she personally had been raised as a child. She also discovered the writings of Barry Lopez, Frederick Turner, and Julia Budenz resonated with those of all the great writers she had discovered in the house in Parsonsfield and had studied both in school and out. Her passion for Bob Dylan nearly drove some of her daughters to running away from home with the repetition of the record-playing. Her sons preferred her liking Burt lancaster, Matt Damon, Leonardo Dicaprio, and Steve Martin to whom they (at least in the case of the last three) could better relate.

Since childhood she has greatly enjoyed chess, painting, playing the violin, hiking, swimming, skiing and tennis--in high school (Kents Hill School) she was tennis team captain and held the record for the fifty yard dash (5.4 seconds). Largely unpublished except for scholarly pieces (she was a finalist for the International Reading Association's Outstanding Dissertation of the Year Award in 1994), she began publishing all she has written for the past fifty years in July of 2013. (She is thrilled that she finally, now the children are grown, can concentrate on publishing her writing, not just writing it.) Current works are chiefly futuristic and include: Fairy tales of the future (a collection of short stories), a futuristic screenplay pastiche of King Lear entitled "Lear 2020," and a post-apocalyptic epic placed in the future. Another work ongoing is a family history.

She is much amused that she is writing about herself in the third person. Having been a teacher in the state psychiatric hospital for eight years before retirement in 2005, she has reason for those chuckles.