Jean Marie Ivey

Jean Marie Ivey is a writer, painter, and woman of faith living in Ellsworth, Maine. At nearly eighty eight years old she is still writing, still painting, and still asking the question she first asked at age six — Is this all there is?

She is the author of eleven books spanning fifty years, beginning with Maine Paradise, co-authored with Russell D. Butcher and published by Viking Press in 1972. Her work moves between memoir, historical fiction, personal essay, poetry, and spiritual reflection, always grounded in the particular — a wild rose in a Maine garden, a child lost on Mount Katahdin, a beam of light falling on one child in a crowd of thousands in Vatican Square.

A longtime member of the United Church of Christ, she has worshiped across many traditions over a lifetime and found God in all of them. She spent thirty three years as a research technologist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, and founded J.A.C.K., Justice for Autism With Community and Kindness.

Her two newest anthologies — The Promise — In Uncertain Times and Crazy Quilt — are accepted for publication. Her memoir Abducted, about a lifetime of unexplained nighttime experiences and possible alien abduction, is complete and seeking a publisher. She painted the cover herself.

She sings no longer, having lost her voice to vocal cord paralysis. She paints instead. And she writes — every day, still.