Beth Powning was born in 1949 and grew up in a small New England town where her family has lived since the 1790's. She attended E.O.Smith High School, in Storrs, Connecticut, and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, New York, where she majored in creative writing. Her mentor and advisor was the novelist E.L.Doctorow.
About her writing, she says:
I have no memory of learning to read. Books were like magic. I entered into them with an immersion so total that I needed to tell my own life to myself in order to make a world of equivalent intensity, and so a third person commentary ran, endlessly, in my mind. When I was eight years old, I decided I would be an author. I went to tea with Esther Bates, the author of the "Marilda" books. We talked, shyly, about writing.
The first book I ever bought was "The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas." I was intoxicated by the wild tumble of words, the feelings they elicited that transcended language. For awhile, in my late teens, I forgot my dream of being an author and began my university studies as an actor. Yet all rivulets were leading to the same stream. What better training for a writer than to think oneself into character?
In 1969, Beth Davis married Peter Powning, and in 1972, the young couple immigrated to Canada. They bought an 1870's farm in New Brunswick, where they established a pottery business.
In those early years, I had a taste of Azuba's life. We had one telephone on a twelve party line. We could only phone out, but could not receive calls. We had a wringer washer, a wood cook stove, a clothes line. We had a Jersey cow, and two dozen hens. We cut all our firewood and hauled it down from the forest. Going to the outhouse, fireflies made an erratic blinking in the meadows. Nights, there was silence, save for the rushing of rivers and the call of owls.
Writing could only be wedged into left-over corners of time: after gardening, or working as a studio assistant, or, later, child-rearing. After a hiatus of doing no writing, she turned to photography. It was not until 1995, after she had published a book of photography, Roses for Canadian Gardens (written by childhood friend Bob Osborne) that she found her voice in Seeds of Another Summer, a book of essays and her own photographs that tells the story of her sense of displacement and of "finding the spirit of home in nature." The book was published in the U.S. as Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life. Over the next 15 years, five books followed: another book of photographs, Northern Trees and Shrubs; two works of non-fiction, Shadow Child and Edge Seasons; and two novels, The Hatbox Letters, and The Sea Captain's Wife.
For more about Beth Powning, CLICK to go to author's resume in main website.