Download or read book The Journals of May Sarton Volume One written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-08-08 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now in one volume: Three exquisite meditations on nature, healing, and the pleasures of the solitary life from a New York Times–bestselling author. In a long life spent recording her personal observations, poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton redefined the journal as a literary form. This extraordinary volume collects three of her most beloved works. Journal of a Solitude: Sarton’s bestselling memoir chronicles a solitary year spent at the house she bought and renovated in the quiet village of Nelson, New Hampshire. Her revealing insights are a moving and profound reflection on creativity, oneness with nature, and the courage it takes to be alone. Plant Dreaming Deep: Sarton’s intensely personal account of how she transformed a dilapidated eighteenth-century farmhouse into a home is a loving, beautifully crafted memoir illuminated by themes of friendship, love, nature, and the struggles of the creative life. Recovering: In this affecting diary of one year’s hardships and healing, Sarton focuses on her sixty-sixth year, which was marked by the turmoil of a mastectomy, the end of a treasured relationship, and the loneliness that visits a life of chosen solitude. By turns uplifting, cathartic, and revelatory, Sarton’s journals still strike a chord in the hearts of contemporary readers. Through them, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, “we are able to see our own experiences reflected in hers and we are enriched.”

Download or read book Journal of a Solitude written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The poet and author’s “beautiful . . . wise and warm” journal of time spent in her New Hampshire home alone with her garden, her books, the seasons, and herself (Eugenia Thornton, Cleveland Plain Dealer). “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.” —May Sarton May Sarton’s parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her “real” life—not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude—both an exhilarating and terrifying state. She likens writing to “cracking open the inner world again,” which sometimes plunges her into depression. She confesses her fears, her disappointments, her unresolved angers. Sarton’s garden is her great, abiding joy, sustaining her through seasons of psychic and emotional pain. Journal of a Solitude is a moving and profound meditation on creativity, oneness with nature, and the courage it takes to be alone. Both uplifting and cathartic, it sweeps us along on Sarton’s pilgrimage inward. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

Download or read book As We Are Now written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 93 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bestselling author “May Sarton has never been better than she is in this beautiful, harrowing novel about being old, unwanted, yet refusing to give up” (The Boston Globe). After seventy-six-year-old Caro Spencer suffers a heart attack, her family sends her to a private retirement home to wait out the rest of her days. Her memory growing fuzzy, Caro decides to keep a journal to document the daily goings-on—her feelings of confinement and boredom; her distrust of the home’s owner, Harriet Hatfield, and her daughter, Rose; her pity for the more incapacitated residents; her resentment of her brother, John, for leaving her alone. The journal entries describe not only her frustrations, but also small moments of beauty—found in a welcome visit from her minister, or in watching a bird in the garden. But as she writes, Caro grows increasingly sensitive to the casual atrocities of retirement-home life. Even as she acknowledges her mind is beginning to fail, she is determined to fight back against the injustices foisted upon the home’s occupants. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

Download or read book Plant Dreaming Deep written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author’s tribute to the 18th-century New England farmhouse she called home: “[A] tender and often poignant book by a woman of many insights” (The New York Times Book Review). In Plant Dreaming Deep, Sarton shares an intensely personal account of transforming a house into a home. She begins with an introduction to the enchanting village of Nelson, where she first meets her house. Sarton finds she must “dream the house alive” inside herself before taking the major step of signing the deed. She paints the walls white in order to catch the light and searches for the precise shade of yellow for the kitchen floor. She discovers peace and beauty in solitude, whether she is toiling in the garden or writing at her desk. This is a loving, beautifully crafted memoir illuminated by themes of friendship, love, nature, and the struggles of the creative life. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

Download or read book Kinds of Love written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spending their first winter away from the city, an aging married couple finds renewed friendship and love in the New Hampshire hills Christina and Cornelius Chapman have spent their summers in Willard for years, shunning the city’s hottest months in favor of New Hampshire’s rocky, rolling hills. In Willard, Christina looks forward to spending time with Ellen, enjoying forest walks and the easy conversation that come with longstanding friendship. But while Christina and Cornelius move comfortably between country and city, Ellen and her husband, Nick, are bound to Willard—their working-class lives standing in stark contrast to the moneyed effortlessness of their friends. This summer, however, is different. Rather than moving back to the city once fall sets in, the Chapmans have decided to stay. Characters of all sorts populate the New England town, and through their first winter in Willard, narrated in part through Christina’s journal entries, the friendship between Christina and Ellen deepens, as does the one between Christina and Cornelius. Beautifully written and warmly rendered, Kinds of Love is a heartfelt portrait of marriage, friendship, class, and aging set against a tranquil, small-town New Hampshire backdrop.

Download or read book At Seventy written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the American Book Award: May Sarton’s honest and engrossing journal of her seventieth year, spent living and working on the Maine coast. May Sarton’s journals are a captivating look at a rich artistic life. In this, her ode to aging, she savors the daily pleasures of tending to her garden, caring for her dogs, and entertaining guests at her beloved Maine home by the sea. Her reminiscences are raw, and her observations are infused with the poetic candor for which Sarton—over the course of her decades-long career—became known. An enlightening glimpse into a time—the early 1980s—and an age, At Seventy is at once specific and universal, providing a unique window into septuagenarian life that readers of all generations will enjoy. At times mournful and at others hopeful, this is a beautiful memoir of the year in which Sarton, looking back on it all, could proclaim, “I am more myself than I have ever been.”

Download or read book May Sarton A Self Portrait written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 83 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This transcript from the film World of Light: A Portrait of May Sarton illuminates the life and writing of the poet while celebrating the joys of creativity, love, and solitude In June of 1979, May Sarton answered the questions of two filmmakers and read to them from her poetry. This four-day “jam session” ultimately became an acclaimed documentary about her life and work. For Sarton, the muse has always been female, and the writer says that her own poems “tell me where to go.” In this rare and inspiring window into a singular woman’s soul, Sarton speaks candidly about everything from how a single image opened the door to writing about her mother to the importance of transparency in art and life. She shares insights into her very personal art, including the unusual people and events that provide inspiration, how creativity can grow out of pain, solitude as a two-edged sword, the difficulties of being a female poet, and the ways love can open “the door into one’s own secret and . . . frightening real self.” Featuring sections entitled “On Inner Space,” “On Nature,” and “On Love,” this revealing volume is also about the need go on, even when up against overwhelming odds. May Sarton: A Self-Portrait pays tribute to an artist’s vision and serves as a revealing window into a fascinating life.

Download or read book At Eighty Two written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times–bestselling author of At Seventy returns with a memoir about advancing age, including her experience with a series of strokes. In this poignant and fearless account, Sarton chronicles the struggles of life at eighty-two. She juxtaposes the quotidian details of life—battling a leaky roof, sharing an afternoon nap with her cat, the joy of buying a new mattress—with lyrical musings about work, celebrity, devoted friends, and the limitations wrought by the frailties of age. She creates poetry out of everyday existence, whether bemoaning a lack of recognition by the literary establishment or the devastation wrought by a series of strokes. Incapacitated by illness, Sarton relies on friends for the little things she always took for granted. As she becomes more and more aware of “what holds life together in a workable whole,” she takes solace in flowers and chocolate and reading letters from devoted fans. This journal takes us into the heart and mind of an extraordinary artist and woman, and is a must-read for Sarton devotees and anyone facing the reality of growing older. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

Download or read book I Knew a Phoenix written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: May Sarton’s first memoir: A lyrical and enchanting look at her formative years from the onset of the First World War through the beginning of the Second Author of a dozen memoirs, May Sarton had a unique talent for capturing the wonder and beauty of nature, love, aging, and art. Throughout her prolific career, she penned many journals examining the different stages of her life, and in this, her first memoir, she laid the foundation for what would become one of the most beloved autobiographical oeuvres in modern literature. Sarton writes of her early childhood in Belgium in the years before World War I, her time in Boston while her father taught at Harvard, and her schooling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she fell in love with poetry and theater. She describes her first meetings and fast friendships with such notable figures as Virginia Woolf, Julian Huxley, James Stephens, and S. S. Koteliansky, many of whom would later come to populate her critically acclaimed journals. With sharp insights and captivating prose, I Knew a Phoenix introduces a generation of readers to one of the twentieth century’s most cherished writers.

Download or read book The Novels of May Sarton Volume One written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2017-11-28 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three luminous novels from a New York Times–bestselling author and National Book Award finalist whose “prose leaves compelling echoes in one’s mind” (The New York Times Book Review). Throughout her long and acclaimed career, May Sarton refused to be categorized. As a memoirist, poet, and novelist, she broke new ground by openly exploring homosexuality, gender inequality, and other once taboo social issues. Gathered here in one volume are three of her most memorable and moving works of fiction. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing: Widely regarded as her most important work, Sarton’s 1965 semiautobiographical novel centers upon Hillary Stevens, an author now in her twilight years. As she prepares to publish anew, Stevens sits down to discuss her life, the arc of her creative journey, and her love affairs—with both men and women. “The plot of this short novel is deceptively simple, the mood subtle, the feeling intense” (The New York Times Book Review). A Shower of Summer Days: The Irish estate home Dene Court has been shuttered for years—but this summer Violet Dene Gordon and her husband Charles return from British Burma, electrifying life in the sleepy village that adjoins Violet’s childhood home. As an added complication, Violet’s American niece is being sent to Ireland to separate her from an unsuitable romantic attachment. A National Book Award finalist, “A Shower of Summer Days establishes once and for all [Sarton’s] unmistakable authority” (The New York Times Book Review). The Magnificent Spinster: This “absolutely compelling . . . monument to love . . . [and] friendship” is actually the story of two women: Cam, the novel’s narrator, and the recently deceased Jane Reid. Unmarried and childless, Jane left no family to remember her, so Cam sets out to immortalize the life of her quietly remarkable friend and teacher in fiction (The Cleveland Plain Dealer).

Download or read book Recovering written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-16 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An affecting diary of one year’s hardships and healing, by one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary memoirists For decades, readers have celebrated May Sarton’s journals for their candid look at relationships, success and failure, communion with nature, and the curious stages of aging. In Recovering, Sarton focuses on her sixty-sixth year—one marked by the turmoil of a mastectomy, the end of a treasured relationship, and the loneliness that visits a life of chosen solitude. Each deeply felt entry in the journal, written between 1978 and 1979, is laced with poignancy and honesty as she grapples with a cold reception for her latest novel, the sad descent of a close friend into senility, and other struggles. Despite the trials of this one painful year, Sarton writes of her progression toward a hard-won renewal, achieved through good friendships, the levity provided by her cherished dog, and peaceful days in her garden. A candid account of Sarton’s revival from personal darkness back into light, Recovering is another stunning entry in the author’s irrepressible oeuvre.

Download or read book Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sarton’s most important novel tells the story of a poet in her seventies, whose life is retold episodically during an interview with two writers from a literary magazine Hilary Stevens’s prolific career includes a provocative novel that shot her into the public consciousness years ago, and an oeuvre of poetry that more recently has consigned her to near-obscurity. Now in the twilight of her life, Hilary, who is both a feminist and a lesbian, is receiving renewed attention for an upcoming collection of poems, one that has brought two young reporters to her Cape Cod home. As Hilary prepares for the conversation, she recalls formative moments both large and small. She then embarks on the interview itself—a witty and intelligent discussion of her life, work, and romantic relationships with men and women. After the journalists have left, Hilary helps a visiting male friend with his anxiety over being gay and imparts wisdom about channeling his own creative passions. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

Download or read book May Sarton written by Margot Peters and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-05-04 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first biography of May Sarton: a brilliant revelation of the life and work of a literary figure who influenced her thousands of readers not only by her novels and poetry, but by her life and her writings about it. May Sarton's career stretched from 1930 (early sonnets published in Poetry magazine) to 1995 (her journal At Eighty-Two). She wrote more than twenty novels, and twenty-five books of poems and journals. The acclaimed biographer Margot Peters was given full access to Sarton's letters, journals, and notes, and during five years of research came to know Sarton herself--the complex woman and artist. She gives us a compelling portrait of Sarton the actress, the poet, the novelist, the feminist, the writer who struggled for literary acceptance. She shows us, beneath Sarton's exhilarating, irresistible spirit, the needy courtier and seducer, the woman whose creativity was propelled by the psychic drama she created in others. We watch young May at age two as she is abruptly uprooted from her native Belgium by World War I, a child ignored both by her mother, who was intent on her own artistic vision and reluctant to cope with a child, and by her father, obsessed with his academic research. We see Sarton as a young girl in America, and then later, at nineteen, choosing a life in the theatre, landing a job in Eva Le Gallienne's Civic Repertory, and gathering what would become a tight-knit coterie of friends and lovers . . . Sarton beginning to write poetry and novels . . . Sarton making friends with Elizabeth Bowen and Julian Huxley, Erika and Klaus Mann, Virginia Woolf, the poet H.D.--charming and enlisting them with her work, her vitality, her hunger for love, driven by her need to conquer (among her conquests: Bowen, Huxley, and later his wife, Juliette). We see her intense friendships with literary pals, including Muriel Rukeyser (her lover), and Louise Bogan, Sarton's "literary sibling, who at once encouraged her and excluded her from a world in which Bogan was a central figure. We see Sarton begin to create in the spiritual journals that inspired the devotion of readers the image of a strong, independent woman who lived peacefully with solitude--an image that contradicted the reality of her neediness, loneliness, and isolation as she pushed away loved ones with her demands and betrayals. A fascinating portrait of one of our major literary figures--a book that for the first time reveals the life that she herself kept hidden.

Download or read book The Fur Person Illustrated Edition written by May Sarton and published by Pickle Partners Publishing. This book was released on 2015-11-06 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes 10 illustrations by Barbara Knox A delightful, whimsical tale—one of the most popular books for cat lovers ever written. May Sarton’s fictionalized account of her cat Tom Jones’s life and adventures prior to making the author’s acquaintance begins with a fiercely independent, nameless street cat who follows the ten commandments of the Gentleman Cat—including “A Gentleman Cat allows no constraint of his person, not even loving constraint.” But after several years of roaming, Tom has grown tired of his vagabond lifestyle, and he concludes that there might be some appeal after all in giving up the freedom of street life for a loving home. It will take just the right human companion, however, to make his transformation from Cat About Town to genuine Fur Person possible. Sarton’s book is one of the most beloved stories ever written about the joys and tribulations inherent in sharing one’s life with a cat.

Download or read book The House by the Sea written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-22 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author and poet’s graceful elegy about life, love, work, and growing older: “The most moving and the most thoughtful [of her] journal-memoirs” (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland). When May Sarton uprooted her life after fifteen years in the refurbished New Hampshire house with the garden she tended so lovingly, she relied solely on instinct. And something told her it was time to move on. Accompanied by her wild cat, Bramble, and Tamas, a Shetland shepherd puppy—the first dog she ever owned—Sarton embarked on the next chapter of her life. The house she chose by the sea in the Maine village of York is completely isolated except during the summer months. Surrounded by nothing but endless ocean, woods, and vast skies, Sarton experiences a rare sense of peace. She creates a new garden and fears that in this tranquil state, she may never write again. But in her solitude—with its occasional interruptions for trips away and visits from friends—she realizes that creativity is constantly renewing itself. This journal offers fascinating insight into a remarkable woman and the work and friendships that form the twin pillars of her life. This ebook features an extended biography of May Sarton.

Download or read book After the Stroke written by May Sarton and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-08-18 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling feminist author’s “lyrical, candid, sensitive” account of her efforts to regain her health, art, and sense of self after a stroke (Publishers Weekly). Feeling cut off and isolated—from herself most of all—after suffering a stroke at age 73, May Sarton began a journal that helped her along the road to recovery. She wrote every day without fail, even if illness sometimes prevented her from penning more than a few lines. From her sprawling house off the coast of Maine, Sarton shares the quotidian details of her life in the aftermath of what her doctors identified as a small brain hemorrhage. What they did not tell her was the effect it would have on her life and work. Sarton’s journal is filled with daily accounts of the weather, her garden, beloved pets, and her concerns about losing psychic energy and no longer feeling completely whole. A woman who had always prized her solitude, Sarton experiences feelings of intense loneliness. When overwhelmed by the past, she tries to find comfort in soothing remembrances of her travels, and struggles to learn to live moment by moment. As Sarton begins to regain her strength, she rejoices in the life “recaptured and in all that still lies ahead.” Interspersed with heartfelt recollections about fellow poets and aspiring writers who see in Sarton a powerful muse, this is a wise and moving memoir about life after illness.

Download or read book Joanna and Ulysses written by May Sarton and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1987 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Story of a painter on vacation and a mistreated donkey.