Author, Robin Clifford Wood will be discusing her new book The Field House: a Writer’s Life Lost and Found on an Island in Maine. 

Born of illustrious New England stock, Rachel Field was a National Book Award–winning novelist, a Newbery Medal–winning children’s writer, a poet, playwright, and rising Hollywood success in the early twentieth century. Her light was abruptly extinguished at the age of forty-seven, when she died at the pinnacle of her personal happiness and professional acclaim.
Fifty years later, Robin Clifford Wood stepped onto the sagging floorboards of Rachel’s long-neglected home on the rugged shores of an island in Maine and began dredging up Rachel’s history. She was determined to answer the questions that filled the house’s every crevice: Who was this vibrant, talented artist whose very name entrances those who still remember her work? Why is that work—so richly remunerated and widely celebrated in her lifetime—so largely forgotten today? The journey into Rachel’s world took Wood further than she ever dreamed possible, unveiling a life fraught with challenge, and buried by tragedy, and yet incandescent with joy.

Robin Clifford Wood first discovered her love of writing as an eight-year-old with a penchant for dramatic fancy. She composed poetry on window ledges and wrote an epic novel about an adventuring polar bear.  None of those early works saw publication, but since then she has been featured in Solstice Literary Magazine, The Maine Review, Port City Life Magazine, Bangor Metro, Genesee Valley Parent Magazine, and Maine Public Radio’s “Music That Moves Me” series. After eight years writing columns for the Bangor Daily, she shifted her attention to larger book projects and freelance work. She also began teaching writing at Husson University, which she enjoyed enormously for five years.