Bucksport Poet Laureate Pat Ranzoni has been awarded a $1,000 grant from the SpiritWords Fund of the University of Maine Foundation to support her proposal for an anthology titled STILL MILL, Poems, Stories & Songs of Making Paper in Bucksport, Maine, 1930–2014. The grant will help fund the cost of the book’s publication and distribution. Ranzoni will compile and edit the collection without compensation as a gift to her hometown. Proceeds from the book beyond the costs of production and marketing will be donated to the Bucksport Historical Society for locating, protecting and exhibiting material documenting the Bucksport mill, further addressing the fund’s mission.
“This generous grant, for which we are exceedingly grateful, makes a huge and hopeful difference to our vision,” says Ranzoni. “To have our voices believed in and respected in this way, not just locally but statewide, shows us that the work of our lives is valued beyond the scrap heap we’ve heard it might become.”
The SpiritWords Fund was established in 1996 to discover, support, honor and preserve the full breadth of poetic expression that grows out of a long and intimate relationship with the state of Maine and its rich and various cultural traditions. It seeks to recognize and honor those voices whose memories, dreams and imagination inhabit this homeland and whose work remembers and renews the significance of place and community.
The call for submissions, announced after the mill’s closing, has brought about a dozen poems, two songs, a half dozen stories, even cartoons. The collection includes a “treasure-trove” of verses and drawings of mill and regional life by “The Papermill Poet” Owen K. Soper (pen name, Fuller Clay), whose work appeared in the Seaboard Bulletin, a publication about the mill’s early identity in Bucksport. “Many of us old mill families have wealth such as this in our records,” says Ranzoni, “and we have promises from third- and fourth-generation mill workers for more.”
March 1, the collection will be reviewed to determine if additional resources are needed for the project. Rather than a totally romanticized account, the project seeks recollections, including the pride and the problems, along with the details and reality of industrial papermaking in Bucksport that only those affected by it can know.
Authentic submissions from all are welcomed regardless of age or schooling, including traditional and experimental treatments. All subjects and perspectives, from all time frames will be considered. Previously published work with standard rights and permissions may be submitted. All submissions will be copyright protected and all contributors will receive a copy of the book.
Send typed or handwritten submissions, with a few lines about your relationship to the Bucksport mill, its people and/or place, to pranzoni@aol.com or c/o Pat Ranzoni 289 Bucksmills Rd., Bucksport, ME 04416; enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope for a reply.
PHOTO: The sun sets on the last papermaking shift at the Verso paper mill in Bucksport. December 4, 2014. Photo by Ernie Smith
