Who I Am

Mary Ellen is a writer, homesteader, mother, maker, community organizer, flower grower, and wildcrafter who has spent a lifetime devoted to international and local community development and organizing.  Now that her children are mostly grown, she spends days tending to soil health, studying the movement of wild grass, drying herbs, and listening to the voices that emerge from silence and the land. She teaches wild poetics and deep image work as the Poet-in-Residence at The Haden Institute, and in ongoing women's poetry circles. She has spent many years exploring depth work,  imagination, and the possibilities of poetry with combat veterans of war under grants, as well as in homeless shelters, substance abuse centers, and peer supported mental health. When her house isn't a messy maker's workshop, she facilitates Farmhouse Poetry Series, sharing meals and conversation about poetry and the inner life, as well as hosting musicians and experimental performance. She has trained with and written for The Institute for Poetic Medicine, taught poetry in Nigeria with Seyi Oluyole who was founding the first free school of the arts for girls in Lagos, and transcribed hours of archival interviews and footage from women in Central Appalachia and Kurdish refugees in Turkey into poetic manuscript form. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize in Poetry, and has been performed by multidisciplinary artists at the MATA Festival in NYC. She continues to write about the knowing through making and the migration of symbols through the unconscious in folk craft, dreams, and "women's work" at her Substack : Women Who Speak With Flowers