Book Club with Phil Primack and Water Street Bookstore: ‘Put It Down On Paper’: The Words and Life of Mary Folsom Blair, A Fifty-Year Search by Phil Primack

Join SELT, local Epping author Phil Primack, and Water Street Bookstore for a book club meeting for ‘Put It Down On Paper’: The Words and Life of Mary Folsom Blair, A Fifty-Year Search by Phil Primack at the new Nan & George Mathey Center for People and Nature at Burley Farms! Phil Primack was a reporter for newspapers from Boston to Appalachia and has written for, among others, the New York Times, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, and The Nation. He has taught journalism and is the author of New England Country Fair.

“Mary E. Folsom Blair was just a name on a listing sheet when young writer Phil Primack bought her Epping, New Hampshire, property in 1974. As he learned more about this lifelong teacher, Quaker, and early advocate for outdoor education, his reporter bones began to twitch. Over decades, Primack talked to her former students and relatives, tracking down Mary’s most accurate life record: letters and journals dating 1897, when she was fifteen. Her sharp mind and creative soul grapple with the social restraints of her time and “the pain this world holds for a woman.” Mary pens her hopes and bares her despair as young chums die, her classroom ways are challenged, relationships with men and women end until—resigned to her fate as “spinster that was, is and ever shall be”—she meets her Hero on ice. With her collected papers preserved at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, Mary Folsom Blair will teach in a digital forever.”

“Mary’s first journal entries recount carefree youth — long skates along frozen rivers, outings on her ‘wheel.’ As their author grows, the writing reflects the struggles of a talented and creative mind frustrated by gender and other restraints of her time, professional and personal. Mary also writes eloquently of the natural world, an attachment she was determined to instill into young people. Primack has assured that the forest and streams along which Mary once walked will be forever protected by transferring his land as a life estate gift to the Southeast Land Trust of New Hampshire.” – Phil Primack

Click Here to Learn More about Mary Folsom Blair and Phil Primack

“The Writer who Walked These Woods Before Me” By Phil Primack – Boston Globe 12/27/2020 

We are partnering with our friends at Water Street Bookstore in Exeter, who will donate 20% of the proceeds from ‘Put It Down On Paper’: The Words and Life of Mary Folsom Blair to SELT: Grab your copy in person in downtown Exeter, or order through their website (www.waterstreetbooks.com)!

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