Who was Mary McHale Wood, anyway?
Mary McHale Woodıs biography
By Jeremy Shaw
Mary once lived in an A-frame deep in the Missouri woods, five miles from a small village named Bellflower which was known for its five churches and one bar as well as its pretty name. This was an idyllic interlude in her life, lasting several years.
Here she wrote, composed songs, held court for her friends and family from Wisconsin, and rolled cigarettes.
A Siamese cat named Virginia Woolf shared Maryıs space, along with, variously, a drunken raccoon who gorged on the leavings of a tomato wine-making session and passed out, a pack of very vocal coyotes, various artists and musicians passing through, and a constant stream of local Missourians whom she befriended and entranced.
This was Mary at her most creative - at ease with a natural world she enhanced. She kept the 1960s alive well into the seventies and eighties.
By contrast, much of Mary's life was a battle, always against the diabetes that had plagued her since her youth and often against a society she saw as wanting to dampen her spirit and make her conform. As a reporter at the Green Bay News-Chronicle, she took to wearing outlandish hats even as she won mainstream prizes for her columns, articles and a special series about diabetes. At the same time, she railed against the gender bias that allowed men to bare their chests in public, but not women. Protest by exaggeration of headware was consistent with Mary's personal mission.
Her early interest in writing and English language usage was fostered in school by an admired English teacher, Madeleine Jewell, from whom she learned to look at words and syntax with an appreciative as well as critical eye. She was uncompromising, even over trivial misuse of the language: "Area is not an adjective," she fumed, at the increasingly common media mention of "area churches" or "area inhabitants" or ³area² anything else. It is not that she found writing always easy. On the lawn below Fort Mackinac on Michigan's Mackinac Island where she was working during summer vacation from college, she showed a story to a more experienced writer in the hope of gaining his approval and advice. He told her she should start by slicing off the first two pages. She was furious.
Some years later they were married.
By Jeremy Shaw
Mary once lived in an A-frame deep in the Missouri woods, five miles from a small village named Bellflower which was known for its five churches and one bar as well as its pretty name. This was an idyllic interlude in her life, lasting several years.
Here she wrote, composed songs, held court for her friends and family from Wisconsin, and rolled cigarettes.
A Siamese cat named Virginia Woolf shared Maryıs space, along with, variously, a drunken raccoon who gorged on the leavings of a tomato wine-making session and passed out, a pack of very vocal coyotes, various artists and musicians passing through, and a constant stream of local Missourians whom she befriended and entranced.
This was Mary at her most creative - at ease with a natural world she enhanced. She kept the 1960s alive well into the seventies and eighties.
By contrast, much of Mary's life was a battle, always against the diabetes that had plagued her since her youth and often against a society she saw as wanting to dampen her spirit and make her conform. As a reporter at the Green Bay News-Chronicle, she took to wearing outlandish hats even as she won mainstream prizes for her columns, articles and a special series about diabetes. At the same time, she railed against the gender bias that allowed men to bare their chests in public, but not women. Protest by exaggeration of headware was consistent with Mary's personal mission.
Her early interest in writing and English language usage was fostered in school by an admired English teacher, Madeleine Jewell, from whom she learned to look at words and syntax with an appreciative as well as critical eye. She was uncompromising, even over trivial misuse of the language: "Area is not an adjective," she fumed, at the increasingly common media mention of "area churches" or "area inhabitants" or ³area² anything else. It is not that she found writing always easy. On the lawn below Fort Mackinac on Michigan's Mackinac Island where she was working during summer vacation from college, she showed a story to a more experienced writer in the hope of gaining his approval and advice. He told her she should start by slicing off the first two pages. She was furious.
Some years later they were married.