She Hides Pencils in the Trees!

Of her childhood, Mary Oliver said: “It was a very dark and broken house that I came from. And I escaped it, barely. With years of trouble.”

She skipped school and read voraciously to escape her home life, mostly the work of John Keats and Emily Dickinson. She also began taking long walks in the woods by her house and writing poems. She says, “I got saved by poetry. And by the beauty of the world.”

She finds most of her inspiration on her walks and hikes. She takes along a hand-sewn notebook so she can stop and write.

Once, she lost her pencil, and now she hides pencils in the trees along the trails so she always has spares.

She says: “It has frequently been remarked, about my own writings, that I emphasize the notion of attention. This began simply enough: to see that the way the flicker flies is greatly different from the way the swallow plays in the golden air of summer.”