Louisa Enright's Blog

I moved to Mid-Coast Maine in June 2004.   My husband John and I wanted to have an adventure, after having lived in the Washington, DC, area for almost forty years.  It has been glorious to be living in a more rural area.

I study systems of cultural power and earned a PhD in Cultural Studies from George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.  Prior to the PhD, I earned an MFA, Creative Writing, and an MA, literature.  I taught at GMU as an adjunct while going to school myself.

I am passionate about finding, cooking, and eating locally sourced, nutrient-dense, organic foods; about creating and supporting local markets; about supporting local farmers; and about living in a way that supports community.

My two sons and their families left the Washington, DC, area in order to live simpler lives.  They moved to Charleston, SC, which is another state that recognizes the worth of good food, local markets, and farmers.

My series of essays called Tipping Points is my effort to share my own recent journey of reading, research, and discovery.  The first essay tells you why I started reading and writing.  I have finished now, as of May 2011, 31 of them, and I will post the rest as I write them.  I hope reading them will help you understand what I did not understand four years ago.  I hope that you will see that while I often am writing about the environment and food and health issues, what lies underneath these subjects is a critique of corporatism.

All of these essays have been published in our local paper, The Herald Gazette, which has been amazingly supportive of my work.  One of the tenants of the kind of Cultural Studies I practice is that one must work locally to effect change.  And, of course, there is the bumper sticker aphorism:  Be the Change You Want.

I am also a passionate quilter and, since coming to Maine, a knitter.  I am trying on this blog to revive the practice of making things with one’s own hands.  So, you will see lots of socks and rugs and the like.  Except for socks, which I adore, or the rugs, which we have needed, I practice a Zen way of relating to work:  You can have the work, but not the fruit of the work.  Thus, I try to give away much of what I make.

We garden as much as we can in the very limited space we have.  We try to grow and put up as much food as we can in the summer.  We belong to a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA), Hope’s Edge, which helps.  And, in March 2010, we got 6 chickens and can’t imagine life without them.

We now have five grandchildren, whom we adore!  They bring their parents to Maine on a regular basis.