Todd Nelson
Fall 2025
Produced by Witherle Memorial Library with support from Castine Arts Association and initial funding from the Maine Community Foundation.
Publications and compositions are the property of Todd R. Nelson unless otherwise specified, and may not be used without permission. All rights reserved.
Project developed by Rich Hewitt with help from Kathryn Dillon and Alicia Anstead. Signatures website designed by Michelle Keyo. © Witherle Memorial Library 2025.
Please click on a book cover for summaries and to order a copy through the state library network.
Conversations
Todd Nelson in Conversation with Alicia Anstead
August 9, 2025, Witherle Memorial Library
Alicia Anstead is a writer, producer, and educator. An experienced journalist, Alicia's interviews are an important element of our Signatures exhibits. She sat down with Todd Nelson this summer to explore his work in education and as a writer.
The Wilson Museum was the setting for this author reading. Sponsored by the Museum and Castine Arts Association, Todd read the following essays" "Photo Day", "The Gate", "Flight Aware", "How Poetry Ruined my Life", and the title essay from his latest book, The Land Between the Rivers.
Typesetting
Before words flock into syntax
fonts begin a murmuration.
I see Times New Roman,
and Palatino, flutter past;
Geneva and stolid Monaco
perching in lower branches.
Todd Nelson reads the title poem, "Betweenity".
LISTEN
Betweenity
Poems by Todd R. Nelson
For Lesley
Cover: "Unchanged" by Johanna Reynolds
These poems first appeared in:
The Christian Science Monitor, Echoes, Poetry 180, The Castine Patriot, Mount Desert Islander, The Ellsworth American, The Poets of Maine, Vol. I, Underground Writers Association.
CONTENTS
The Sixth Grade Love Letter
On the Ceiling, Stars Come Out
The Quilt
Dream Kitchen
Jackson Island's the Place
Worthy of his Hire
Goalie
Billy Collins at the Circus
Dans le Printemps
Glacial Erratic
Crossing the Water
A May Day Dance
Clark Fitz-Gerald's Tools
Syrup
The Hands of the Woodworking Teacher
Chicken Hour
Dark Matter Goes to Kindergarten
Daddy
Madama Hummingbird
Making Tracks
The Tik Tok
Your books have arrived
To the midnight mosquito tracked and smote
on the bathroom mirror
The running of the hydrants
Bombinate seems to be the word of the day
How to talk to extraterrestrials
The Concupiscense of Croissants
To the Barred Owls
I am the Hunter's Wife
Mt. Woodsuvius
A Playground Ball in August
The Force
Auden, Picasso, and Yeats in Mariupol
Typesetting
Fledglings
To my little dog, who has just spotted the skunk standing between her and the back door
Ode ot Jeff Beck's whammy bar
The Burlesque Show
Layering
Taking Inventory
Ode to my Teapot
The Bear's heartbeat in winter
Betweenity
Petrichor
My Life as a "barn find"
The bear in Wiggly Woods
Kind Offer
La Vikinga Voladora
Can't get enough of your love, babe
Le Dodo
Ancestry
My discovery of our family's past
This is all to say that we are a perfectly typical American family. We come from all over, the compass round, at the earliest times of the country, before it was a republic, and as part of more recent waves of immigration. And, as the opening story reveals, we are still expanding our story to other countries and in new generations. This is us.
CONTENTS
Preface
The 2020 Census: This will be us
Echoes of Our Family's Farms
The Man in the Photo
The Man in the Photo II
Grand Army of the Republic: A Maine Veteran's family arc
Great Great Great Grandfather and Me
A Return to Dunnattar Castle
Remaking the Family Kilt
Back to the Old Country
A Family History Sung by Bagpipes
Thrush Hour
Beating Captain Najork
A principal's view of a small, rural school in Maine
After school they play "au tennis, le football, le judo, le basket, chant dessin, le cirque." They have two Yans (Yann and Yan), and two Camilles (boy and girl); we have two Hannahs (Hanna and Hannah), two Merediths and two Jennifers. Between us, we have three boys named Nicholas. Their older class visits medieval archeology sites; our younger classes dig in the sandbox in search of ancient artifacts. Their school was named after the Baron; we're still searching for the legendary box of gold the Baron buried somewhere on the peninsula–hopefully in our sandbox. Suffice to say: we're finding that we have a lot to talk about.
From "Chers Amis Américains"
These musings happened quite by accident. Every week, I started to "take a line out for a walk" as Paul Klee says about his drawing process. My line, though, were words and they attempted to draw the figures and textures of teaching and learning at my school: The Adams School in Castine, Maine. I didn't know how long the line would become, but there's always something thought-provoking going on in an elementary school.
CONTENTS
One: 2004-2005
Two: 2005-2006
Three: 2006-2007
Four: 2007-2008
Five: 2008-2009
Six: 2009-2010
Bibliography
The Anthology
Collecting my thoughts
Or, My life in dogs
Dedication
To Mr. Walker, the 12th grade English teacher who expanded my vocabulary and exacted better writing by requiring more writing, and introduced me to the anthology of the title. I'm much obliged. He appears in these essays, and his approval means everything. Is it too late for extra credit?
CONTENTS
Dedication
A Note to the Reader
73 Essays
About the Author
The integrity of the collection comes not from particular topics or themes. It is best summarized by one of the final essays, "On a Good Day." It is about the how as much as the what in each essay. It is about finding the words, syntax, the timbre that gives the threads of thought the right bounce, or solemnity, or pathos. The topics, however, do span quite a chronological, geographical, experimental, or archetypal range. I live in a world that is flat, as those things are concerned. It extends from childhood memories to high school teachers to childrearing and the chronicling of a grandchild's wonder. Or is it my wonder, renewed through the eyes of Freya June Gutierrez Nelson, age 5.5. Nor am I finished with the perspective of my own children, no adults and parents; nor the perspective of myself at age 15. Am I living in the past? Of course. It's so much easier to edit than the present. And, as it turns out, it augured so much of the future, which is now.
Columns from Portland Press Herald
2015-2023
When I was young, we lived in Chicago, where my father was bureau chief for a national newspaper. It wasn't called "the media" then – just "newspapers." There was print, radio and television at the time, and there wasn't the phrase "fake news." It was not long after Edward R. Murrow's heyday, in the Walter Cronkite-David Brinkley era. My father was the figurative scion of their tenor, stature and character.
From "Disturbing voices from a bygone era"
August 18, 2018
CONTENTS
Conversations with my father: a laborer's tale can be as significant as that of a world famous poet
March is a hill, and we are cresting it
A Time to burn the fuel for inner grace
The Whoosh Zone
From a bygone era to now, it's the enemy of my people all over again
A list of tips for students, parents
The Bear and the Chipmunk: Hibernation looking pretty good right now
Dad's Typing: Reverberant, Royal Percussion
Apple's journeys inform our story, too
Educator sees woodpile as barometer of school year
In Praise of good teachers: Practice, passion, and hope for the best
Winter schoolyard becomes fertile ground for invention
Sense of Radio's wonders handed down over generations
Really educated people learn wherever they are
Mark Twain's wit would help us understand King Donald's court
Stone walls tell a story of the land's past
Blinter: There's a word for cold, clear light of winter
Re-learning how to say hello
The 2020 Census and me
My Mrs. Krikorian
Enough is Enough
When clotheslines las in the dooryard bloom'd
Pitchers and Catchers Report
Owl Time
Moving to September
Only a School. Only a Teacher.
Putting the year to bed
Portland Press Herald is a daily newspaper based in South Portland, Maine, with a statewide readership. The Press Herald mainly serves southern Maine and is focused on the greater metropolitan area of Portland. It is the most distributed newspaper in the state of Maine.
A Second Look
Columns for Penobscot Bay Press
2015-24
You see, even if you don't like to write you have a handy topic: writer's block itself. You could start out with a letter, like John McPhee advises. "Dear Mr. Nelson," you might say, "I do not like to write! I have such a hard time thinking of a topic. This assignment is a total bear." Then you could go on and on saying why, and what it feels like to have no ideas and feel blocked and stymied, whining about how useless it feels to persist. And yet write you must.
From "Writing is a Bear"
Monthly Columns (and more)
Illustrations by Ariel R. Nelson
Photos by Todd R. Nelson
Penobscot Bay Press is an independently owned community information company publishing newspapers, books, and maps, with offices in Blue Hill and Stonington. The company produces three paid weekly newspapers—Island Ad-Vantages, The Weekly Packet, and Castine Patriot.
CONTENTS
Ancestry
Brigade de Cuisine
Made in Castine
A Spring Medley
The Sounds of Summer
Taking a Line Out for a Walk
Testing a String Theory
Lists and Lessons
A family and writing arc: From farming to writing to love
Op-Ed
Time Travel by Train
Local Writes of Passage
Beating Captain Najork
The Learning Curve
One the Way to Bamboo Island
Patrimony
As Goes Maine
The Snow Day Owl
Taking a walk with Clark Fitz-Gerald
To Be of Use: Visiting Museums with Creative Purpose
The Thought-Fox
How to Kill a Moose
Plowing the Woods on a Snowy Evening
Restoring the World to its full Dimension
The Annual Rings of Christmas
Inspired by Goldsworthy
Reviving Horace
The Christmas Table
Boats, Lakes, Bliss
The Quilt (Poems)
Season of Mists
One Good Word
Cold Spell
Personal Inquiries
Radio Waves
Specially Marked Boxes
Todd's Writing Almanac 2024
What I published this year
In Mr. Walker's 12th grade English class, you needed a copy of The Pocket Book of Modern Verses (third edition) edited by Oscar Williams; a 500-page paperback with cover collage of imagery taken from its contents–hundreds of poems by the best-known poets of the 20th century.
From The Anthology
CONTENTS...in chronological order
Waxing Vernal
La Vikinga Voladora
Dad Sounds
Alexei Navalny Enters Heaven
Freya June likes a Dark Cave
My life in dogs
Owl Time
The Anthology
Can't get enough of our love, babe
Don't Rush the Spaces
Two Trials
Polynomials au Printemps
Ode to Kool Pops
Ode to Good Humor
Charles N. Shay turns 100
Birds are Dinosaurs and other Reports of Nature
Up to Camp
Le Dodo
Another Turn of the Screw
Mt. Fuji in my Driveway
The Marshall Pratt Plan
The Mighty Pen
If Mark Twain Could see us Now
Remembering a Mentor at the start of School
Kicking the Leaves
All Paid Up
How do you get to Bamboo Island?
The Christmas Literary Commonplace
Cover painting: Sam Messer
Taking a Line for a Walk
These are the essays that I look back on with pleasure because the act of writing them was so joyous, pleasant, or revealing about writing as well as the subject. As Paul Klee describes his drawing technique, I "took a line for a walk." His lines are visual; mine verbal. Sometimes I am in the frame; sometimes a bystander gazing at the frame. Like Harold, in one of my favorite opening sentences of all time, who, "after thinking it over for some time, went for a walk in the moonlight," I just take my pencil and draw.
From Introduction
CONTENTS
Introduction
Warning: Demolitionists at Work
Word by Word
Cold Spell
A Return to Dunnottar Castle
The Man in the Photo
The Sounds of Summer
In Another Country
Writing is a Total Bear
Remembering Joe Segar
The Christmas Table
Meditation on the house on Allen Cove
Writer's Block
How Poetry Ruined my Life
Our Daily Deer
Embers
The Sound of Writing
Plowing by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Thrush Hour
On a Good Day
Subtitled:
My favorite pieces of writing
Includes the poem, Strip, by Philip Booth
The Land Between the Rivers
Thoughts on Time and Place
Yes, many of these essays are rooted in locale. I have been a writer in all our previous settlement locales––Boston, London, Scotland, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Maine––and in all my prior communities, any elementary school being an inexhaustible source of writing topics. That exploration––a "Magellanic voyage"––awaits another book, as does the full family arc. This book is derivative of my days when there are no other exigencies beside putting words on paper. This is my writing practice, as opposed to my educator practice. I suppose, however, it's all fashioned of the same cloth, the same tartan warp and weft. It's in the land between the rivers...
From A Note to the Reader
© 2024
For Lesley, the girl in the red
Yes, The New Yorker T-shirt.
"Nelson's ability to draw connections between his Maine experiences and experiences described in literature is one of the most rewarding facets of this collection." Portland Press Herald
CONTENTS
A Note to the Reader
The Gate
Flight Aware
The Sound of Writing
Thoreauvians I Have Known
Reports of Nature
'Neath the Cover of October Skies
Writing Is a Bear
Glasgow Necropolis––Back to the Old Country
Seeing a World in a Grain of Sand
Conversations with My Father
My Bookshelves, My Self
Summer is Raft
Ode to Disraeli Gears
As Poetry Is My Compass
The Mighty Pen
Owl Time
Writer's Block
The Return of Background Sounds
Taking a Walk with Clark Fitz-Gerald
Speak, Matryoshka Memory
The Augurs of Green Men Day
The Heist: Organized Crime in Penobscot
In Just Seventh Grade
My Life in Bicycles
Snail Mail
Train Time
The Man in the Photo
The Lost Poem
The New Year Heffalump Count
How Poetry Ruined My Life
Junkyard Thoughts
Now We Are Six––or 16
The Mummer Motif
Our Westward Migration
The Myrmidons Take Ripogenus Dam
Pool Party
My Vorpal Blades: My Life in Knives
Ox Cart Man
On Seeing
Once More to the Stream
A Paean to a Blueberry Season Foretold
The Christmas Table
Far and Away
Reaching the Outer Buoy of Summer
The Knowledge Redux
Going Through the Stones
The Word for World Is Forest
A Little Leaven
Great Great Great Grandfather Rutherford and Me
Typing with America's Sweetheart
Vernal Pools: A Love Story
Bird by Bird
Our Daily Deer
Whose Woods These Are
A la recherche des voitures perdu
Aural Postcards from a Lake in Maine
A Return to Dunnottar Castle
When Clotheslines Las in the Dooryard Bloom'd
Mermaids We Have Heard on High
My Band of Brothers
Lefty Fourchette, cuisinière
Putting the Year to Bed
Where the Unicorns Sing
Knitting Up the Raveled Sleeve of Care
The Land Between the Rivers
About the Author
Christian Science Monitor
Modern Parenthood Blogs
Columns
The topics here range range from poetry to civility to Mars exploration to altruism in school and the value of an "A"–to parent and child. My own childhood and the parenthood of my parents informs my own relationship to my children, and the children of other parents who are my charges in the elementary school setting. There is usually a very blurry line, if any, between the two. Parenting and teaching are of the same cloth, but not entirely the same. But I like the backward glance to my own childhood as a reminder of what's possible and what's necessary as parent and mentor. Now that my own kids are in their thirties, and teaching and parenting, it's a delight to see the common family threads in this tapestry. And sometimes parenthood and teaching don't seem so different from exploring a distant planet.
From Preamble
The Christian Science Monitor is an independent, non-profit news organization founded in 1908. Owned by the Christian Science Church, the Monitor's mission is to "injure no man, but to bless all mankind" by providing objective, trustworthy news on global and domestic affairs, emphasizing thorough reporting over sensationalism.
CONTENTS
Poetry's Schoolyard Beginnings
A handmade table to set for Christmas dinner
Best teacher ever? You could hear it in their tone
A return to "paleo parenting"
Paddling to the sea: The magic of imaginary play
School report cards, then and now. What's changed?
Breaking in the new school year, preserving that new car smell
Back-to-school earn or learn debate: Should parents pay for good grades?
Track and field day is a rite of passage with one special gym teacher
The end of the school "Whoosh Zone": Plan for how you'd like to look back
Education and baseball: Performance stats good to know, not the whole picture
Socrates in Preschool: What would Socrates say about Snapchat?
The 100th day: Learning's tipping point deep in the school year
Immigration Reform: Teaching kids about the "pathway to citizenship"
Martin Luther King Day: Tap the right kind of dissatisfaction
Holiday parenting: How the holiday liturgy of light creates a global family
The holidays mean reflection via Dylan Thomas
Election 2012: We're all candidates for change, especially middle-schoolers
Kindergarten teacher: August dreams, the best laid lesson plans
Grading teachers: Tone is part of the conspiracy of learning
Kindergarten mindset list: 5-year-olds' cultural DNA
Mars: NASA rover Curiosity taking a giant leap for today's students?
Floating through summer: Embrace boredom, imagine epic adventures
Summer books: Skip the blockbusters, let kids' imaginations grow
Father's Day gifts of conversation: from poet Yevtushenko to a jobless steelworker
Graduation gifts: The moving boxes of elementary school days
Cold Spell
A View from the End of the Peninsula
And as hard and lifeless as it seems at the surface, I know that not too many inches below the snow things are moving. There is always a layer of activity down in the dark soil, below the frost. From their nests deep beneath my log piles, or among the tree roots, moles and mice surface to a seed stash—we see their tracks skittering across the leach field—the unwary potential prey of cats, hawks, foxes, or coyotes. And water still moves sideways through the earth, as our sump pump indicates when it whirs every so often to keep the foundation dry.
Skunks and owls are mating; the does browsing our cedars are slow and heavy with spring fawns, and drag their hind legs in the deep drifts. Most significantly, catalogs arrive in the mail tantalizing us torpid gardeners with beefy tomatoes, strawberry plants, or monster pumpkins. And my mind turns to the lupine seeds I scattered about the field and clearings last fall. Without a hard freeze we won’t have new flowers! Yes, it’s good and cold, auguring robust purple flowers in July.
From title essay, "Cold Spell"
Cold Spell is for Lesley, Spencer, Hilary, Ariel, Jhonny, and Freya June. It's our story. Thank you for sharing the journey. And gratitude to Stoney and Poppa, who found the little town at the end of the peninsula––and to so many inspiring English teachers, neighbors, colleagues, and former students. You're all in here.
"With an exquisite eye for detail, Todd Nelson masterfully chronicles the seasons of Maine reminding us to pause, lest we miss the beauty that community and nature has to offer. Cold Spell is a delightful book. One that you will want to share with others."
Deborah Joy Corey
Down East Books
An imprint of Globe Pequot, the trade division of The Roman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
2022
Illustrations by Ariel R. Nelson
CONTENTS
Winter
Cold Spell
Having a mind of Winter
Embers
The January Woodpile
Predator, prey
Waiting for Ice
Enough is enough
Snow Day Owl
Something there is that does love a wall
The annual Rings of Christmas
A Line in Winter
The Cape Racer and heirloom sounds
The two-tongued sea
Blinter
Plowing by woods on a Winter Evening
Winter nears its tipping point
Spring
“The Force that through the green fuse
drives the flower”drives us
March Hill
Learning the lore of my land
The Vizier of native brook trout
Who cooks for you?
My thought-fox
A burning desire
Thrush Hour
My next bear
When clotheslines last in the dooryard bloom’d
We will have our syrup
Springtide
Summer
Skunk Hour, redux
Fishing Blues
The Sounds of Summer
The Fruits of our labors
Beachcombing
Manual Boating Bliss
Echoes of our family’s farms
Inspiration found on the writing road
Sign of the Times
We come home to the forest
Preserving a way of light
Inspired by Goldsworthy
Awaiting bear number three
Time, Tide, Tuscany
Ice-Cream as heat pump
The sea will hold you
The Migration
Autumn
Season of Mists
Emptying the harbor
Sailing back in time
Photo Days
Testing a string theory
The Memory of this Place
Timorous beasties and woodpile thermodynamics
My Writing fro the Bangor Daily News
1998-2023
In June of 1998, we move to Castine, Maine from Chicago to take up life in the land of our prior summer vacations. We had a house to land in and no jobs. What were we thinking? But by September, I was publishing in The Bangor Daily News and the Ellsworth American, thanks to editors Todd Benoit and Steve Fay who accepted the very first things I sent them. It began a 25-year relationship with community journalism and finding my voice for a myriad of topics: schools and learning, of course, politics, appreciation of neighbors and wild life, humor and satire.
From Introduction
Cover Art: Sam Messer
The Bangor Daily News is an American newspaper covering a large portion of central and eastern Maine, published six days per week in Bangor, Maine. The Bangor Daily News was founded on June 18, 1889; it merged with the Bangor Whig and Courier in 1900.
CONTENTS
Charlotte's Web Site spins dreams for some
The Christmas Literary Commonplace
Teacher dreams and questions at the schoolhouse door
The Books of Summer
Bread tells the story of our family history
Summer's end brings migration back to the "real world"
We are halfway through winter. Do we have enough to make it through?
Banned Books and I have a long history
Old School Social Influencers
All Hail Icetopia
My dad's 1962 reporting echoes through today's protests
The Trump Ponzi Scheme
Grand Army of the Republic: A Maine Veteran's family arc
An Angel for the Holidays
Clothes Make the Student and the Man
My Mrs. Krikorian
The North Face at Recess
The Man in the Photo (Walter Colby)
The Man in the Photo, II
Mermaids we have hear on high
Savoring Secret Santa
Autumn is for Gleaners
Great teachers give more than grades––they inspire truth and beauty
The Hassett Family Car
The thought Fox a sign of spring
Pushing Snow
Backstory to a Love Poem
Stars and Stripes for Christmas
The Educational Watershed: Maine graduates should be "captains of great voyages"
Our Cousin the Apple
Finding the deeper meaning in stories
Back to the Old Country
My mom forbade watching the Three Stooges, then they brought us closer together
Nothing augurs spring like heavenly, amber bottles of maple syrup
The Christmas Table
I still feel the impulse to find the perfect Halloween costume
A Teacher Appreciation
Manual mowers, pen on paper, silence: Which sounds are fading into history?
New school year with new car smell: 25 years to break it in
Sports with Mike
The universal liturgy of light
A Paean to Paddling
The Vizier of Native Brook Trout
Recalling the Sound of My Father's Writing
On Snow Days, even a principal plays
Riding the Christmas Express
Summer is for Beachcombing
Miss Kelham, third grade teacher
Ballpark Figures
School is a Verb
Ruined by Altruism
Look out for Pirates!
Time to pen box where you put the laws of summer
Cultural profiling of back-to-schoolers
Solving for Why
The rituals of a new school year bind us together
Leaving the Comfort Zone
The Snowball Commissioner holds a press conference
Clark Fitz-Gerald, at 87
How Hear This!
The Best School in the World
Digital Town Crier: Alice Kimball
Message in a Digital Bottle
How We Go On...Preparing for School
Brooksville writer inspired by years of medical service
Chef de "Kristine", Harry Kaiserian
Bohunk Artist on the Bagaduce, George Motycka
Answering a Calling, writer Ed Turner
Keeping up with the Jones
Taking Pride in the World's Best School
For the Love of Teaching
A Nail from the Ashes
We are Embedded in the World
The Arrival of Harry the Fifth
Enter the (Algebra) Matrix
Annual Rings of Christmas
Voting Threads: Message on a T-Shirt
A Lesson from those Striking Writers
Notable Olympic metter contenders honored
Credentialing or experience––Howard Gardner
When lilacs last in the schoolyard bloom'd
It's not a box––Imagination at Christmas time
Rizzo Wonderland
"Neath the cover of October Skies
The Whoosh Zone
The outsize power of a Daily Poem
School Supplies
Summer is a Raft
A New Unified Field Theory
Application for my daughter's affection
Snow Day Owl
In Praise of Paddling
The Winter Count
By Land or By Sea: Dudley's Refresher
Farm Follies: David's Folly Farm
Tinder Hearth Bread
Frozen Stories
Schoolsville
Don Buckingham
Photo Day Redux
Specially Marked Boxes
The title? Remember those cereal commercials during Saturday morning cartoon shows back in the 1960s? They always suckered us kids into begging for the latest sugar-coated breakfast with prizes inside the “specially marked boxes.” My take is this: any life is full of specially-marked boxes, if you know what to look for. Discerning and deciphering the prize inside is a unique gift. You just never know the value until you pry open the box top and peek inside. This book is your decoder ring. I’m still trying to figure out what some of it means.
From Preface
Five essays from this collection, selected by the author, are available in this exhibit.
Cover Art: Quilt by Lesley Brody Nelson
Essays from The Christian Science Monitor, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Maine Public Radio, Bangor Daily News, Ellsworth American, Castine Patriot, and Bangor Metro.
CONTENTS
Preface
Warning: Demolitionists at work
A raft epic in every childhood
Striking out for new territory
Flying in the face of parental authority
No snack is safe with Nick
Parents who turn up the amps
Inside those specially marked boxes
Baseball cards and barefoot sluggers
The art of the [small] deal
A ride on the Christmas express
The man of science and the alphabet girls
Notes on the eve of my sabbatical
Tapestries of afterthought
The sincerest form of flattery
A dog by any other name
Journeying out, journeying home
Packing boxes
The wonder of radio
The neighborhood spy ring
Clothes make the man
New coast, old bearings
A family history sung by bagpipes
Fishin' blues
The keeper of hearts and bearer of goodies
One man's gear thing
Starting school
Once more to the stream
Writing like Picasso
Starts and stripes for Christmas
One man's trash
Kitchen chemistry
The fruits of our labors
Beachcombing
Echoes of our family's farms
On the verge of spotting a moose
The Sound of my Father's Writing
Spotting Sandra's Bear
Manual Boating Bliss
Aural Postcards from a Maine Lake
Male Teen Plumage Goes Fluorescent
Emptying the Harbor
The Rhythm Kings at the Breakfast Table
Seeking an Unseen World of Words
Having a cabin in mind
Snow Day
I'm driving the truck I drove as a child
The Vizier of Native Brook Trout
Outward Bound, Inward Bound
The earth-shaking show some never outgrow
Solving for Why
We make history with hands-on learning
Thinking inside the box
Winter nears its tipping point
The memory of this place
Collections not for keeping
Inspiration found on the writing road
Time, Tide, and Tuscany
Sign of the times
Lessons from the woodlot
Owls of literature and utility poles
Now hear this!
Tractor man
We come home to the forest
Preserving a way of light
All that glitters is the possibility
Our journey begins, and begins again
Inspired by Goldsworthy
Brigade de cuisine
In another country
Cold spell
Learning the lore of my hand
The professor and the jazz man
Theme parks redux
Awaiting bear number three
Miss Buddiacco finally shows her face
The prodigal cat
Riding "the pie" in the sky
Clothes make the man
Free-range bowling
Principal shepherd
My miscellany
Something there is that does love a wall
The annual rings of Christmas
A mind of winter
Between summer and fall, a time to pause
At the schoolhouse door
The magic of spring–-and swing
A pile of clippings and notes yields to a burning desire
Train time
A typewriter may be old-fashioned but it still has that magic
A jump-start on spring
Garage band 2.0
Heirloom sounds
Schoolsville
Reports of Nature
Our Daily Deer
Lists & Lessons
Data and narratives about learning
Who doesn't like a list? They're pithy, memorable, utterly reductive (when it comes to some things), simultaneously accurate, summative and encyclopedic and incomplete, dismissive, and formative. Ever left the store with only what you had on the shopping list? My point exactly. My point with this collection is to cast my gaze back over a career's-worth of school writing and pluck out the articles that condense the wisdom of my peers, mentors, and influencers into concise terms. Lists. They come from faculty meetings, experienced teachers writing home to parents, academics studying the systemic workings and traditions of schools.
From Introduction
CONTENTS
Introduction
School Supplies
"Really Educated People: Learn wherever they are
Clothes Make the Man
Sports with Mike
The Whoosh Zone
How to Better Pair Parents and Teachers
Our Civility Footprint
What's in your Toolbox?
Rule One, and Rule Two
Our Winter Count
Writing like Picasso
Tapestries of Afterthought
Kindergarten mindset list: A 5-year-old's cultural DNA
Send in the Clowns
Readings for teachers and parents
Thanks to my colleagues and students
past, present, and future.
Reviving Horace
Readings for the Soul of Teaching
Collected by Todd R. Nelson
I realized, at a certain point in my teaching career, that I was hearing les and less of a certain voice in education. For me, it was the voice of my parents about the value of my teachers, legendary thinkers who inspired a desire in me to also teach. Then it was my teacher mentors, the experienced practitioners of teaching as a craft and calling. It was the voice of consultants and speakers at various professional development conferences and retreats.
The voice has soul, insight, poetry, poignancy, and a centeredness that goes beyond the particular student, class, and school day. Yes, today we're studying gerunds. But surely you know that the real subject is who you will be at age 35, says the voice!
So my antidote is the readings herein. ...This is not an encyclopedic collection. If anything, it's a starter set. It works like sourdough. These are token samples, examples that will lead your father afield. I've shared my root sources. Your own additions will leaven it further and add to the individual promise of your new, growing compendium.
From Forward
Cover photo: Adams School, Castine, Maine circa 1870
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Maggie Anderson & David Hassler
Larry Boggess
Guillaume Debre
John Taylor Gatto
Arnold Greenberg
Seamus Heaney
Tracy Kidder
Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
Sara Levine ed.
Charles Merrill
Parker Palmer
May Sarton
Gary Snyder
William Stafford
Esther Wright.
One Good Word
On Teaching Reading and Writing
My twelfth grade English teacher, Mr. Walker, made us learn twenty-five vocabulary words per week. There was a quiz each Friday, on which he would select ten words from the twenty-five. The end-of-term test was a doozie. But it's not about tests.
Even though that was a long time ago in teacher years, and pre-history in child years, I can still envision the lists and quizzes of all kinds of late night thumbing of the dictionary. Mandarin, caucus, Walpurgisnacht, dialectic, palette and palate, moot, pique, and troika were all words I heard for the first time in his class and still––oddly–remember. The weekly words came from assigned novels and stories or magazine articles (What the heck were we reading?), and many had multiple definitions. Mostly I remember being inducted into the discipline and peculiar joy of acquiring interesting words. For some classmates it was a chore, but we all took Mr. Walker's justification at face value: that knowing lots of words and putting the to use is virtuous and powerful.
From Word Up
CONTENTS
Saying It
The Finger Exercises of Rhetoric
Bird by Bird
Writing Like Picasso
True Story
The Walker Papers
The Sound of My Father's Writing
Tapestries of Afterthought
Word Up
Writing Rules
Appetite for Instruction
My Back Pages
Illustrations by Ariel Rose Nelson
Word by Word
Christian Science Monitor Writing
1989-2021
It all started when, editor, Fred Hunter accepted a column for the Home Forum section of the paper: "Warning: Demolitionists at Work," The Christian Science Monitor, April 19, 1989. It was the first time I submitted an essay for publication anywhere, and he snatched it up. It wrote itself, beginning with the first line: "Dynamite was my first love." I was off and writing. That first piece was about making dynamite with Derek, my brother, and it was all true–the bucket, the blasting caps, lighting the fuse, using simple kitchen ingredients for explosives, and dad watching with amusement and support. It felt amazing to see my name in print, a brightly colored illustration, and a paycheck. I was no longer an English teacher, I was a writer, looking over the shoulder of my kids, my students, and my backyard fence.
From Introduction
CONTENTS
The Home Forum Essays (114)
Op-Ed Commentaries, Interviews,
and Book Reviews (24)
Backstory (6)
Poems (5)
Modern Parenting Blogs (29)
The Christian Science Monitor is an independent, non-profit news organization founded in 1908. Owned by the Christian Science Church, the Monitor's mission is to "injure no man, but to bless all mankind" by providing objective, trustworthy news on global and domestic affairs, emphasizing thorough reporting over sensationalism.
For Lesley, Spencer, Hilary, Ariel, Freya, Brooke, Stoney, Poppa, and Derek; Nick, Louie, Gus, Ivy and Lulu–you're all in here.
In the Old Country:
Essays about being in Scotland
Tonight, I will be on a plane from Philadelphia to Glasgow, the city of my ancestors. In two days, my daughter, Ariel Rose Nelson, graduates from Glasgow School of Art. "We" left four generations ago, and have been looking back ever since. It's a common enough Scottish story, but it's new each time to the generation that makes the trip. It's also a common enough American story, since we all began somewhere else and millions of us feel this urge to locate our origin. Going back to the remote source of our DNA helps to explain why we're here, and who we are.
From Back to the Old Country
June 15, 2011
CONTENTS
Introduction
Going through the stones
On Moray Firth: A 50th Anniversary
Back to the Old Country
Remaking the family kilt
A Return to Donnottar Castle
A family history sung by bagpipes
The man in the photo
Great, great, great grandfather Rutherford and me
Photograph:
Climbing Aonach Eagach Ridge
Glen Coe, Fall 1976
Op-Ed
Comments on the political climate
2016-2025
The definition of Op-Ed is deceptively simple: opposite editorial. It denotes the page in a newspaper preserved for unsolicited opinions, perhaps even the opposing view from the newspaper's own editorial line. It's across the fold; opposite. It's a founding principle of American democracy and a free press. Disagreement is constitutionally protected. As it should be. As the soon a newspaper correspondent, I find it hard to stay on the sidelines of current events. Activism in our house was commentary–saying something to antidote violations of civility, civil rights, and the laws of humanity written in our inward parts.
From Forward
CONTENTS
Our Civility Footprint
A Civil Rights Anniversary in the age of Charlottesville
The Voice of the Church
The Don's Wife sees a Therapist
Disturbing Voices from a Bygone Era
A Word from the Delphic Oracle
A Caravan to the border of integrity
My Racial Profile
Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown
Who belongs here?
A Maine Yankee at King Donald's Court
Controlled flight into terrain
Nebuchadnezzar holds his daily briefing
The Confederate Mental States of Trump
Children learn rule of law on the playground
The Covid Commons
The Trump Ponzi scheme
Democratic Vistas: an update from Walt Whitman
Banned Books and Me
My summer of '64 in Mississippi
Why not tap the strategic kindness reserve?
Two Trials
If Mark Twain could see us now
Revisit the cautionary words of Walt Whitman
Mutually Assured Destitution
Columns published in the Ellsworth American, Bangor Daily News
and Portland Press Herald
Three Talks
Originally prepared for the Unitarian Universalist Congregation
Castine, Maine, Winter 2004
For me, the arc––of words, family history, current events, justice and mercy––culminates here: with love. It's more than sufficient, omnipresent, resilient; found again and again amidst hardship, wrangling, animosity, injustice, pride, confusion or wont. It's not an ending, though, for where is the fringe of eternity?
From The Arc
Restoring the World to its Full Dimension
The Wisdom of Ordinary Things:
Our Tables, Our Footprints, Our Hands,
and our words
The Arc:
Reconciling personal and social history
Sections of the Wisdom of Ordinary Things have been published separately in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Christian Science Monitor, and the Ellsworth American.
Patrimony
Essays remembering Dad, and the dad in me
I'll try not to get all gushy on you. This is, however, the soulful realm of feeling and memory and connection. the realm that we return to when there's a sudden glimpse of the old neighborhood, literally or figuratively, or the mental audio archive recalls another Dad moment–the way his hand grasped the screwdriver, the snap of his ankle going upstairs, someone practicing scales on a trumpet, a writer's cadence on a manual typewriter, a certain radio voice he had. My dad returns most often to me in sound.
This collection is incomplete. It is also impossible to complete; perhaps undesirable to complete. So these vignettes will have to stand for so much more. Perhaps like other stories in this genre, they will inaugurate your own echoes and paths of recollection of a parent. I hope so. It's a conversation that goes on and on.
From Forward
CONTENTS
Demolitionists at Work
A Nail from Ashes
A Family History sung by bagpipes
The Sound of Writing
The Wonder of Radio
Striking out for New Territory
The Art of the [Small] Deal
The Man of Science and the Alphabet Girls
Fishin' Blues
One man's Gear Thing
Star's and Stripes for Christmas
Kitchen Chemistry
Brigade de Cuisine
The Professor and the Jazz Man
Clothes Make the Man
Conversations with my Father
Echoes of our Family Farms
Back to the Old Country
A Civil Rights Anniversary
A Spring Medley
Seasonal essays
Maine spring is an inter-tidal zone, a slow, ragged exposure of winter's ravages on the way to summer's fruitfulness and bounty. It is a persistent skirmish between freezing and thawing, hibernation and new birth, torpor and explosive flowering; migration and returns of all kinds. Grumpy bears come out of their dens with new cubs to feed; the peepers and vernal pools evanesce; flowers and berries prepare to nourish. We are betwixt and between and migrating. Cold recedes; warmth timidly floods in. Spring is full of becoming, and we too are its creatures.
From Preamble
CONTENTS
Preamble
March Hill
We will have our syrup
In Just Seventh Grade
The Mummer Motif
The Augurs of Green Man Day
The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives me
Vernal Pools: A Love Story
Springtide
The bear in Fairy Town
The Heist
Owl Time
Illustrations by Ariel Rose Nelson
Selections from Specially Marked Boxes
My essays—columns, really—written between 1988 and the present, represent my walk, my excursions, my oeuvre—about fatherhood, teaching, moving around the country, cooking, quartz sales, jazz, new environments and habitats, various local characters, Picasso and Klee, and, in the interstices, myself. They hang together in a rough scrapbook of experience, reflection, and identity. There is a Nelsonness to them—the themes a journalist father and columnist mother would embrace, and the origins of the ancestors too. They have our sense of humor and vocabulary, the cadence of our values and point of view. In them I hear a familiar voice: ours.
Cover Image: Quilt by Lesley Brody Nelson
About Todd Nelson
Sometimes it feels like my life arc is a grand return to the Maine starting line. I do not earn my living by manual labor, but I am inspired in a romantic way by a few rural skills I’ve acquired in our Maine years. No, I am a scribbler. But I hope a few of the observations that I’ve hammered out will honor all the ancestors whose lives resonate in our migrations and pilgrimage back to the family headwaters. I observe the seasons, the critters, the neighbors, the land itself, the jobs and the community we joined that has made this such a rewarding place to call home. And, between the lines, I find a considerable amount of myself.
From "A Note to the Reader", Cold Spell, 2022
After a long career as a teacher and administrator in public and private schools in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Castine, Maine, Todd Nelson retired to write and bake bread and the scones of destiny. His writing has appeared in numerous periodicals, including The Ellsworth American, Castine Patriot, Maine Boats, Homes & Harbors, Bangor Daily News, Bangor Metro, Maine Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Taproot, The Christian Science Monitor, Wooden Boat, Northern Journeys, Maine Public Radio, Education Week, Appalachia, and the Portland Press Herald. He lives with his wife, Lesley Brody Nelson, in Penobscot, Maine.
Home page author portrait by Michelle L. Morby
The Land Between the Rivers
Fifteen years into my teaching career, something changed when I wrote an opening line that led to an essay that led to publication. Suddenly, I had a byline—and a check in the mail. I was a paid writer. “Dynamite was my first love,” I wrote, beginning a wry dialogue with my own experience, inhabiting my five-year-old-self while borrowing from my writing-teacher playbook. Here was a fresh conversation with myself, and a daily confrontation of the blank page.
Todd Nelson reads
"The Hobgoblin of Hindsight"
Not all signing is alike, nor all signing pens. We sign letters and notes; sometimes documents with weightier intent: the mortgage, the employment contract, the marriage license—documents of exalted ilk. These require a signing pen. In my case, they require my father’s Mont Blanc Meisterstück, the plump, black, gold filigreed, classic fountain pen with the iconic white star on the end of the cap.
Schoolville
Todd R. Nelson is a writer and educator with 35 years’ experience in schools across the country. His career spans schools in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Castine and Brooksville in Maine. Serving as a teacher and administrator in schools small and large, public and private, across the philosophical spectrum, he has written extensively about his experience and those of the teachers and students he has encountered.
Writing Like Picasso
To him, I spoke a foreign tongue. I was busy teaching him to write like other people by giving him assignments to write “by ear;” he was busy sculpting and painting with words, writing “by eye.” And he was following his own muse, writing like himself. We were two writers divided by a common language, to co-opt Churchill.
Socrates in Preschool
The engineers speak. “Todd, we’re building a rocket ship. Do you have time to talk with us?”
Actually, the It’s Not a Box Project is Not a Project! It’s a conversation. Yes, our engineers have a detailed, colorful and imaginative plan to be executed in three-dimensional glory.
My Mrs. Krikorian
I’ve come to feel that this is the fundamental transaction of good schools as well as good teachers: creating an atmosphere in which students can learn because their teachers know them intimately, have their trust, and ingeniously adapt information and skills in a way that is authentic.
Only a School. Only a Teacher.
Our children should not go to the highest bidder! Developing souls takes time, contact, thought, labor, struggle, guidance—teachers. They’re the remedy for what ails us as a society. And amidst the clamor for accountability and standards, we may be missing the simple, clear eloquence and mentoring of the teacher-student relationship. Teachers accept an implied call to step in and show wisdom, candor, honesty and durability when they are wont to be found elsewhere. Teachers stanch the consumerization and marketing of children.
The Best School in the World
In an era of standards reform and school accountability, we are in danger of following the wrong star home if we standardize our mission. In our era of quantification of unquantifiable things, schools in particular are under great scrutiny and pressure to measure up by measuring student achievement as if it were reducible to a simple algorithm, like bandwidth or megahertz. And yet, whether we are a Big Name Franchise or a one-room schoolhouse, it is the spark and heat of our verbs that ignite learning. It is this elemental level on which reputations are earned, child-by-child, day-by-day.
The Education Watershed
The story of education stewardship should involve imagining myriad futures and occupations, things that one’s forebears might find unimaginable, for we are the superseding technologies. And it is about caring intensively for the purity of the local water, what flows downstream, and where that stream goes; caring intensively about the quality of childhood itself; how it evolves into adulthood; and where that adulthood goes in terms of service, learning, leadership, and fulfilling lives.
French Exchange
But as with many sojourns, what I find myself carrying around is a feeling of connection and contentment, having found a warm welcome and a well of generosity and appreciation shared among strangers. But we are not strangers—we are cousins, now, beyond the level of sharing a script from the text of intertwined history. We are in the afterglow of recollections.
From "Les Américains"
The books, Castine to St. Castin, St. Castin visits Castine, and Castine Visits Saint-Castin, are archived at the Castine Historical Society.
Samuel P. Grindle House
The Samuel P. Grindle House, an example of Greek Revival architecture, was built between 1850-51 on the so-called Freeman Tan Yard property, likely using all or part of the Freeman house which had been constructed earlier in that century. A portion of the property was sold in 1859 to the Castine School District for the construction of the Abbott School.
Samuel Wescott purchased the home in 1852 and the Wescott owned the house throughout the rest of the 19th Century and well into the 20th Century. The Castine Historical Society now owns both the Abbott School and the Grindle House, which serves as administrative offices and for archival storage.
"The Grindle House and me"
We knew it as The Nelson house.
From January 1988, when my parents bought the house between the Abbott School and the Unitarian Universalist church from Gunilla Foster Kettis, until June of 2008, when we sold it to the Historical Society, it was where we spent summers; where my father and then both parents lived briefly in the early 1990s; where Lesley and I and our three kids moved to start our Maine lives in 1998, the year after my father died; where my mother lived from 2000 until 2008. Our former bedrooms are now administrative offices, but the feel of the old house persists, and memories swirl.
In the Old Country
All my visits to Scotland live in a certain simultaneity.
Despite the intervening years, each new visit has felt like a continuation of another one, whenever that might have occurred.
Churchill Watch, Outward Bound, 1971
Aonach Eagach Ridge, Glen Coe, 1976
Glasgow Necropolis 2011
Dunnattor Castle by Ariel R. Nelson
Typing: the sonic background of the Nelson household
"Typing with America’s Sweetheart "
I had no sooner finished watching the California Typewriter story on CBS, than I knew I needed to write a letter to Tom Hanks. A fellow typewriter aficionado and grand collector, he waxes eloquent in the film about the feel of real typing on vintage typing machines. It is an homage to the style, heft, timbre, and tradition of manual typewriters—word processors with moving parts, inky ribbons, and cacophonous clatter. No silicon. It is the sound of thinking and writing, in my humble opinion—a sound I was raised on. I fired off my letter—not an email. Though I’m afraid I did compose it on my laptop, it was duly printed and signed on paper. Not an electronic transmission.
