I am a writer, teacher and an outdoorsman. I hold a Masters Degree in Creative Writing and Literature from Brown University where I won an Academy of American Poets award. My poetry, often about the people and landscape of my native Maine, has appeared in literary journals nationwide and has been collected in a book, At the Grave of the Unknown River Driver, published by North Country Press. My essays on teaching poetry in a maximum security prison and on ways of involving students in a classroom writing apprenticeship have appeared in Blue Line and the national education journal Voices in the Middle. I'm currently at work on a memoir about being a wilderness instructor for at-risk teenage girls, titled The Summer Grievances.

Before settling down to become a high school English teacher in central Maine, I was an itinerant poet in the public schools in New York State. In the manner of an old time circuit preacher I brought the good news of poetry to school districts from Long Island to the Adirondacks and west to Buffalo. My week-long poetry programs, funded by the school districts and the State of New York, were very popular and I was invited back year after year. I found ways for students who had never written poetry, particularly boys with little interest in writing and literature, to create their own body of work which they read aloud to gatherings of family and friends on the final day of my residency.

My life-long love of the outdoors was handed down to me by my dad and by other woodsman from Dad's generation. He and I fished, canoed and hunted together and I was an enthusiastic listener to stories told and retold around the fire at night in the family cabin. Over the years, I mastered woods skills such as fire building and emergency shelter construction, became an experienced fly fisher, hunter, canoeist and bird watcher, and worked as a whitewater raft guide for several summers, and am a Registered Maine Guide. An avid Masters athlete, I competed in the National and World Masters Cross-Country Ski Championships. In the summer I bike and trail run to stay fit and enjoy hiking and back packing in the mountains of the Northeast and the Rocky Mountains. Years ago, after bicycling across the U.S., on a lark I joined a party of technical climbers on an ascent of the Grand Teton in Wyoming. I made it to the top, but it was one of the scariest experiences of my life.

My three-year stint as an Instructor in the wilderness therapy program New Horizons for Young Women was a most valuable life experience. It allowed me to incorporate my love of writing and the outdoors into a challenging program for at-risk girls. Along the way, I discovered that the diverse experiences of a long life are of real value in working with the young. Many of the girls appreciated my outdoor skills, my love of books and even my offbeat and whacky sense of humor. In hindsight, I learned as much, or more, from the girls as, I hope, they picked up from being around me. They taught me patience, and their emotional honesty as they spoke of their issues around the camp fire spilled over into my life outside the job. But most of all my years as a wilderness instructor deepened my belief in the wild as a place of healing.

Paul Corrigan, Jr
Millinocket, Maine