Meg Weston: A Profile
In January 2025 Meg Weston took over as Board President of Millay House Rockland, we sat down with her recently to find out a little more about what got her here . . .
You retired several years ago, and pretty quickly took on quite a few writing related endeavors, which makes you not so much retired, as . . . how do you describe your life since retirement?
It’s a very full life–full of things I love doing! I decided to retire in order to have time and space for my own creativity. In eight years of running Maine Media Workshops + College in Rockport, Maine, I felt great about making opportunities for creatives to meet, learn, and invest their time in making photographs, films, writing, and hand-made books. Now I wanted time for me to delve more deeply into poetry. I began reading prodigiously, writing daily, taking online workshops, but I found I was missing a sense of community. I retired in January 2020; we were sheltered in and had lots and lots of time! I founded The Poets Corner and hosted online readings once a month. That platform has grown to include nearly 8,000 members from all over the world; we host monthly Sunday readings, plus craft talks, workshops, a chapbook contest, and other opportunities for writers and readers of poetry and short prose to connect and to learn.
When we emerged from the worst of the pandemic, Mark Burrows, a poet and Rilke scholar from Camden, co-founded the Camden Festival of Poetry with me—gathering people together in person to listen to and celebrate Maine poets and singer-songwriters, to encourage young people as poets and honor a Poet of Promise, and to bring in a poet of renown to keynote the conference. Its mission is to create community connection through poetry. Next, I became involved with the Millay House Rockland because I wanted to help preserve the legacy of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a woman who made her mark on the world by living her life directed by her creative instincts and flaunting conventions or restrictions on how a woman should be. I’m excited about the establishment of a writer-in-residence program here at the Millay House in Rockland, Maine, and other ways to connect community and support our literary community.
In the midst of these community-based activities, I’ve put three books of poetry out into the world in the past five years: Letters from the White Queen, Magma Intrusions, and To the Point & Back: Swimming Poems (a collaborative book with Margaret Haberman).
You are both a photographer and a writer, can you talk to us about how they inform or feed each other?
I think I was a writer first—my elementary school yearbook said that I wanted to grow up to be a writer. But I’d forgotten about that goal until much later in my life. After my mother died, when I was in my early twenties, my father stuck a camera in my hand and said “go take a photo class.” I did and I was hooked. I went everywhere with a twin-lens reflex camera around my neck and processed b&w film in the darkroom. After college, I went into business—the business of consumer photography. I loved the way people would sit in their cars after picking up a roll of film that had been processed and couldn’t wait to get home to open up the envelope and see their pictures. Photography had a magic to it—even more so in the days of film when you had to wait to see the latent image that you captured with your camera. I worked for Konica, a Japanese company, and ended up as President of their U.S. photofinishing operations.
I didn’t get back to writing until I was 50 years old. I’d shut down an international dot-com business I was running with operations in Israel, U.S., and Japan, and I didn’t want to get drawn back into a high-pressure executive life. I began a consulting practice and also started writing, and decided to do a low-residency MFA in creative writing. Creative nonfiction was my genre, not poetry.
Writing—especially poetry—involves imagery, just like photography. I often have an image in my head—either one I’ve taken or one I’ve imagined, and that’s where a poem begins. I do remember in one poetry workshop the teacher, I think it was the poet Richard Blanco, said to everyone: “Try using more images in your poems. Except Meg. Meg, you could use some more language to connect the images.”
Who are some of your literary mentors—writers that you don’t know personally but whose work you read and admire or are inspired by—and have any of them had a hand in shaping your writing, and if yes, how so?
I’m inspired by so many writers and poets. When I was working in creative nonfiction, it was Terry Tempest Williams. Her memoir Refuge combined science and nature writing with personal story in a way that I’ve aspired to write. Beautifully woven together in her book, I learned about the birds and the ecology of the Great Salt Lake at the same time as her story about her mother’s battle with cancer, nuclear testing that had taken place many years before, and her anger and grief. I was writing my own personal story about my love for volcanoes and travels all over the world to photograph them, my growing understanding of earth’s power and the forces of nature, and coming to terms with personal loss and my own power to overcome that.
When I began my path into poetry, I fell in love with Mary Oliver. Her way of walking through the natural world, observing, and commenting, felt essential to me. I’ve since expanded my poetry shelf to include many others, and I’ve had the privilege to take workshops with wonderful poets, especially Kevin Pilkington, Richard Blanco, and Ellen Bass.
Looking back to your childhood reading, is there one book that stands out as a favorite? Thoughts on why it’s stuck with you?
My favorite childhood book was A Wrinkle in Time. In our school library when a new book came in, the librarian chose one student who got to read it first—and when A Wrinkle in Time was the book, she chose me because of the character named Meg. I was so thrilled—I never forgot the experience or the book. I was very disappointed in the movie when it came out a few years ago.
How did you find your way to being on the board for Millay House Rockland, and were you familiar with Vincent’s writing, or her life, before you joined the board?
I had heard of Millay, and knew that she had grown up here—but very little else. I’m not particularly drawn to formal poetry, and especially rhyme. But Ann Morris, who was president of the board, reached out to me, offered to give me a tour, and told me about building a writer-in-residence program at the house, and I was intrigued. She invited me to come to a board meeting, and I did. I was hesitant to commit to joining a board at first, but I was so impressed with what those board members had accomplished in buying the house, raising funds, and restoring it, and with the plans for the future, that I just found myself showing up every month for the board meetings, and then joined the board. I read Nancy Milford’s biography of Millay, Savage Beauty, and I was impressed with Millay’s unconventional way of being in the world, putting her art before tradition, standing up for women’s rights to live the life they were meant to live—that kept me going. And now, Jefferson Navicky, Steve Cartwright, and others on the board have been introducing me to a new appreciation for her poetry as well.
The recent Five-Day Poetry Challenge from A.O. Scott in the New York Times featured memorizing Millay’s poem “Recuerdo,” and in memorizing it I learned and really felt a new appreciation for the poem, including its rhymes and refrain (which make it much easier to memorize).
If you were on a desert island and only had 1 book with you, to read for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Okay, this question really intrigued me. I would choose a large anthology of poetry. Because poetry can be read over and over and there’s something new and different with each reading. An anthology would give me many different voices to keep me company. Really, I should probably choose some kind of practical Survival Guide but although it might ensure my survival, it wouldn’t nourish me in a way that made me want to survive.
