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"Undercurrents" Published by Rising Tide Press |
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About the Author... Laurel Mills
Laurel Mills grew up close to ocean waves in Maine and now lives near waving wheat fields in the Midwest. She earned a bachelor's degree in English and master's degree in Humanities from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She is editor of the literary magazine Fox Cry Review and Lecturer in English at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley.
Mills has been a successful poet for many years; most recently her work appeared in the anthology Boomer Girls: American Women Poets Come of Age (University of Iowa Press). Her poems have been published in various magazines, including Ms., Yankee, Kenyon Review and Calyx.
She is the author of four award-winning collections of poems. I Sing Back (Black Hat Press) won the Pippistrelle Best of Small Press Award. Troika IV: Hidden Seed (Thorntree Press) earned the Posner Poetry Award. Canada Geese Coming Home (Wolfinger Press) received an award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers Award. The Gull Is My Divining Rod (Wisconsin Review Press) was awarded Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Achievement Honors.
In collaboration with composer Julie Gardner Bray, Mills composed the lyrics for Be the Stream That Oxbows (Heritage Music Press) and When Blackberries Come Again (Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.)
Mills was awarded writing residencies at Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois, where she completed much of the work on No Saving Grace, her first full-length novel. She is currently working on a second novel, The Mountain Waits, set in the low mountains of western Maine.
She and her partner Lynn live in Neenah, Wisconsin, where they raised two daughters and a son. Both in their mid-fifties, they are now re-visiting motherhood and raising their orphaned ten-year-old-nephew.
A description of Under Currents
Martha Felkins a forty-nine-year-old Boston art professor and photographer, arrives at Quarry Island, Maine, in June 2000. Her family have been islanders for generations, and her widowed brother, Jake, still resides in the family home with his grown retarded son, David. Martha is looking for a quiet summer and the company of her brother and nephew to help her heal from the event that shattered her life the summer before -- the puzzling death of Grace, her companion of twenty years.
Martha's summer is complicated by a young man, Ben Gere, who tries to commit suicide on the beach near her cottage. She becomes involved in his life, and it is a strange bond that comes to have a profound effect upon both of them and on her family. Jake hires Ben to work with him and David on his lobsterboat, The Sybil.
As the summer progresses, Martha's friendship with Sue Whittaker, the doctor on the island, begins to deepen. They spend more and more time together, including a fogbound night on Sue's sailboat.
Her summer changes suddenly when Martha uncovers a shocking secret. Her nephew, David, in a fit of temper, was the one who caused Grace's fatal accident on The Sybil. Jake has been covering up for him in the fear that authorities the mainland might take his son away from him. Only after Martha nearly loses her nephew in a drowning accident can she find forgiveness. She comes to see that David cannot be held responsible for Grace's death. She makes a pact with her brother to keep the secret. Jakes agrees to take Ben into his home to help look after David.
On the night of a hurricane, just before Martha leaves for her teaching position at the Art Institute in Boston, she and Sue make love for the first time. As the storm rages outside, Martha finds that she is capable of opening her heart again to another woman.
In the course of the summer on Quarry Island, Martha has discovered the force of family obligation, her own capacity for forgiveness, and the courage to give herself again to love.
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