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| Sophie Wadsworth at her kitchen table. (Photo by Richard Wolfson) |
When she steps out the door of her apartment on Old Mill Road in the morning, Sophie Wadsworth can pick from one of many roles to play that day: poet, teacher, naturalist, and environmental educator. Wadsworth has woven many interests into the kind of life that others might only dream of. Whether teaching poetry in Concord or developing nature programs in her work with the nonprofit organization Animals as Intermediaries, Wadsworth has used her gift with words to convey the beauty and mystery of the natural world to readers of her work. In recent years her efforts have begun to receive wider recognition, and Wadsworth is excited for her future as a poet.
Wadsworth is the first recipient of the Jessie Bryce Niles Chapbook Award for poetry from the Comstock Review, a prize which included the publication of a collection of her poems called Letters from Siberia. The book, published in 2004, is a collection of narrative poetry based on the life of her grandmother, Roxanna Lord Pray. Pray emigrated to Vladivostok in 1894 with her new husband, and over the years wrote thousands of letters home to her family in Maine. Inspiration for Letters to Siberia was gleaned from those letters, Wadsworth said. The poems, which address themes of dislocation, the growth and loss of love, and finding one’s place in a foreign world, are rich in physical detail yet sparing and light in form. The book took a little more than five years to write, Wadsworth said. When considered for the Jessie Bryce Niles Award, it was chosen from among 350 entrants.
Born and raised in New York City, Wadsworth has since traversed the country in search of adventure and opportunity. She attended Trinity College in Hartford as a history major, and it was there that her passion for poetry was ignited. “I took a poetry course there that was very inspiring,” she said. “It set me on a path, although I didn’t know it at the time.” After leaving Trinity, Wadsworth found a job teaching high school English and social studies at the Annie Wright School in Tacoma, Washington. She stayed there for three years before pursuing a writing fellowship at the University of New Mexico, where she received her master’s in English. Heading east again, Wadsworth decided to settle in New England, partly out of an attraction to its literary tradition, and also for the natural beauty of the region. For a number of years she worked at Harvard University supporting a professor there, leaving only recently when her dream job opened up in Concord. Just after attending a poetry reading at the Concord Bookshop, Wadsworth stopped by an information booth for Animals as Intermediaries, a nonprofit group that brings animals and nature into closed-care facilities, such as nursing homes. After volunteering for the organization for a time, she was asked to work there part-time last year. Three days a week, Wadsworth helps AAI with grant writing, community outreach, and nature interpretation. “It brings together a lot of my interests,” she said. On the day of the interview, Wadsworth was on her way to coordinate a community nature walk for AAI.
When she is not working there, Wadsworth continues to teach writing and poetry. Tuesday and Thursday find her in Lowell teaching college writing to students at UMass, and many weekends she is busy offering poetry classes to teens and adults at the Concord Poetry Center. Because teaching and poetry are so central to her life, she said she would continue teaching even if money were no object. The work has a spiritual basis for her, she continued, and supporting people in their artistic growth is something she feels called to do.
Wadsworth carves out time to write in the morning, and tries to sit down at her kitchen table with paper and pen six mornings a week. Sometimes she is able to write more than others, she said, depending on what else she is busy with at the moment. She is currently at work on another collection of poems.
For the last three years Wadsworth has been one of the judges for the John Faulkner Whitcomb Memorial Poetry Competition, a contest for high school juniors sponsored by the Friends of the Library. “It’s been a treat to see what the students are working on,” she said, adding that she admires the earnestness and intensity high school students often bring to a poem. When asked what advice she would offer an aspiring poet, Wadsworth gave a thoughtful response. “Never underestimate the power of revision,” she said, adding “Read, and seek the writing that you love.”
In the future, Wadsworth plans to continue teaching and creating the poetry that she loves, weaving it into the many different paths she has taken in her life. “Poetry is the most intimate and soulful form of writing,” she said. “All writing is concerned with the big questions, but poetry gives the writer the freedom to express their experience of those big questions through metaphor in a more heightened way than prose.”