top of page
Stacked Chocolate Chunks

Smithville Junction

Within small, close-knit towns, privacy is a rare commodity. In Smithville Junction, this held true and along with it, so did judgement. So when a newborn baby girl is shunned and given away by her father blamed for the death of  her mother ~ his wife; there might as well have been posters around town with his face on them for bounty. But no one knew the miracle waiting, the least expected redeemer, and the deep and muddy path to forgiveness so innocently tucked in the shadows just waiting for a hard, hard lesson to be learned.  So yes, it certainly was a banner year in Smithville Junction for NOT minding your own damned business.

           About the Author

​

Claire Hersom is a native Mainer with two books of poetry published by Moon Pie Press, Westbrook: Drowning: A Poetic Memoir (2008) and Dreamscape (2017). Her poem Dreamscape was nominated by Moon Pie Press for a Pushcart Prize. She is a past recipient of Boston's Saint Botolph Club Foundation's New England Emerging Artist Award for poetry. In 2025, her poem First Day at the New Field was featured on Maine Public Radio's Poems from Here and Now selected and read by Maine's poet laureate, Julia Bouwsma.

 

This year, Claire stepped away from her 11 years co-organizing the poetry venue The Bookey Readings turning attention to her debut book Smithville Junction: A Maine Novel. Of regional fiction genre, it is set in the 1940's, and follows a young family through a small, rural town's journey toward a reluctant forgiveness, surprisingly found through the innocence of an 8 year old girl. Claire has three grown children, six granddaughters, and lives in Winthrop, Maine. 

Tractor.jpg
A tractor like this is a key part of the story, and I had to do a little research on it thankful for some Monmouth farmers having coffee one morning who had much experience with tractors! Farmsall Tractors were introduced in 1920 for crops. They were affordable for small to medium-sized family farms, and could do much of the job of hired hands. On some farms, horses became obsolete. But much of Aroostook kept their old ways, for a long time, keeping their horses if they could, for quite a while longer than most!
                                      (Photo by Judy MacDougal Abbott)
Aroostook Potato barn, half in the ground.jpg

Typical Aroostook Potato barn, build into the ground just far enough so they wouldn't freeze through the winter, but cold enough to 'keep'.

​​

 

Supper At the Farm

         - by Claire Hersom 

                  ​

Nothing prepared me for my grandfather’s

peculiar brand of jurisprudence,

the kind he wielded outside on the north

corner of the farm where his ax sang

hallelujah over the necks of chickens.

One minute their stuttering walk

mimicking palsy, the next in frantic

flight, running headless.

 

Like an odd baptism after the fact,

dipped in the scalding water bucket

full of floating feathers,

it was last rites for a useless heart.

Dunk and pull, Nana didn’t mind

the bird in her kitchen sink to gut and

clean, she’d truss across the open belly

like she was mending socks,

a plain prosperity.

​

When dusk fell, it filtered through

the farmhouse window on steaming

plates of fresh snapped beans,

fluffed potatoes from the upper field

dotted with butter hand churned

and set a few days ago.

​

I'd bow my head, swallow the apparition

rising out of the white and voiceless breast,

                the tasty little wing, and dig in.                              

 , 

Published NewEngland Memories - 

                            Yankee Magazine, 2009                       

                                             

Chickens.jpg

Yes.We grew our own food, made our own curtains, clothes, rugs, chairs and bread. We churned butter, and grew gardens of string beans, squash, potato, and corn, and fields full of strawberries, blueberries, and apples, and so much more. We built our barns, roofed our houses, hunted bird, deer, and rabbit for food. We fished the seas, the lakes, the rivers. We felled trees for the Winter warmth, and praised the coming of Spring wildflowers. We bore our children at home and we buried our parents and grandparents on our generational land. We lived clean on well water and outhouses. We had clothes lines held strong by the crotch of a pliable tree bending with grace in a summer breeze down off the fields, its fragrance left on our sheets and pillow cases; our hand made quilts. We loved. We prayed. When things got tough, we leaned in, helped our neighbors.
                       We laughed and we cried and we wrangled. We lived independent and we lived intertwined.
                                                                          We were small-town Maine

B&WNana's Farm.jpg

This is my Nana , Kate (O'Grady) Hersom's farm house deeded to the family in 1833. Located in Pittston, Maine, the property had a one-room school house and a big old barn of the same era, lost in 1985 to hurricane Gloria. The barn's replacement is shown in this photo, however the old barn. three lofts high, is alive and well in the story. The character of Minnie Pond in the book is taken from the true name of my Nana's neighbor who lived next door on her own farm, and was a life-time friend. There was a warn and steady path between their farms and the two friends.

       My childhood stomping grounds out to Nana Kate's farm,
                    my guide for the farmhouse settings....  

        A little bit about Claire, a little bit of writing history..... a little bit of music, a little bit of story, a little bit of blind faith,
                                                                    ...a whole lot of love

When I was 17, my father died of a heart attack. One day I was giggling with my friends, wondering who really WAS the cutest boy in the Senior class, and what dress would I wear to the school dance. The next day, I was  carrying the world, wondering if there really was a God, and who was going to take care of Mom, how we would ever be OK and able to even smile again. Grief saturates every cell of your body for a long time, if not forever. It was certainly saturating me. I escaped to our attic in the old Victorian we lived in bringing along my acoustic guitar, my canvas and paint brushes, and my note book for writing poems. I was safest there from sympathetic glances, expectations of a strength I didn't yet have, and the idle chatter of those unknown to grief, all while my entire family and I were just trying to learn how to breath again.  

It was there in that dusty old attic that I found my true voice, and it was there that I tackled the demons of his death. Eventually, though some of the grief stayed with me, it didn't take me over. I began to write poems and to think up short stories in my head of what the characteristics of the 'actors' might be, and who was the victim and who was the hero? And could it be that sometimes they were the same? What would they look and sound like? It took me a very long time to realize that my grief brought an unexpected gift; because I had reached so deeply into my own heart, I wanted to know what was in the hearts of the characters. How would they become whole in their own life's story? What would they be forced to forgive given their own tragedy, and how would I ever write that ethereal spirit that allows that to happen? 

          The Why of Things

In the Smithville Junction story, that is exactly the struggle the reader finds the characters facing, and as they read, it's unavoidable not to put yourself in their 'shoes'. You'll find yourself asking, as I did when writing, what would I have done in that situation? And as the plot peels layer by layer finally reaching the very core of the most unexpected situation, the truth circles around you as if explaining itself, waiting too for forgiveness; to finally understand the why of it all, opening that invisible path that at some point, holds us all accountable in our own lives. It's like unexpected music that builds inside you, finally playing the right notes, finally asking you to chime in.

492259923_9736687813060564_6860434741350372233_n.jpg

 
Mud season ~
not for the faint of heart!
And  especially wretched
for 1937 Studebakers!     
 

Those  Maple sap buckets! 
Mud season and maple syrup
hold hands. 
No matter what,
you can't have one without the t'other...

   P O E T R Y ~ The 'Other' Obsession

​
Maine IS poetry to me and I've written it since the 5th grade when my teacher told me I had cheated because 'no one your age could ever write a poem like that'.  While I was humiliated and had to stay after school to clean blackbords and 'clap' erasers, still I couldn't stop writing, this time up in the attic of our old Victorian. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and have never stopped. It has embraced me, and sustained me in ways I cannot begin to explain ...  Thankful... 
Some of Maine's wonderful poets and publishers 

Poets, low left: David Moreau, Steve Cowperthwaite, Jay Franzel, Musicians to the right:  Brian Cavanaugh top row, Stan Davis bottom row, The Beat Poets of Wayne Maine, and Winthrop, Claire in the middle.... 

Beet Poets.jpg
Alice, new car.jpg

Alice Persons standing beside her new 'wheels'. Editor and owner of Moon Pie Press in Westbrook, she has published, and in doing so, honored well over 100 poets. A mega force in Maine for the art of poetry. 

Dreamscape, Drowning.jpg

Dreamscape
                  by Claire Hersom
It’s always in the early, dark morning
when a chill lingers from the night air
that we balance and suspend in so many forms. At the brink of the precipice -
that first glimmer of day, of hope,
the new beginning hardly noticed
were it not for the argument of birds,
the bending, dew-filled pine,
the hollow stamp of deer outlined
in the grass under our windows
settled in last night beside you in dream.
They too waited, their warm fawn bodies
of stick-legs and too-big ears listening
for sounds; the same sounds as you,
eyes never too far from a flutter,
never completely at rest.

These poetry books are available through Moon Pie Press,                           or directly through me.

Questions for the Author? 
              find her at                chersom1949@gmail.com

Roasted Coffee Beans

      "The best time to plan a book is while                                     you're doing the dishes."
                               ~ Agatha Christie

© 2025 Claire Hersom

bottom of page