Author Hughes never forgot her Greenville roots

GREENVILLE— Lew-Ellyn Hughes is awaiting the fifth printing of her most recent and very popular book, Maine Stories, a compilation of the column she has written for years – Away with Words – which appears in the Original Irregular, an award-winning weekly newspaper that covers the Northern Franklin County region in the Western Mountains of Maine. Hughes’ column won the Maine Press Association’s Better Newspaper Contest seven times!

Hughes has been writing since she was small. “I’ve got the schoolwork from that time to prove it,” she said. “My mother kept all those old papers and as an adult I looked at some of my stuff. For example some kids would write ‘the cat is in a tree’…. But I would write ‘the lion was lying on a branch with an evil desire in his heart,’” she laughed. “I was 8 years old at the time and the teacher wrote at the bottom of that paper, ‘this is her talent.’”

Her writing career actually came to her. She had written a letter to the editor of a newspaper (The Yarmouth Notes) and he in turn wrote back and offered her a job as a columnist. She’s been in print ever since. And, what does she write about? Her incredibly busy life! During this interview I was able to tease out some of the myriad things she’s done, especially during the time she owned Diamond Corner B&B, an 1890s farmhouse that she refurbished and updated as a thriving bed and breakfast. It is located on Stratton Brook in Stratton.

Hughes told me a story about when she and her daughter, Holland, first moved there from the much more urban setting of Bangor. Holland, who was 12 at the time, noticed a boy throwing rocks into the stream. Being from the “city,” she wanted to know what kids did for fun in that rural area. The boy didn’t skip a beat: “Mostly throw rocks in the brook,” he remarked as he chucked another stone in the water.

Mother and daughter settled into the area and one day someone asked Hughes if she would bake a pie for him. She’d never baked pies before, but like everything else in her life, she plunged gamely in, admitting, “I have trouble saying no.”  The upshot of all this: in her last year of owning the B&B, she churned out (with care and love) around 800 pies, ran a small bakery – amazing breads and cookies — grew five gardens, using the produce in various recipes in her recipes, and was an LPN at a nearby residential group home! Oh, and she faithfully wrote her weekly column.

Hughes says she “grew up everywhere,” being the daughter of an often transferred service man. But Greenville was where she felt most at home.  “My parents were born and brought up in Greenville as well as my maternal grandparents – so this was really home. My father wanted to make sure we had roots; we always came back to Moosehead for summers.”

Hughes’ writing reflects her personality and her keen witted approach to life. She’s gifted with an abundance of that wonderful acerbic Maine humor and an uncanny way of spinning a really good story. Hughes said these stories “just come to me” and if there’s something in a story that’s not just right, she feels it. “I’m unsettled — there’s something inside of me that’s disturbed,” she paused. “It might be a great sentence – but the story doesn’t care and the story will have its way,” she grinned. “There’s nothing I can do about it.”

Maine Stories makes for the perfect camp or vacation book. It’s easy to pick up, the columns can easily be for short individual reads so, whether you have 15 minutes or many hours, you can savor, enjoy and best of all laugh. Beth Woodbury from Lincoln wrote of Maine Stories: “Lew-Ellyn is my new favorite Maine author. This book is funny, poignant, entertaining, well written and it touched my heart.” George Smith of “George’s Outdoor News” featured in the Bangor Daily News enthused: “A wonderful Maine writer. She has captured Maine.”

You won’t find Maine Stories on Amazon, however, as Hughes prefers to support local Maine bookstores. You can find her book at Bookstacks, Longfellow Books, Sherman’s Bookstore Inc., among others, and more locally, at the Corner Shop and Indian Hill Trading Post, both in Greenville. Maine Stories makes a great gift any time of year.  Check out lewellynhughes.com for additional information or “like” Away with Words on Facebook.