Our Maine Street's Aroostook Issue 32 : Spring 2017 | Page 50

Writing For
A Better World
by Melissa Lizotte
Whoever coined the phrase, “Those
who can, do, those you can’t, teach,”
never met Alice Bolstridge. A retired
English teacher living in Presque Isle,
Bolstridge has spent a good part of
her life teaching college and high
school students creative writing and
literature. But that is only half of
her story. Bolstridge is also a writer
who has published more than 100
poems, short stories and essays in
over 41 literary journals as well as an
experimental novel.
She began her journey as a writer
much later than other writers might.
But her personal experiences and desire
for a better world have made her more determined to write
what she knows and what she feels about life, family and the
chances many people take to live by their own choices.
Bolstridge grew up in a poor family in Portage, Maine—a
small town known as “Buffalo” to its residents. She remembers
reading fairy tales and other books and magazines that her
family had around the house when she was a child. At Ashland
High School, Bolstridge’s teachers Rose Tilley and Burt deFrees
thought she should consider pursuing further education.
“He was someone who encouraged me a lot and paid attention,”
Bolstridge says, about deFrees. “He said I should go to college,
which took me a while.”
By the time Bolstridge entered college, she was married and had
three children. On her youngest son’s first day of school she
started her freshman year at the University of Maine at Presque
Isle as an education major with a concentration in English.
She says she never saw being a non-traditional student as very
challenging.
“I was very interested and very motivated. I don’t think if I
had gone to college right out of high school, I would’ve been as
48
SPRING 2017
motivated as I was when I was older,”
Bolstridge says.
After she graduated from UMPI in
1970, Bolstridge began teaching
third grade at Ashland Elementary
School. One year later, she took a
position as a third and fourth grade
teacher at Millinocket Elementary
School, where she taught for nine
years. She went on to receive her
master’s degree in English from the
University of Maine in 1982 and
her doctorate in English literature
from Oklahoma State University in
1987. Her other areas of study at
Oklahoma State University included
creative writing, literary theory and American literature.
Bolstridge worked as a creative writing instructor at the
University of Cincinnati until 1994. She moved back to
Aroostook County after the birth of her first grandson and
took a job as an English teacher at the Maine School of Science
and Mathematics, where she taught until her retirement in
2012.
During the years after graduate school, Bolstridge developed
her craft and built her resume as a published writer. But it
was not until a year after she retired from teaching that
Bolstridge published her most personal work: “Oppression for
the Heaven of It.” She based the experimental novel on her
son Alan Mountain’s real-life experiences and struggles with
schizophrenia. She drew from many of her own conversations
with Mountain and his firsthand accounts of what it is like to
live with mental illness.
“My relationship with him has shaped a lot of my adult life,”
Bolstridge says. “I’m interested in a kinder, gentler world with
not so much prejudice.”
“Oppression for the Heaven of It” won the Kenneth Patchen