Anne Sexton's connection to Maine

Published Mar 10 2009, 10:12 AM by Deirdre Fulton

So, apparently recovering from bird flu makes me an insomniac. Awesome!! Around 3 a.m., I pulled out my Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (hey, if you're going to be miserable, might as well go all the way, right?) After reading some uterus/madness/Freudian shit for a while, I decided to (re?) read the intro by editors Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George.

And in doing so, I stumbled upon what this all has to do with About Town: Anne Sexton's mom was from Lewiston! Her father was a Maine newspaper editor! Apparently one of her ancestors was a governor of Maine! Several of her poems reference the summers her family spend on a coastal island Downeast!

This really did seem relevant and interesting at 4 a.m.

Filed Under: books, local authors

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2 Comments

Jeff Inglis said:

Turns out there might be an even-closer connection somewhere in all this:

Anne Gray Harvey (married name Sexton) was the daughter of Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Gray Harvey, according to that bio-link up there.

Her maternal grandfather, Arthur Gray Staples, was a top editor at the Lewiston Evening Journal.

(So was Nelson Dingley Jr., who was also a member of the US House of Representatives and a Maine governor, and a person the bio-link claims was her maternal great-uncle. I have no reason to doubt, except that Dingley married a McKenney, not a Staples.)

Anyway, we here at the Phoenix know someone with a penchant for writing with a family name of Gray and origins in Lewiston.

Here's some more specifics on Sexton:

books.google.com/books

And on Dingley-McKenney:

www.nga.org/.../menuitem.94702e711043a03e9d28aca9501010a0

So maybe Chris had it coming, all these years. We'll ask him, if he ever takes those headphones off!

March 10, 2009 11:16 AM
Chris Gray said:

As much as I'd like to have some inroads to a future at the State House, my family only moved to Lewiston from Brewer/Orrington after the great Aroostook County potato famine of 1985 or so.

I am, however, way deep into some uterus/Freudian shit, so maybe I should bust out the old coat of arms and family tree.

March 10, 2009 11:42 AM

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Anne Sexton's connection to Maine

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