MSI Press Blog

  As I sit in my “office”—a modest 10x12 she shed that, post-Covid, doubles as the inventory hub for MSI Press—I’m surrounded not by filing cabinets or ergonomic chairs, but by relics. Remnants. Reminders. Each one a whisper from a life lived across continents, cultures, and hemispheres. Hanging from the coatrack, where coats and sweaters ought to be, are artifacts that defy seasonal utility: A Christmas bell ornament adorned with camels from Jordan A painted hand fan from Korea A swath of fabric in Uzbekistan’s national colors A small woven purse from Turkmenistan A banner from Lithuania International University, where I once subbed for a professor on maternity sabbatical—a generous two-year leave that American mothers can only dream of Nearby sits a dilapidated Russian Mishka bear, its head precariously held by my own crude stitching. My daughter Echo, then 11 or 12, carried it everywhere during our shared days in the USSR. It’s more than a toy—it’s a talisman of a time and ...

  Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication from the forthcoming memoir, In with the East: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver Chapter One: Acton I was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, but my earliest memories belong to East Rochester—a small mill town that felt big to a child on a bike. I spent my early years pedaling down its streets, ducking in and out of the Main Street shops, and playing games on the lawns of the two churches that sat directly across from each other like old, watchful neighbors. Back then, life was as local as it gets. I knew every sidewalk crack and shortcut path, every neighbor’s barky dog, and every familiar bell above a shop door. But as our family grew—eight children in all—my father couldn’t support us on a town lot alone. So we moved across the Salmon Falls River to Acton, Maine, where land was cheap and farms were many. That’s the place I truly think of as my childhood home, the place that shaped my bones and burned the soles of my feet ...