.png)
- Julie A. Sellers
Of June, Anne, and New Beginnings: A Personal Essay by Julie A. Sellers
Anne of Green Gables and June will always be inseparably linked in my heart with new beginnings because it was on a long-ago June day that I first made Anne Shirley’s acquaintance. I remember that day so clearly because it marked a pivotal moment in my life, dividing it into two distinct periods of before and after. Before, I was a bookish, imaginative girl who loved the outdoors, dreamed of writing, and was constantly falling short of the expected levels of practicality prized by my family and the rural community where I was raised. After, I was the same bookish, imaginative dreamer… but now, I knew I was not alone.
Like so many kindred spirits and Anne devotees I’ve met over the years, Anne seemed very real to me as I read the novel for the first time in my room on the family farm at age fourteen; decades later, she still seems just as real.
It’s as if I’ve always known Anne because I see glimpses of myself in her and in her creator. I recognize her in her daydreams and life goals, her rapture before the beauty of nature, her creativity, and her scrapes because I’ve lived my own versions of them all. Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of this self-identification with Anne is that I’ve discovered over the years that others worldwide feel the same. Anne devotees around the globe speak of her as if she is an old friend, and many make the pilgrimage to Prince Edward Island in search of the red-headed orphan girl, Lover’s Lane, and Green Gables.
Anne’s story, and, indeed, all the well-crafted narratives written by L.M. Montgomery, called to me as a young reader, not only for their plots but for their language. Reading a Montgomery novel is like luxuriating in the English language, wrapped in its loveliness and metaphor, as enraptured as Anne when she first experiences the White Way of Delight on her own first June day in Prince Edward Island. It brings that same “flash” that Emily Starr knows in Emily of New Moon.
The breaths of beauty Montgomery captured in word snapshots did not seem all that different to me than the glimpses I found in the natural landscape of the Kansas home of my childhood. Therein lies part of her artistry and magic, as Janice Fiamengo has observed: “Montgomery’s emphasis on the ecstatic response of the sympathetic viewer meant that Avonlea…became a portable landscape” (228). I was able to see myself not only in Anne but also in a kindred geography. I didn’t live by the shore or at a romantic home called Green Gables, but I could see them both in the sea of waving prairie grass and the farm where I was raised. The trees bordering the creek that ran through our property were just as inspiring as any could be in Prince Edward Island, and the flowers in the gardens just as poetic.
Anne has traveled many a mile with me to different states, countries, and cultures where I’ve lived, but she has always, ever since I’ve known her, been integral to my own understandings of myself. She is literature, friend, and geography, all in one. And so, when I read a call for submissions to a poetry contest on the theme of fernweh or farsickness, a type of longing for faraway places, the first location that came to mind was Green Gables. I sat down and dashed off a poem about that iconic spot.
I didn’t win the contest, but the act of writing that poem reminded me of all the ways and all the times I’d felt connections to Anne Shirley over the many years of our friendship. I did what any self-respecting Anne fan would do: I re-read the novel (again). And that was when I was struck once more by the poetic pulse of Montgomery’s prose. Not long thereafter, I began an exercise in writing each day, and, more and more, I found myself taking inspiration from the pages of my old friend, Anne of Green Gables.
Of course, I must write about kindred spirits and all the cast of unforgettable characters: Marilla, Matthew, Diana, Gilbert. But there were other images that had always called to me: amethysts as the souls of good violets, Anne’s love for narcissi, the enchanted bookcase, mayflowers, light on the Lake of Shining Waters, Anne’s philosophy of Octobers, wild cherry trees, marble halls, and so many more images. As the stack of poems grew, it became abundantly clear to me that I had the makings of my own collection, my own book of poems inspired by Anne.
I’d love to say that the first publisher I approached about this project saw its brilliance and snatched it up, but that’s not the case. I admit I took heart in knowing Montgomery had to try more than once with Anne, and I vowed not to give up. Then, I participated in a read-around at the Kansas Author’s Club Convention in 2020, and I shared one of my Montgomery-inspired pieces.
The owners of Blue Cedar Press were there, and they reached out to me afterward to see if I had any projects I’d like to pitch to them. Fortunately, the press board had enough scope for the imagination to see the beauty and value of my collection of poetry and photographs, and now, several months later, I hold in my hands the fruits of so many years of reading, dreaming, and friendship with Anne Shirley.
Montgomery’s novel is a testament to the enduring legacy of the lasting impact of a well-written story and beautiful language on readers and writers.
It is my hope that Kindred Verse: Poems Inspired by Anne of Green Gables will encourage kindred spirits around the globe to revisit Green Gables or to discover it for the first time. And it is fitting that my book is released in June—the month of Anne’s arrival at Green Gables, the month when I first met her, the month of Anne-ish beginnings.
Works Cited:
Fiamengo, Janice. “Towards a Theory of the Popular Landscape in Anne of Green Gables.
Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture, edited by Irene Gammel, University of Toronto Press, 2002, pp. 225-227.