2024 is L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday! The L.M. Montgomery Institute (LMMI) at the University of Prince Edward Island is celebrating with 150 tributes – celebratory statements or greetings – that reflect upon personal connections to Montgomery or on an aspect of her life, work, or legacy.
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Just as Montgomery was inspired by books that she read, today’s writers are inspired by her legacy. This week’s tributes are from four writers – Sarah McCoy, Kathy Stinson, Logan Steiner, and Louise Michalos – who express appreciation for those qualities of Montgomery’s writing that inspired and continue to inspire them as artists.
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Sarah McCoy on Montgomery’s humanity
I say with no embellishment that Lucy Maud Montgomery is the single most influential writer in my career as a published author. From my earliest days of reading to the novel I’m working on this hour, her kindred spirit continues to encourage me to seek those things that are noble, lovely, admirable, and true. Her legacy is one of storytelling, but it is also one of humanity and mining the gold of that enigmatic territory of the heart.
I celebrate her on her 150th birthday and honour her every day! Our world is a more splendid place because of L.M. Montgomery, indeed.
Sarah McCoy is a New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of Marilla of Green Gables.
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Kathy Stinson on that “crinkly feeling”
Although I loved Anne of Green Gables as a child, it’s only recently that I’ve come to realize that the book may have had more of an impact on me than has ever occurred to me before.
Anne refers to poetry often. “Don’t you just love poetry that gives you a crinkly feeling up and down your back?” she says.
I suspect that Maud did, Marilla not so much, and I certainly do. Not long ago I wrote “Something Missing” – an erasure poem using an excerpt from Chapter XX as the source text.
orchards pink
frogs silverly
sweet savor of clover
walls white
chairs yellowly
cracked blue jug
the pie
the handkerchiefs
the brook
one can live down troubles
before dark
after dark
a white lady
walks wailing
believe in daylight
tell a story
I like to think that Anne, and maybe even Maud, would have approved.
Kathy Stinson has been writing books for young people for over forty years, and poetry, less publicly, for almost as long. Her first poem for adults will be published in the Fall 2024 issue of The New Quarterly.
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Logan Steiner on Anne’s directness of speech
I first discovered Anne of Green Gables in a small Iowa town where I spent long summer days with my grandparents. There are likely as many reasons for loving Anne as there are Anne lovers, but for me, the most striking thing about eleven-year-old Anne was her perpetual failure to hold her tongue. By the time I read Anne, I had already learned how to hold my tongue too well. I share Anne’s sensitivity and penchant for disappointment, and filtering became an easy way to avoid offending.
My years spent studying and cherishing L.M. Montgomery’s life have only made me appreciate Anne’s directness more. Her story is often read by young adults, but I think we may need it most in middle life. Rereading it now, I feel an immediate uplift in my spirits and the freedom to say exactly what I mean. What a gift to generations of readers.
Logan Steiner is the USA Today bestselling author of After Anne, a novel based on the life of L.M. Montgomery. She is a writer and practicing lawyer living in Denver with her husband, daughter, and a cranky grey cat named Taggart.
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Louise Michalos on Marilla choosing who to tell her story
I have to admit, my scholastic knowledge of Lucy Maud Montgomery is very limited. And I didn’t grow up reading the Anne novels. My first introduction to her characters was at the Confederation Centre in PEI, watching the stage production of Anne of Green Gables. By that time, I was twenty-five years old, married, and had two little boys. The characters I most related to, and felt as if I knew, were Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert and their discovery of what it felt like to be loved by a little girl.
In 2018 I was looking for a well-known East Coast character and a well-known Canadian character to be in my first novel. And the first person I thought of was Marilla. So I chose her or at least I thought I did. The book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron talks about the character choosing the author. And that is really what happened. It was as if Marilla stood behind me and said “You need to tell my story.”
And so I did. And in the process, fell in love with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert all over again. The creation of these two characters by Montgomery in 1908 was their introduction to the world. Since then they have not only endured, they’ve adapted and changed as needed, for the readers and movie watchers, and TV Series fans around the world, who still need them.
Louise Michalos, a graduate of Adult Education from Dalhousie’s Henson College, is a mother of two sons and grandmother to one very special grandson, who lives with her husband in Bedford, Nova Scotia. Louise retired after a forty-year career in Banking, Human Resource Management and Program Administration with the Provincial Government before publishing her first novel Marilla before Anne in 2021.
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Next week’s tributes celebrate Montgomery and International Friendship Day.