Abbie Sewall

For many Mainers, and for those with a creative spirit, one must wear several hats through the course of a lifetime. Starting at about age ten, Abbie Sewall kept journals and dabbled in poetry. At age fifteen she discovered image-making. Following college, Sewall became a professional photographer for over twenty-five years. Her first book of photographs, The Voice of Maine, was a collaboration with author, Bill Pohl, published by Thorndike Press in 1980. After six years of digging deep into the life of a Maine woman turned photographer in the Victorian era, Sewall wrote Message Through Time, a photo-biography of her great-great grandmother, Emma D. Sewall, published in 1986, by Harpswell Press (now Tilbury House). In 2007, Sewall initiated a book project with the Maine Maritime Museum, the purpose of which was to condense into one volume the miles of maritime documentation kept by Sewall shipbuilders. Her brainchild, Live Yankees, by Wm. Bunting was published in 2009 by Tilbury House.

From 2012 - 2019 Sewall became an organic elderberry grower, spreading both the knowledge and the berries of the great Mother Elder to a customer base interested in health and healing. In the interest of ‘putting it all together,’ and knowing she would return to writing in her sunset years, Sewall’s hat is again a writer’s hat, with a focus on memoir, fiction and poetry.