Jean Pedrick, 83; poet helped others create, inspire through words

The blank white page: inviting and daunting. A line appears, a stanza, a poem.

White is the where all color lives. Black is where all color goes. But grey pretends no color was, nor ever will be. The color of murmur. The color of the musical rest.

The verse, an invocation for those who trek through poetry's mists, is from ``The World of Grey & The Man in the Picture," a 2001 collection by Jean Pedrick.

``Everything she was in her life was grounded in the fact that she was a poet," said her friend Marie Harris, former poet laureate of New Hampshire. ``She was a most accomplished poet and someone who was very underappreciated in her own lifetime."

Thirty-three years ago Ms. Pedrick helped found the groundbreaking publishing cooperative Alice James Books. A year later, she began hosting a workshop for writers each Monday at Skimmilk Farm, her summer home in Brentwood, N.H., which participants treasured for its abundance of rigor and absence of rancor.

Jean Pedrick Kefferstan, who published under her maiden name, died of complications from a stroke on July 31 in Exeter Hospital, several miles from her farm. She was 83 and died on a Monday, a workshop day during her weekly gathering's 32 d summer.

``I suppose everybody has one person they cannot bear to live without, and that's who Aunt Jean was for me. I don't know who I will be without Aunt Jean," said her niece Nancy Mairs, an essayist and poet whose books include ``Waist-High In the World."

Ms. Pedrick was born in Salem, where she lived for five years. As her family moved to Marblehead, then Danvers, she began writing poems to secure the bond with her father. By her teens she was being published ``with tedious regularity" in her high school magazine, she said in an interview with the literary journal Rivendell.

During the years she was growing up and attending college, her parents divorced and her father committed suicide -- lessons in loss she revisited in poems.

Graduating from Wheaton College in Norton in the 1940s, she worked at a war plant, then in publishing at Houghton Mifflin in Boston. The job, she said, ``unfitted me for the nonliterary life." Her boss and mentor was Ferris Greenslet, editor in chief emeritus.

``I learned more about literature and our language in two years with him there than I had gleaned in 20 years of schooling," she later wrote.

After World War II she married Frank Kefferstan, a physician who became an insurance executive.

``They moved to Beacon Hill in the mid-1950s, at a time when everyone else was picking up their kids and scattering to the suburbs," said their son John Kefferstan, who lives in Washington.

When his mother began publishing, she always used her maiden name, ``so she had a dual identity, and my father liked it when he was introduced as Mr. Pedrick -- at times," their son said, laughing.

In the late 1950s the family purchased Skimmilk Farm, where Ms. Pedrick's other son, Laurence, now lives. She also has a granddaughter who, like Ms. Pedrick, was drawn to books even as a toddler.

``She would play bookstore," Ms. Pedrick said in the Rivendell interview. Her husband died in 1998.

Writing poetry, meanwhile, remained a calling, but never a livelihood.

``This is simply wrong in a developed, cultural society," she said.

Matters generally were worse for women, so in 1973, Ms. Pedrick was one of five women and two men who founded Alice James Books. The nonprofit cooperative was named for the sister of Henry and William James, whose work went unrecognized in her lifetime. The press, now run through the University of Maine, predominantly publishes work by women.

``I thought that I would grow old and die before I'd get a book of my poems published," she told the Globe in 1974.

Ms. Pedrick later cofounded Rowan Tree Press in Boston, which published poetry and prose in Boston for 10 years beginning in 1980.

During these years, her family lived in the Beacon Hill townhouse and spent summer months at the farm.

``I think I write more here at the farm," she said in the Rivendell interview. ``I tend to get here, take off my shoes, and put down my roots immediately."

In either residence, though, writing was a constant presence.

``I keep myself available to it at all times," she said. ``When I am not actually at a desk or table, physically writing something, I am in my head. Ideas are always running in and out of the doors and windows there."

Said John Kefferstan, ``I don't believe she ever stopped working on her poetry. . . . There was never any question of, `Oh, I'm going to retire from this now.' "

``I don't think poets retire," she said in the interview.

Her list of published books and chapbooks grew, from ``Wolf Moon" in 1974 through ``Pride and Splendor," ``Saints," and ``Catgut" three years ago. In 1993 she received the Bruce P. Rossley Literary Award, named for Boston's first commissioner of arts and humanities.

As her reputation became more pronounced among poets, so did the acclamation for the summer workshops she held at Skimmilk Farm. Invitations came through word-of-mouth exchanges.

Previous workshop experiences may have guided the approach when she started her own.

``Workshop seemed a misnomer," she said in the Rivendell interview. ``The poem [and poet] were being worked over, shredded, if possible, annihilated."

The Skimmilk workshop was different. Ms. Pedrick was the host, rather than the leader. The criticism offered was exacting, but not humiliating.

``She had an extraordinarily generous heart, and yet was always an astute critic," Harris said.

``I have an MFA in creative writing, so I'm workshopped to a fare-the-well," Mairs said. ``But it was nothing like the Skimmilk Farm workshop, which was not remotely competitive, but demanding at the same time -- demanding of each of us our best work. Hard listening and hard criticism, but always directed right at the poem -- never any of the personality stuff."

Next Sunday, those who have attended the workshop will gather at Skimmilk Farm at 2 p.m. for a memorial service, a chance to read Ms. Pedrick's poems again around the long wooden table inside her brown clapboard farmhouse or under the maple tree where everyone sat on pleasant days.

``We in the group went there for so many years that it was a part of our own mythology -- the way you would look back on your grandparents' place," Harris said. ``This was rooted in who we were as writers."