Despite adventures across the pond to delve into British literature and creative writing, Vermonter Jenny Land Mackenzie was pretty sure she would ultimately remain close to the Northeast Kingdom. Building a world for herself there, however, she also built worlds conducive for learning and worlds from words. Find out how planting seeds for tomorrow’s bounty can sometimes nurture your own sense of place.
Guest Jenny Land Mackenzie grew up in Vermont and figured she would likely return there one day. However, her college career—filled as it was with all sort of creative explorations and outdoor adventures—set her up to delve into one passion only to have it lead her to another passion. This began when her interest in the history of clothing led her to an internship at a museum led by a mentor who would ultimately spark a passion for organic farming. The love of the land led her to other gardening adventures which led her to teaching adventures. Teaching led to a break for her own schooling, which led to more teaching and the development of a family life. Passion for her family ultimately led her to create the type of teaching and writing career that fills her soul.//In this episode, find out from Jenny how planting seeds for tomorrow’s bounty can sometimes nurture your own sense of place…on Roads Taken with Leslie Jennings Rowley.
About This Episode’s Guest//Jenny Land Mackenzie lives in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom with her husband—with whom she teaches at St. Johnsbury Academy—and their twins. Along with having a soft spot for organic farming, hiking, singing and the history of fashion, Jenny enjoys the process of writing in all genres. She is the author of The Spare Room, a historical novel for middle grade readers, as well as the non-fiction volume Teaching Rules! 52 Ways to Achieve Teaching Success. In 2015, Jenny was the grand-prize winner for that year’s Reader’s Digest Poetry Contest for her poem “After the Death of Their Child,” inspired by the infamous Lindberg baby. The following year, she won another top honor, as her poem “Morning E.R.” was selected by the Telegraph newspaper as the winning entry in the poetry contest to celebrate Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday.
Read Jenny’s award-winning poem, “Morning E.R.” about Queen Elizabeth II.
And to see examples of the homemade Halloween costumes Jenny mentioned, see this year's dragon and gnome.
For another story about being called to one thing and following another to find your way home, listen to our episode with Michelle Erickson Waters.
Find more episodes at https://roadstakenshow.com
Executive Producer/Host: Leslie Jennings Rowley
Music: Brian Burrows
Email the show at RoadsTakenShow@gmail.com
Jenny Land Mackenzie: I just walked into the department and absolutely loved it from the minute I was teaching, I just knew this was what I was supposed to do with my life. Every day in there is so special to be with those students. And I learn from them along with teaching them, and I'm so passionate about it.
Leslie Jennings Rowley: Despite adventures across the pond to delve into British literature and creative writing, Vermonter Jenny Land Mackenzie was pretty sure she would ultimately remain close to the Northeast Kingdom. Building a world for herself there, however, she also built worlds conducive for learning and worlds from words. Find out how planting seeds for tomorrow’s bounty can sometimes nurture your own sense of place…on today’s Roads Taken, with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley.
Today I'm here with Jenny Land Mackenzie and we are going to talk about how words can take us places and what they mean and how you build a life around them. So Jenny, welcome. Thank you so much for being here.
JLM: Thanks for asking me, Leslie. It's great to see you again after so many years.
LJR: I know. We were in the same UGA group. I think you were among my first people. Well, we start this the same way each episode and I ask the same two questions and they are these: When we were in college, who were you? And when we were getting ready to leave, who did you think you would become?
JLM: Let’s think about that. So when I was in college, I was a person who wanted to grab onto every experience that I possibly could and run with it and I took my studies extremely seriously and worked really hard. I spent a lot of hours alone working, but at the same time, I never wanted my studies to stop me from doing other things at Dartmouth. I was just so excited to take advantage of whatever came my way. So probably the most important part of my life there was being active in the outing club and I became a leader in the Cabin and Trail Division and led work trips, and I was a co-captain on the forestry team, or it's now called the Timber Sports Team. I continue to be active in the outing club in various ways. Alums at Dartmouth were such an important part of my formation and helped me, guide me towards some of my most important life decisions that I'm so grateful for. So I've wanted to continue to try to take on that kind of a role in the outing club now that I'm on the other side.
So I think that I, most of my social group was in the outing club, but I was also very involved with singing. I grew up in Vermont. And I went to a public school and where it fortunately had a very strong music program at the school where I went and when I came I wasn't very experienced. But Melinda O'Neill was instrumental to me in helping me move forward and recognizing that I might do better with a little bit of help. So she helped me connect with the music department to have lessons for credit. So I did that for four years. So that was a big investment because I practiced for about 45 minutes every day and was also very busy with chamber singers as well, which met for at least six hours a week. And I also worked in the costume shop and helped build costumes.
LJR: I remember that.
JLM: I loved that and I loved the ladies down there.
LJR: And style was kind of a part of your thing too, which I, I found so interesting with the. Kinda knowing you were outdoorsy and I had a vision of what that would mean, like lumberjacky. And yet you were there in your flowing maxi dresses and like definitely brought the femininity to this kind of more rugged outdoorsiness. So I, I love that. And then I did know that you were spending a lot of time in costuming. So had that come from a love previously [Yes.] or was that a newfound thing?
JLM: Oh yes. My parents would tell you that. So I was the kid who lived in the dress of box as a child and was always fascinated by that. I never took art classes in high school or in college, but when I got into high school, I started spending my free block in a corner of the library where there was a shelf with all of these books on costuming. And I started studying them and teaching myself how to draw and learning everything that I could about the history of fashion and designing and doing that. So I love this. So when I got to Dartmouth and I found out that there are classes in this and you could just spend your time taking classes, designing and learning. The history of clothes. I was, I took everything I could. Margaret Spicer was so important to me. She was the head director of the Hood Museum and so I took a lot of classes, like five classes, at Dartmouth.
LJR: Wow.
JLM: So liked to sew a lot too.
LJR: So, But that didn't create a minor or a…
JLM: Well, you know, thinking about choices. Margaret really took me under her wing and I was interested more in the intellectual side of fashion history than in actual design production and, and also more than design for the theater, although I was also interested in theater. So I definitely contemplated going down a road where I would academically study costume history, but began to realize that that would lead to a career where I would probably be in a city, probably more connected to a museum. And I did an internship that Margaret helped set up for me my junior summer at the Shelburne Museum. And that was in my hometown where I grew up. But it was a wonderful internship. I had access to all of their archival clothing and I helped organize it and label it and learned so much about it. I organized their whole children's collection, which had never been touched and I designed a huge exhibit about childhood in America with the help of this woman, Celia Oliver, who is my mentor there, and the director of clothing and costume and textiles there.
So it was very rewarding, but it was also a absolute watershed moment for me because I didn't earn any money with my internship. So I earned money by working for Celia helping transplant her garden from one town in Vermont to another that summer on the other days. And I found out I liked that so much better. And so my life took a 180 and I realized I need to live, really, I really want to live not only in Vermont, but probably buried in woods and fields even more than I had been living in Shelburne. And that is exactly what I've done with my life. And so the next summer I had spent my first summer working on an organic farm. And I've worked on an organic farm almost every summer, except for when I was on bedrest twice with pregnancies since I was since that year I graduated from Dartmouth. So I still work on an organic farm in the summer. I still have a huge garden and I love that. I'm passionate about it, so I don't really have a great outlet for my passion for costuming anymore, except for designing the most elaborate Halloween costumes for my children.
LJR: Oh, excellent. We'll have to see pictures.
JLM: Anyway, my life is much more connected to the outdoors and to, as you say to words. And. I'm a teacher and I really love that part of my life.
LJR: All right, so already we've had mentors that kind of guide you and then ultimately are guiding you to things that are passions, but not the passion or that would take up the bulk of your time, let's say. So where do you get the mentorship or the guidance to take on the teaching side of who you are?
JLM: Well, one Outing Club mentor who played a huge role in my decision making was Kathy Roy, who became Kathy Hook, wife of David Hook. So she's an 85 and she was working at the Mountain School. At the time, she had just started working there. She had finished up at the Yale School of Forestry at the time I was at Dartmouth, and she moved over to teaching there. She's a science teacher and she urged me to take a job working on the farm at the Mountain School. I worked there for seven summers and I also just started to think for the first time seriously about teaching and particularly teaching high school.
I had not absolutely loved high school. It's not my favorite period of my life. But I started thinking about it more seriously as a possibility. And I went away to graduate school after Dartmouth. So I had a Reynolds scholarship and I went to Oxford. I was there for two years studying English and literature. And then from there I went to the University of St. Andrews and I was studying creative writing. I stayed to teach there for a year at St. Andrews, or half of a year. I actually left my job because my mother developed breast cancer and I went home to be near to her and she made a great recovery and she and my dad are celebrating their 50th. [LJR: Oh, Yay.] Happy ending to that. She had that at the same age that, you know, I've had breast cancer since then, too. So anyway, it's really great to be home and near mom and Vermont is definitely where I wanted to land eventually. I just got back there a little bit sooner than I might have done otherwise.
And so I decided, I applied all over the place to lots of different English teaching positions in high schools, at private schools, because I didn't have a certificate to teach at a public school. And I visited these schools around New England and there are very few in Vermont and that didn't make me really happy. I wanted to be in Vermont and I also, it's hard to explain. I just felt like something was a little bit wrong in terms of my vision of what education should be for young people that age. When I was visiting those schools, it, they felt like small colleges. There was so much pressure on those students to achieve certain things and so much focus on what was coming next instead of what was happening to them right then at that particular time in their life. And it's so important. And I just said there has to be something more than this for this age group. And out of the blue, a job came up halfway through the year at St. Johnsbury Academy, which I'd heard of because, Oh boy, there was somebody named Skyler in our singing group. He had gone to St. Johnsbury Academy. I'd heard of it, right? It's on the other side of Vermont, but I'd never been there before and I went up there with my mom and I interviewed for the position. I wasn't sure, there weren't any young teachers my age. I was a little frightened of. I was like, Oh, what does you like being in such an isolated area? And the department chair was so kind and he gave me a few days to think about it. He arranged a meeting during winter break with a couple of teachers my age who felt like old friends I'd always known from Dartmouth immediately when I met them. And so I just walked into the department and absolutely loved it from the minute I was teaching, I just knew this was what I was supposed to do with my life every day in there is so special to be with those students and I learn from them along with teaching them and I'm so passionate about it.
And I had a wonderful year on sabbatical with my husband back over in England because he's British. His family's Scottish English, so, but I had a great year. But part of that year for me was realizing that I needed to go back to teaching itself. and I was writing a lot that year and I was gardening a lot that year. But I missed teaching so much, I just missed being with students. I love that. And so I enjoy teaching both lit and I love teaching creative writing. I teach creative writing sections in the spring. I have two sections. I teach advanced creative writers, too, so some of them are writing whole novels, which is really exciting. And I love staying in touch with my students and getting to know who they become and the writers they become. I just had a student from Notre Dame write me, I have a new idea about my novel. I need to run it by you. Can I call you this weekend? Like, Well, I'm really flattered. Oh, you would wanna call me Lily. That's great. But I'll, I'll help her all I can. So I just absolutely love being in the four walls of that classroom. And I have been in the same classroom since 2000. So I've never left that world. It's the same place.
LJR: Wow. Yeah. Well that's probably why you felt as though you were walking to a place and you were the only young person. Cuz people go there and stay and so now you're on the other side of that. And the new ones are like, wait, you've been here for how many years?
JLM: I've been here a long time. But it is a boarding school where I teach, and so there are actually, there's a bigger mix of ages of teachers there than there are at a lot of Vermont schools, and there's a little bit more coming and going—that's typical at a boarding school. But yes, a lot of people do realize that it's a pretty great life and a wonderful place to raise kids and end up staying, which is what I've done.
LJR: Right. And then you do have your summers where you can garden and [JLM: right] be on your organic farms and having things grow all, all seasons. It seems like you're helping kids grow in their writing and,
JLM: Well, I maybe, maybe I should think about that metaphor a little bit more in my own life. I guess that's really true, Leslie. But I definitely find the switch to spending time outside where I'm. Much more manual tasks where I just have my hands on the dirt and I don't have to think every moment in a cerebral sense about my task. So my mind is free to think about other things, and I think of writing ideas. I try to solve problems at home. I think through the way that I want my classroom to feel if I have a prep with that group of students to make it a special experience for them. Just I spend a lot of time on that, much more than writing lesson plans. Just what do I want that room to feel like for that group? What is the, how are they going to feel as a community and support each other, and how am I going to interact with that group? Because it's really different. Really different with the different age levels and the different kinds of…I teach writing. I also teach literature. I also teach creative writing, so I have to think about the needs of a particular classroom, and I teach different levels and students coming from wildly different backgrounds. So there are students from China and Kazakhstan in my AP research classroom next to students who have lived in the Northeast Kingdom who have never left the Northeast Kingdom before. You know, they're 15 and they've never been outside it, and they write, I'm going to Burlington for the first time. That doesn't happen very often, but it happens. So, those are really different needs among those student.
LJR: So I'm mixing my metaphors here, but I feel like a seed was probably planted in your outdoors training that you got at Dartmouth, at the DOC, because that's the kind of thing that DOC groups and trips and probably crews that are working on trails have to think about, you know, what are the skills being brought here? They're so diverse, I'm sure. And it's all about kind of feeling like a team pretty quickly to make sure that everybody's safe and gets out of it what they need and all of those things. So…
JLM: That's a really good point. I think about my outing club experiences and the outing club welcomes and accepts whoever walks through and decides they wanna be there. So, you know, there's no choosing the people who arrive. And so you, you take on board whoever's there and you welcome them, and you work with the group that's there. And you can work with a lot of different personalities and people with wildly different backgrounds and that's similar in a classroom, right? You're just going to be with a group of people who are there and enjoy that time together. So make the most of it.
LJR: Yeah. Well, I love how we are commingling all of these thoughts of growth and germinating things. But also you've built and grown a family and a life for yourself in Vermont where you've always wanted. So are there aspects about kind of home that you've—particularly since you've had a, a bit of adventure overseas and that sort of thing—what are your reflections on all of these things when you apply them to your domestic life?
JLM: Home is really important to me and to my husband. I met him, he was in my creative writing class, my master's creative writing program at St. Andrew's, and he grew up over there. And we did not date while we were there. We got together a couple of years afterwards; he came over. We are both avid hikers. We did some hiking together on both sides at the Atlantic and decided to try a relationship and things moved fast after that. He actually came over and spent a year on the farm, at the Mountain School with me where he was able to sit there and have a little bit of his own space that wasn't my space to kind of get to know the States on his own terms a little bit more and decided that he wanted to try it. And so we got married and bought a house. He got a job at St. Johnsbury Academy, too, so we both teach there together. He also teaches English with a focus on learning support. We, I think maybe a week after we'd gotten back after our honeymoon, we looked at the listings for real estate and found a little tiny, tiny house in Peacham and bought it. And I don't think we thought that we would still be here. It's really small. It's a tiny place for a family, but it's also a very special community here. And we both really love the landscape. He loves it because it's more open than some places in Vermont and it reminds him of home. And he also likes that the houses are older, which reminds him of home even if they look different. And we care a lot about having a real sense of home for our children. So we both care a lot about cooking and making things from scratch. We do a lot of that with our own food and both like to bake. We had a great amount of difficulty having children. It was very hard for us. And so when they kids came along, we really wanted to spend time with them and be there, and that's why we had them. And so it's been hard at times, but we have committed to working three quarter time each. So somebody was always home with the kids when they were little. And at this point, I'm home now and I will go in and I will teach my three quarter time soon and my husband will be home. He can come home by one o'clock and he's home for the kids on the other end. And we're able to support our home and the family that way. And our headmaster was incredibly supportive in helping us with this arrangement. And I still, I just told the headmaster I love so many parts of my job beyond the teaching. Like I like running the writing club and I love being an advisor. And those types of things are not generally on the description list for people who are part-time. But I told him that we, if we could move part-time and do this and share a few duties together, that we continue to do those extra things. And he supported that and he said, Well try it on a year by year basis. And it worked for him and it really, really did work for us really well. And so we've continued that and our children are 14 now, but that's still what we're doing.
So home is very important. Landscape is deeply important. Place is very important. And that's partly too why those, I guess I've lived five years of my life in the UK at this point. And place over there…It was, so it took me a full year of getting to notice the seasons and the changing and how the plants work and what's normal and what's not normal, before I felt myself there. And it was really formative for me to be over there and get to understand the landscape of a place Who's I, I prefer British writing in general. I like to teach that in my classroom too. And so to be able to picture these landscapes and understand them, know what they smell like, know, know when the leaves come down and when things grow, and how slowly things grow there compared to over here. All those things are really important to me and I think it helps. I think it affects my teaching now. I think those experiences, I don't necessarily probably need all of the—I've had a lot of fancy education—but I probably don't need all of that to teach in the classroom, but I use it. It really informs what I'm doing and what I share with students every day. So that's been a really important part of my life too, is just to be able to take what I've learned and and roll that into the kind of storytelling and sharing that I do in the classroom. LJR: Speaking of storytelling, what about your own writing author and poet is part of who you are too?
JLM: So I have not published a lot. I've published a children's novel and I have published some poems. But I write a lot and it's a big part of my life. And one thing that I've found is very special is sharing writing time with my students. So when they're writing in the classroom, I'm writing, too. And that's important to me, especially because at this point in my life, I'm a little bit isolated and I don't have a lot of peers that I'm sharing writing time with or exchanging things. It's important for me to have somebody keeping me in check a little bit and I actually find [that] through my top level students.
LJR: Yeah, I bet that time is so good for you, but it's also such a good model for your students to say, this isn't just an academic exercise. This is something that you can live and you can embed in your life for the rest of your life.
JLM: I hope so. I, I think it's important to model for kids. So when they're writing, I'm writing, when they're reading, I'm reading. Cause I don't think they see adults reading and enjoying reading very much in their lives. And I think it makes a difference to them when they say, Oh, wow my teacher is really having fun with her book too. You know? I try to make it a nice experience when we do that together. I just hope whatever taste of it they get there, they just wanna keep running with it at the next stage of their lives wherever that is.
LJR: Yeah. And as you said earlier when you were talking about the schools that just felt like they were looking forward and they weren't taking advantage of the now. I mean, you have to be so in the now when you're reading or writing but it also is showing much more process than achievement, right? If you're saying, I don't publish much, but I'm still writing, I'm still writing a lot. Because it's for you and it because it's the love of the craft and the creation. [JLM: Mm-hmm.] not so much the achievement part.
JLM: And also a recognition that life is long. And that right now I'm enjoying the here and now of time with my family, and I love my job and I love my time outside with my children and friends, too. And I can be writing now and concentrating on some of those other things later. That'll be there, as long as I kind of keep with it. I'm realizing that you can only keep so many balls up in the air and you really have to choose. And it's really important to me to, I had some difficulty having my children and, and didn't almost didn't make it, and I had a sea change at that point in my life where I just realized I just really need to enjoy every day and be super present in every day. That led to my decision to wanna be three quarter time to want to be present at home. To try to make time for things in my life that I care about in addition to work. As much as I love my work, there are other things that I wanna do, and I don't wanna end up 65 and say, now I'm gonna do those things. So I wanna do 'em all the way along the way.
LJR: Right, right. And to varying degrees of, you know, seriousness or putting something foregrounded. Other things that are taking up all of our energies, but I'm so glad that you're continuing writing.
So, Jenny, when you think back to that younger version of yourself, when we were in college and you knew you had a bunch of different interests, and yet you had some very strong pulls to remain in Vermont and to do certain things and live in accordance with the land in a certain way. And you told her, Okay, so here's your trajectory and here's where we've been and here's where we've ended up. What would her reaction be? Like, of course this is where you were gonna, you were destined for this, or?
JLM: I don't think she'd be incredibly surprised. I think that it's one path that she could have taken, and I think there are multiple paths. I think that by the time she graduated, she thought that she probably would be running her own farm rather than doing this. But I've really learned how absolutely crucial it is to me to be reading, writing, sharing reading, and writing with young people. And that is my career and I love it. And so it really makes sense for me to be. I work on a neighbor's farm and I grow food with her, and we eat a lot of her food and a lot of our own food that we grow and that balance works fine.
One of my twins is now working on that farm with me and she gets up really early, like five o'clock to go pick strawberries and you know, or raspberries or whatever it is for the early morning shifts. And it's a great pleasure to see how much she enjoys just being outside, too, and that she can handle doing the same task for four hours. It takes a certain kind of mentality for people to do that, especially at a young age. I think she has more patience probably than I did for that at that particular age. I don't think I would be entirely surprised, Leslie. But I think I'd be really excited to know at that age that I, living in the community that I'm living in. I absolutely value this part of Vermont, which has a lot of people who have lived here a long time, as well as people who have moved in who are so committed to being a part of this community and making it a special place to be. People really look out for each other and people really appreciate the beauty of the place they're in and help to take care of it. So I think I'd be really excited about where I'm living and what I'm doing. I’d like to think so.
LJR: I bet you would cause you can tell how excited you are that it is a reality now. So I appreciate your. Taking us on this path. And as you said, there are many that we could take , so who knows where's where yours will. But my guess is it will always be grounded in where you are right now and the people and the community and the thoughts. And so thank you so much for letting us take this journey with you today and catching us up.
JLM: It's wonderful to connect. Thank you so much, Leslie.
LJR: That was Jenny Land McKenzie, who lives in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom with her husband—with whom she teaches at St. Johnsbury Academy—and their twins. Along with having a soft spot for organic farming, hiking, singing, and the history of fashion, Jenny enjoys the process of writing in all genres. She's the author of The Spare Room, a historical novel for middle grade readers, as well as the nonfiction volume Teaching Rules 52 Ways to Achieve Teaching Success. In 2015, Jenny was the grand prize winner of that year's Reader's Digest poetry contest for her poem "After the Death of Their Child," inspired by the infamous Lindberg baby. The following year, she won another top honor as her poem “Morning E.R.” was selected by the Telegraph newspaper as the winning entry in the poetry contest to celebrate Queen Elizabeth's 90th birthday. We've put a link in the show notes to an article about Jenny and that poem in its entirety.
Speaking of show notes, don't forget that you can access a treasure trove of additional material RoadsTakenShow.com in addition to show notes with fun links and occasional “if you like this, you may like that episode recommendations.” You can also find full transcripts and some pretty great then and now photos of our guests, whether that's your cup of tea or not. We hope you'll just enjoy tuning in again next week with me, Leslie Jennings Rowley, for another episode of Roads Taken.