The volume of original poetry by Charlotte Hathaway entitled Indian Paintbrushes Shade Wild Strawberries reflect the author’s interest in treating the severe division within society on every level, individuals within that society, their beliefs and even within their own thoughts about themselves. Experiencing this in her own life, having lived most of her life as a man suspecting that she was really a woman deep inside found her own inner self as divided as the society around her. Having grown up on a farm, Ms. Hathaway developed a keen awareness for marked divisions within the natural world dividing people from their land and ultimately people from the land in general in the inevitable quest for modernization and industrialization-a ‘better’ life.

Ms. Hathaway reflects in her work on the results of the psychological rifts in her own mind and in the minds and lives of her many students over her years of teaching youngsters who did not experience schooling like the many children who seemed to be able to adapt themselves to an environment, find some intellectual and social mean whereas many of her students could not. Ms. Hathaway found herself empathetically able to sense the anxiety within her students and within her fellow teachers. She was keenly aware of these stresses in the developing lives of her children she helped to raise. She often carried these rifts and uncertainties into her writing work as a means of disarming the extremes of stress she felt about them, the symptoms of that stress including depression and alcohol dependence which she managed to resolve with therapeutic invention.

It is Ms. Hathaway’s hope that readers may find her very readable poetry and prose an inspiration to help find insight into the societal and natural rifts all of us must face in out existential realities. On on level her work is a source of pleasure and originality. On darker levels others may find keys to escape dissolution.