PRESTON BROWNING, co-director of Wellspring House, is a retired English professor. For almost 35 years he taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in twentieth-century American fiction. He is the author of FLANNERY O'CONNOR, published in 1975 by Southern Illinois University Press, and of several articles on O'Connor and other contemporary writers, including the "black humorists" of the fifties and sixties and Walker Percy. His poetry has been published in Phase & Cycle, Poetry East, The Lyric, Collision, Pikestaff Forum, Thorny Locust and Mother Earth News, his translations of Guatemalan and Nicaraguan poetry in several journals, including Mother Earth News and Collision. Two recently published essays are "American Global Hegemony Versus the Quest for a New Humanity," which appeared in the Spring 2003 issue of The ECOZOIC READER; and "Struggling for the Soul of One's Country: American Pathologies and the Response of Faith" Cross/Currents (Winter 2005).
With a Ph.D. in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago, Preston has interests ranging from contemporary writing about spiritual quest (Kathleen Norris, author of The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace, is a favorite), to the fiction of such writers as Tillie Olsen, Flannery O'Connnor, Louise Erdrich, and Ursula LeGuin (one of his most popular courses at UIC was entitled "Love and Sexuality in 20th Century American Women Writers"), to American diplomatic history. He recently completed a book entitled Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir while working on several short stories, one of which is based on a play he wrote in the 90's about the U.S. and Nicaragua during the Reagan years.
Twice in the eighties and four times since moving to Ashfield, Preston has visited Nicaragua, also visiting Guatemala on numerous occasions since 1999. In the early seventies Preston and Ann spent an academic year in a small village in the southwest of France, where their two older daughters attended the local school, and during the academic year 1977-78 their entire family (three daughters and a son) was in Macedonia, then a part of Yugoslavia, where Preston was a Fulbright lecturer in American literature at the university in Skopje. (Again their children attended local schools and learned to read, write and speak Macedonian, a south Slavic language.)
At Wellspring House Preston intends to pursue a long-dormant interest in woodworking, to read more political drama (just before retirement he offered a graduate seminar in this area), and to perfect his cooking skills. He expects to continue to enjoy his five grandchildren and to get to know much better the newest addition.
ANN HUTT BROWNING is an architect, a published poet, the mother of four grown children and the grandmother of five. With an undergraduate degree in English literature from Radcliffe College, she has two master's degrees, one in psychology from the Claremont Graduate School, and one in architecture from Catholic University in Washington, D.C. In Virginia, in the 1980's, she designed new houses using passive solar technology, created many designs for additions and renovations, often working on 18th century houses. She also supervised the repair and restoration of a one-hundred-year old church. In Chicago, in the 1990's, she worked with other architects, mainly on apartment house renovations. Before studying architecture, Ann had a variety of work experiences in Chicago: at a settlement house in a largely Spanish-speaking neighborhood, as director of a family camp for groups from the inner city, as director of a department at the Health and Hospitals Governing Commission of Cook County, focussing on support for health and medical education, and as associate director of University Health Services at the University of Chicago. In the 1970's she served for eight years on the board of directors of a Montessori school and was on the vestry of her Episcopal church. In the 1990's she worked with community groups on appropriate architectural designs for an urban setting and on a co-housing project. She was one of the key creators of an inner-city “small school” funded by the Chicago Board of Education.
In the winter of 1999, Ann studied Spanish in Guatemala and started working, with the design staff, on a housing project in Ocotal, Nicaragua, for 300 families made homeless by Hurricane Mitch. She returned to Nicaragua in the winter of 2000 to spend two weeks working on this project, and also spent another week in the islands of Solentiname, planning for future solar energy projects. She has returned to the Solentiname Islands virtually every year since, has designed a large workshop for the local artists and artisans there, which now serves as a focal point for the community. Ann also oversees the condition and needed repairs of the seven schools on the islands. She and Preston are both active members of the Solentiname, Nicaragua Friendship Group of Western Massachusetts, building solidarity with the people on the islands. In Ashfield, Ann is active in the community, serving as warden in the local Episcopal church, and is a member of the town Finance Committee. She served on the Town Center Planning Committee, and was in charge of raising funds for buying privately held open land, now the Town Common. Ann is a published poet. Her work has appeared in the Carolina Quarterly, the Dalhousie Review, Salamander, Out of Line and many other journals.
“Waddaya know? Here's this wonderful house in this friendly town run by two lovely, generous souls who by some strange sorcery came to know exactly what was needed to snap me out of my doldrums and remind me why I got into this writing racket in the first place.” - Joe Fox