Norma Roche shares a collection of stories and poems from days skipping school to sip homemade wine in the woods, to luxury trips in Boston on a movie star’s dime (for a medical study), and kayaking down the rivers by Northampton.

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Norma Sims Roche grew up on Cape Cod, but has lived in Northampton since graduating from UMass in 1977. She recently retired from her work as an editor of college textbooks on biology and geology, through which she learned many amazing things about our planet, and even remembers a few of them.

She is grateful to all the attendees at Robin Barber’s Wednesday workshop, who have told her wonderful stories and kept her writing over the last 15 years.  She writes mainly memoir, personal essays, poems, and fiction based on true events.

She will paddle into her retirement years keeping the advice of her whitewater kayaking instructors in mind: “Keep your hips relaxed, lean downstream, and look where you want to go.”