Eileen Graham, Author

Artist's Statement

An Outlander’s Journal tells the stories of people who celebrate spring by throwing an egg over their house, a folk healer who finds lost dogs by calling through a knothole in your barn, a snake doctor who relocates unwanted poisonous reptiles, a woman who saves vintage seeds and lives by the signs of the moon, and my adventures among them in one of the last truly rural communities in America.
When I moved to Pennsylvania apple country in 1974, I learned that real country living bore little resemblance to my bucolic daydreams; as an outsider, my road through this colorful locale proved lonely and burdened by responsibilities. Writing for newspapers offered me a lifeline and entrée into the lives of people who had all but disappeared from mainstream society a half century earlier. From them, I learned to plant and dry field corn, graft fruit trees, make hay, raise pigs and steers, help birth lambs and kid goats, and brew dandelion wine. Most of all I learned to listen more than I talked.
An Outlander’s Journal is my love letter to this singular place, motivated by a desire to preserve the values and histories of people as endangered and significant as the exotic cultures anthropologists study today.

Artist's Biography

An award-winning journalist, Eileen Graham began her professional career as a free-lance writer for magazines and a correspondent for several Central Pennsylvania newspapers, eventually writing and syndicating a weekly newspaper column for more than 22 years.
Graham lives on a 21-acre homestead in Gardners, Pennsylvania, where she and her husband raised their two sons along with an assortment of sheep, goats, a few pigs, a horse, one goose, and an occasional steer.
Her articles appeared in one Maryland and six Pennsylvania newspapers, one of which was The Patriot-News, Harrisburg. They introduced readers to a cast of country characters including a folk healer and the 1983 Skunk Trapper of the Year, and they chronicled Graham’s often-humorous experiences such as riding a vintage two-row corn planter and just trying to fit in to a community where her neighbors and their kin had lived for generations.
She holds a B.S. degree in Education and an M.A. in English and also worked in higher education administration at Penn State Mont Alto and Dickinson College before her retirement in 2002.