Edie Clark (1948-2024) was a writer and editor from Dublin, NH. She served as senior editor for Yankee magazine for 10 years and then senior writer and fiction editor for another 14 years. Her multiple part series of topics such as land development, water pollution, the Christian Science church, and the Connecticut River have gained widespread attention. In her hundreds of articles published by Yankee, she established her popular themes about ordinary lives changed by one extraordinary act or circumstance.
Clark’s work appeared in The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, Northeast magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Hope magazine, and Reader’s Digest. She taught workshops and lectured frequently about writing and reporting. She also received the New Hampshire Writers and Publishers Project’s award for Excellence in Journalism and for four years in a row, her essays were listed in the Best American Essays. In 1998, she was named “Writer of the Year” by the City and Regional Magazine Publishers Association. She wrote the text for an orchestral work entitled Monadnock Tales, a fusion of music and poetry, which had its world premiere in 2001.
Clark was a fellow at MacDowell as well as at Hedgebrook Writer’s Retreat on Whidbey Island, Washington. She had also been in residence as the Visiting Writer at the University of Northern Michigan.
Edie was the author of The Place He Made, a memoir about her husband, Paul Bolton, who died of cancer at the age of 39. Though the book takes a wide-eyed look at cancer and at death, The Place He Made is a love story, more about life than it is about death. In its review, the New York Times Book Review called The Place He Made “a triumph of the human spirit . . . sure to take its place among the best of the literature.” The book, published in hardcover by Villard, was issued in paperback by Bantam Books and translated into Korean. The book was reissued in a new edition last year.
Clark was also the author of The View from Mary's Farm, a collection of her essays from Yankee magazine, and Saturday Beans and Sunday Suppers: Kitchen Stories from Mary's Farm, a food memoir with recipes.
