English Teacher Publishes Book of Poetry

Westminster English teacher Mollie Pilling knew at an early age that she should be a writer. “I knew I had to record my feelings and my reactions to the world in order to try to make some sense of it,” she said. Following the publication last year of her first novel, “The Ensign’s Wife,” she has just published her first book of poems titled “Journeys.” The poems reflect her experiences becoming a mother, living abroad, losing love and finding joy in the everyday miracles of life.

“In her debut book of poems, Mollie Pilling takes us across two continents and several cultures, whose artistic and historical wealth is set out in vivid detail, along with events and phenomena unfamiliar to most of us,” writes Arlene Swift Jones, author of “God, Put Out One of My Eyes.” "We also join Pilling on journeys to realms of political fury and fierce mother-love.”

Mollie began writing poems and essays years ago from unrecorded and private thoughts in trip logs, jottings scratched in the margins of shopping lists or on the backs of her children’s math homework and in small notebooks that served as diaries and traveled with her around the world. But the heavy-duty writing of a 90-page manuscript of poems took place over six weeks last summer while she was visiting her son and his family in Spain. She had been commissioned to write the book of poems by publisher Rennie McQuilken of Antrim House, after he had reviewed a sampling of her poems. “Soon I was using the siesta, when my little granddaughters were sleeping, to compose poems,” she recalled. “Amazingly the poems came and came, and I found that I easily had 90 pages by July 29, when I went to the local Internet café to post them to the publisher.” Her whirlwind writing resulted in a 114-page book of poems that she divided into sectioned parts titled “Visible Cities,” “First World,” “Sappho’s Songs,” “Second World” and “Letters to Rome.”

Mollie, who has been at Westminster since 2008, has been teaching literature for more than 25 years, 17 of them at international schools in New Delhi, Lugano, Athens, London and Rome. She also has traveled extensively in the Middle East, North Africa, Australia and Europe. She has been a reader for the College Board for AP English Literature and Composition and an examiner for the IB Language A1 Program.

Mollie adds, "Westminster School has been instrumental in my success as a writer and Michael Cervas, in particular, has supported and encouraged me in my two years on Williams Hill."

“Journeys” may be ordered from the Antrim House Web site: http://antrimhousebooks.com/catalog.html