The Owl Pen

Together with books about Natural History, there is a lasting appeal among an increasing number of readers in simple living and sustainable agriculture. Ever since Henry David Thoreau published Walden; or, Life in the Woods in 1854, his attempt at living closer to nature and being self-sufficient, has inspired many people around the world.

The Owl Pen describes the adventure and experience of Kenneth McNeill Wells and Lucille Oille to carve out a life for themselves, at a time long before the "back-to-the-land" movement. Shortly after their marriage, in the mid-1940s, they lived for a short while in a cabin in the Canadian backwoods, before finding an building The Owl Pen, which was to be their rural home for about 20 years. Up in show more Medonte, Ontario, they discovered an old pioneer's log cabin, which they purchased for just 15 dollars on the condition that they removed it. Eventually, they were able to reconstruct and rebuild it on a plot of land which they described as "four acres of Eden".

Here they started their farm. During the Second World War, while Kenneth went overseas, Lucille kept the farm going. After the war, Kenneth gave up a career as a journalist, to build up their farm. The book, The Owl Pen, is a collection of 48 articles which describe their progress throughout the seasons, setting up and expanding their operations on the farm, as they start breeding chickens, ducks, and goats, and holding bees and extracting honey. Learning from scratch, through trial-and-error, initially scorned by neighbouring farmers, they persist in (re-)building and expanding the farm, weathering and wintering, each and every mishap. While the progression of the articles suggests the turn of a year, it is clear that the experiences contained in them represent a much longer period of pioneering their new lifestyle.

Kenneth McNeill Wells wrote the episodes as a series of articles that were published in the Saturday editions of the Evening Telegram in Toronto, and were subsequently published in book form in 1947. Kenneth McNeill Wells' journalistic writing skills make the book very readable. The high quality of writing with a touch of irony, made that the book remained in print for many years after its original publication, through various editions.

Starting before her marriage to Kenneth, Lucille Oille had her own career as a sculptor, wood engraver and illustrator of books. Like many of the books they later published together, The Owl Pen is richly illustrated with her wood engravings, which lend the text a dreamlike quality, complemented by eight black-and-while photographs, at the end of the book.

A book that would deserve the status of a classic in the genre of "back-to-the-land" writing. show less

The book gets its name from the farm settled by the author and his wife in Medonte Township in the early 40's and it's a collection of short essays about life on the farm written for the Toronto Evening Telegram. By turns fascinating, touching, and hilarious, I absolutely loved it.