Margaret Yocom

For five decades, poet and folklorist Margaret “Peggy” Yocom has been listening to the stories of people who live in the western mountains of Maine.

Her book All Kinds of Fur: Erasure Poems & New Translation of a Tale from the Brothers Grimm was published by Deerbrook Editions in 2018. Her poetry and non-fiction have also appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, The Beltway Poetry Journal, the anthology The Folklore Muse: Poetry, Fiction, and Other Reflections by Folklorists, Friends Journal, and elsewhere.

She founded the Folklore Studies Program of George Mason University where she taught for 36 years; among her many courses, she offered “Living Words: Folklore and Creative Writing.” For her work at the university, the American Folklore Society awarded her the Kenneth Goldstein Award for Lifetime Academic Leadership.

She has published on the Brothers Grimm, on the folk arts of political protest, on Inuit storytelling in northwest Alaska, on family folklore, and on the folk arts of Maine logging communities, especially on the Richard Family of Rangeley. Curator of the Rangeley Lakes Region Logging Museum until 2014, she has written several essays on Rangeley’s logging heritage, including the book Logging in the Maine Woods: The Paintings of Alden Grant. She has served as editor for two Rangeley authors: Favorite Story-poems of Maine’s Unique Storyteller by Gaylon “Jeep” Wilcox (Liongrass Editions, 2018), and Ayuh, That’s Life on the Moose Trail! (Liongrass Editions, 2019) by Wanda Ferguson.

Co-founder of the American Folklore Society’s Creative Writing and Storytelling Section, she holds a Ph.D. in English and folklore from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A founding member of Western Maine Storytelling, she tells legendary tales of the seen—and the unseen. She has offered several workshops at Monson Arts on personal stories and creative writing; in July 2023, she will lead a week-long session on folklore and creative writing. Co-organizer of the Hugh Ogden Memorial Evening of Poetry in Rangeley, she makes her home with her geologist husband, John F. Slack, in Farmington and Rangeley.