How Perseverance Farm Got Its Name.

In the spring of 2018, I suffered a traumatic brain injury. Before the injury, I was a playwright. After the injury, I was lost.

Also in the spring of that year, I discovered dahlias.

Learning about dahlias offered me a restorative way through the isolation following my TBI. (And then, of course, the pandemic added more challenges.) I was also looking for a way to support myself, since my ability to work on a computer screen was greatly diminished.

That dahlias have four seasons—planting, tending, harvesting, and storing—helped me mark time and track my recovery over the next several years. Learning new skills and then sharing knowledge lifted my spirit, as my brain healed bit by bit.

In the fall of 2021, I purchased an acre of land in Freeport, Maine. I was only able to do so with a generous loan from friends who had long supported my playwriting career and were now trying to support me as I built a new source of income.

The acre was highly distressed and filled with sofas, bathtubs, and car parts. (See before and after pics below.)

There was also a long-neglected hydrangea next to a falling-down house. The building was propped up on teetering cinder blocks and didn’t have a back wall.

I couldn’t rescue the building, but I was determined to rescue the hydrangea.

Bribed with a box of donuts, the bulldozer operator kindly dug a hole for it, scooped up as much of the root ball as he could, and plunked it down in the new hole.

I pruned it heavily in 2021 and again in 2022, so for a while it was just a tall scraggly stump. I worried that overpruning and transplant shock had doomed it, but in 2023 it bloomed into the photos you see on this page.

It’s time to give it a name. I’m going with Percy, short for Perseverance.

You may know that I call my farm Perseverance Farm. Well, there’s a story behind that.

Percy is the main character of the last play I wrote, “Perseverance.” It was produced by Portland Stage in 2021 as their first in-person play during the pandemic.

With my ongoing cognitive challenges, I wasn’t sure I could work on my script as we rehearsed, but Todd Backus, Miles Hatch, Anita Stewart, and director Jade King Carroll kindly set up a way for us to rehearse that kept me off the computer—after rehearsal, Jade and I would talk through script changes I couldn’t see on the page myself. Then Macey Downs would make the changes on her laptop and send the new pages to everyone. It was very labor-intensive, yet no one ever made me feel like it was a burden.

I had never worked in such a collaborative way, and it resulted in a play I was very proud of.

The set for the play was a Grange Hall in Maine with a dirt side yard. So Portland Stage poured a dump truck’s worth of screened loam on stage, and when the play closed, they kindly donated the dirt to my farm.

Right now dahlias are growing in that very same dirt.

There was a long stretch, about four years, where I was very confused and frightened by the loss of my abilities. I wasn’t sure I’d ever fully recover. I’ll likely always have limited ability here and there. I am simply different now. But starting in 2022, I began to steadily feel like myself again. I’m grateful to all of my loving friends who stood by me when I was so lost and had very little to offer in the way of friendship.

I was an apartment kid who moved a lot growing up. I’ve never farmed anything in my life before this. Learning to rely on others and collaborate in new ways in both playwriting and flower farming has been a revelation.

In 2023, I began to welcome people to the farm so that they might rest, find community, and appreciate dahlias. I especially enjoy sharing knowledge and encouraging other beginning flower enthusiasts.

Perseverance Farm will always be a work in progress, but aren’t we all?

May we all find ways to persevere and thrive.