RUMFORD— Katrina Ray-Saulis, a 2002 graduate of Mountain Valley High School, has recently published her first book, By the River. The book is a collection of short stories based on Maine’s history and beautiful landscape.

The opening story takes place around 1901, the year that the Strathglass brick park was built in Rumford. These buildings were created as housing for workers at the Rumford paper mill. As a teenager, Ray-Saulis spent a lot of time in the park, visiting friends who lived there, and their homes as well as the walkways in the park interested her, she says.

She first was inspired to write in the fourth grade, when she was in the Hartford-Sumner school system, she says. Her teacher had a particularly messy desk and this teacher and her desk inspired her to write a story: “In homeroom I wrote a story about her students getting shrunk and running around on her desk trying to find stuff.” But she also remembers she was reading when she was very little and has always been a bookworm. “So writing was just kind of a natural fit, I think,” she adds.

Ray-Saulis was born in Portland and later attended middle school in the Rumford area. However, generations of her family are from the area and she points out that her great-grandfather used to run the ferry in Rumford Falls.

When asked why she chose to write about some of Maine’s historical events she explains “My grandmother was a volunteer librarian at the Mexico library when I was growing up, and she was always into history, especially the Titanic.” Her grandmother was also involved in Mexico’s historical society, she adds.

As a student at MVHS her history teacher was Ron Leberg. “He had a really good knack for taking what we were learning about history and putting it into the things we saw in everyday life. So, on the civil-war he would talk specifically about the people in the Rumford-Mexico area that fought in the Civil War,” she said.

Her parents, Kennith and Marilla Couch, always encouraged her in her writing and she recalls that their home was always full of art work and supplies. “There’s no fear of the arts in my family, that’s for sure,” she said.

When she was 11 or 12 she spent a summer in New York as an award for winning a writing contest. While she was there she realized that writing and the arts was what she truly loved.

Ray-Saulis also says that she loves her Indie Publisher, BGP Publishing. “Part of the reason I love BGP is because of the small community of writers they create around them.” BGP Publishing is also using that community to raise funds for autism research “and I think that’s a beautiful thing,” she says. Their project 50/50 is a photo project collecting photos of people with autism from around the country, and their website is http://www.bgp-publishing.com.

Ray-Saulis will be at the Rumford Public Library on Tuesday March 15 at 6 p.m. for a reading of some excerpts from By the River. For more information contact the library at 364-3661.

mhutchinson@sunmediagroup.net

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