Meet Our Alumni
Hannah Holmes ’88
- Just Her Nature
- For more information, visit: www.hannahholmes.net
In The Well-Dressed Ape (Random House, 2009), Hannah Holmes ’88 presents her third and most personal book, as only she can. As she did with that ever-present grit in our lives in The Secret Life of Dust (Wiley, 2001) and her yard’s ecosystem in Suburban Safari (Bloomsbury USA, 2006), this time out Holmes studies the human being with the eye of a scientist and the wry and engaging voice of a master storyteller.
She takes the format of the biologist’s formulaic species fact sheet (physical appearance, habitat, diet, mating habits, and the like), and, with tongue firmly in cheek, creates one for human beings. “The book focuses only on biology,” she says, “on things universal to the human animal.”
Which human does she study? “I settled on myself,” she says. “I was easy to reach.”
Buoyed by reviews in Time magazine and Oprah’s O magazine, Holmes hit the road to promote the book, first through local readings, then to the West Coast, and Canada and Australia. She’s traveled broadly in her career, which began more than 20 years ago when she was an undergraduate at USM.
“The key for me was to work as a writer as soon as I possibly could,” she says. Greater Portland provided a number of outlets. Her early work appeared in the Free Press, alumni publications, the Portland Press Herald, Portland Monthly, and the Casco Bay Weekly. “You just need to write and publish as much as you can. You can learn something with every single piece.”
Students today have an even more powerful forum, the blog. Holmes finds the blog refreshing. “People are writing from the gut, on the fly, and without hearing a professor’s voice in their ear. While a lot of it is dreck, the form allows for the possibility of fresh new ways of communicating.”
And to gain experience writing.
