Nancy Gordon
Author photo by Howard Gordon.
Nancy Gordon was born in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1938, moved to the Adirondacks at age two, and grew up in two small Adirondack towns, Chestertown and AuSable Forks. She has been an Adirondacker ever since, though life and work have had her living elsewhere until retirement let her and her husband, Howard Gordon, make a home in Lake Placid, near where they grew up. They both graduated from AuSable Forks High School, but were several classes apart. They had not known each other but met more than two decades later when both were north for Christmas with their families. They both went at the last minute to a holiday party neither had planned to attend. Nancy calls this “magical happenstance.”
She has been a reader all her life, since first grade. She cannot resist words, wherever they appear. She tried some writing in high school and college, but did not write anything that she thought deserved an audience. She grew up loving hiking and sports. College summers spent as a camp counselor made her think of teaching as a career. Grateful for scholarship aid, she graduated from Wellesley College in 1958. With a fellowship from Wesleyan University, she spent the next year earning a Master of Arts in Teaching, which gave her the credentials required for teaching in public schools. She taught high school English and Creative Writing, for one year in Wethersfield, Connecticut, then for five years in Verona, New Jersey, followed by a year at Prentice Hall, editing college textbooks.
She joined the faculty at James Caldwell High School (JCHS) in West Caldwell, New Jersey, for the next thirteen years, teaching English and Creative Writing. For one of those years she taught at Glendowie College, near Auckland, New Zealand, on a Fulbright Hays exchange grant, which permitted a New Zealand teacher to travel to the US to take her schedule at JCHS. The West Caldwell School Board later granted her a yearlong sabbatical, during part of which she studied for a term in Oxford, England, not as an Oxford student, but in a program open to American graduate students, taking courses with Oxford professors. She still treasures her card for the Bodleian Library, where she swore “not to ignite flames therein” and was impressed that the ladies room graffiti messages were in Latin.
Nancy and Howard were engaged a month after their first date, and were married on New Year’s Day 1976, in the Adirondacks, with the AuSable River and Whiteface Mountain nearby and in view. She resigned from James Caldwell High School and moved to Miami, Florida, expecting to continue teaching, but opportunities were limited. She decided to go to law school and graduated from the UM School of Law in 1982. Her legal career included practicing law in two Miami firms, serving as the first JD Director of the UM law school’s Placement Office, and practicing as a member of the Ryder System Law Department. Lawyering as in-house counsel was a good job for this former teacher and camp counselor. An in-house lawyer gets to know the people and companies being represented, can advise about what to write, what to argue, what to commit to. When Ryder sold its Insurance Division to a new US subsidiary of Stockholm’s Skandia Insurance Company, Nancy served as General Counsel for Skandia’s new US holding company, the beginning of twenty years of lawyering for Skandia.
As her legal work diminished and finally ended in 2012, she had more time for other involvements, and began trying to write poems. She found a couple of small poetry groups, and attended the Dodge Poetry Festival in Newark, New Jersey several times and continued to be more involved in the world of poetry.
In 2020, a published poet friend asked if she might be interested in a poetry workshop with James Crews. She joined that workshop, which was a substantial start to the poetry world as she now knows it. She did two more workshops with James and then started, with several other workshop attendees, a poetry group that has met weekly online, with occasional weeks off, ever since. We are now well into our fifth year. We called ourselves the Saturday Poets, as James’s workshops had been on Saturday. When we decided that Wednesday was a better day for us, James said we were the Saturday Poets that meet on Wednesday. And so we are.
Nancy was thrilled to have a poem published in James’s 2022 anthology, The Path to Kindness. Nancy has also enjoyed several workshops with Rebecca Starks, whose workshops are superb learning and writing experiences.
In 2024, she joined the Poetry Society of Vermont, which published two of her poems in the 2024 Mountain Troubadour and awarded her two Honorable Mentions for poems submitted to the PSOV summer contests.
During the first year of the Covid pandemic, Nancy and Howard, who had bought a house in Lake Placid years before to be north for the summer months, stayed north through the first winter, and reclaimed their New York residency. They now are in the Adirondacks for more than two-thirds of the year. It’s home.