Maine Governor Janet Mills Bridges Political and Poetic Life

When Janet Mills needs to step away from work, she turns to poetry. That's according to Katy Kelleher's profile of the state of Maine's governor, published at Down East. Kelleher writes that "Mills has been a regular on the Maine literary circuit throughout her political career, sometimes as a speaker or guest, often as a low-key attendee at public readings, book launches, and fundraisers." From there: 

A lawyer and former state district attorney, she served three terms in the Maine House of Representatives, representing Wilton and her hometown of Farmington, before being elected the state’s attorney general in 2008. She comes from a prominent political family: Her granddad served as a Republican in the state legislature, as did her father, who was also a U.S. attorney under Eisenhower and Nixon. Her older brother, Peter, spent 16 years in the state legislature and twice sought the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Her sister, Dora Anne Mills, did a stint on the Democratic National Committee before serving 14 years as the state’s public health director. Famed McCarthy-defying Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith was a family friend.

Mills’s mother, meanwhile, was a high school English teacher. Kay Mills grew up in Aroostook County, in Maine’s northern farm country, and Mills’s sister, Dora, remembers her mother reciting poems during long car rides up north: Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, Carl Sandberg. “She brought us up with poetry, there is no doubt,” Dora says. “Janet’s love of poetry stems from her.” Kay nurtured her older daughter’s nascent passion for writing, even helped her land a teen column in the Farmington paper.

After high school, Mills headed to Colby College in Waterville, but she dropped out after three semesters, in 1967, and headed to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. A year later, she enrolled at the University of Massachusetts Boston, then went to Paris for a year-long study abroad. In 1970, she finished her bachelor’s degree, with a major in French and an English minor. After a stint as a legal secretary in DC, she returned to Maine, to enroll at the University of Maine School of Law in 1973.

Read on at Down East.