by Ardeana Hamlin
of The Weekly Staff
A story about a turtle that John R. Cobb of Holden wrote, illustrated and bound into a little book when he was a third-grader at Holden Elementary School served as a touchstone over the years to remind him of his interest in writing, keeping him in touch with his creative spirit. “I wrote it when I was 8 years old. It was part of an art project. My mother hung onto it for years. Every so often we’d take it out of the box and look at it,” he said. “In the process of my mother moving, it got lost, but I had enough of the story in my head to rewrite it from an adult point of view.”
Cobb said he is largely a self-taught writer. “It seems to be working for me. Readers seem to like what I do,” he said.
His childhood effort at story writing now has a brand new life as “A Turtle Tale,” illustrated by University of Maine art student Dawn Shain, and self-published through an online company. The story is about Clemmie, an orphaned spotted turtle longing to reach an island in a small pond where food is always plentiful. But in order to get to the pond, he has to elude a hungry fox. The story, which has a happy ending, is written in rhyming couplets which fall pleasantly on the ear.
Shain’s illustrations are engaging and sure to please young readers.
“I always had a creative spark,” Cobb said, “but it was a dormant gift and not fully realized. I had a knack for writing in high school, but that got cast aside as an adult.”
As is sometimes the case, life intervened before Cobb could set his sites on writing the stories that bloomed in his imagination.
After graduating from Brewer High School in 1983, Cobb did a stint in the U.S. Army, learned a trade and eventually ended up working for what was then Bangor Hydro, and now for Emera Maine as an IT infrastructure analyst.
“I spend a lot of my time working on computer systems. Writing is a good way to balance that [thinking analytically],” he said.
He also spends a lot of time on the road which makes it challenging to find a predictable time to write. To keep his mind nimble with the written word, he writes a haiku each day and posts it on Facebook and Twitter. “It forces me to put something out each day,” Cobb said.
“A Turtle Tale” is Cobb’s third book, and his first children’s book.
His first book was “Judith: A Quoddy Tale,” published in 2012. “This was after many years of having the story idea floating in my mind. I thought it would be a shame if I didn’t write it down,” he said. “My wife and I travel a lot Downeast, exploring the coastal islands and the coastline.”
His second book, “Tales of Cemetery Trees,” a collection of crime, fantasy, mystery and supernatural short stories, won a New England Book Festival award in the anthology category in 2014.
The stories in “Tales of Cemetery Trees,” Cobb said are set in actual places in Maine, such as Sears Island in Searsport, and at a whirlpool, known as The Old Sow, off Eastport. “It’s the second most powerful maritime whirlpool on the east coast, in Passamaquoddy Bay, between Maine and New Brunswick. The tides create the whirlpools — you can see them off the Eastport shore,” he said.
Cobb said he is available to give talks about his books. “I’ll go anywhere. All they have to do is feed me,” he said, laughing.
Cobb is working on a novel for adults. Its working title is “Birdmen” and he expects it to be in print in 2016.
“A Turtle Tale” is available at the Briar Patch in Bangor. His books also are available at amazon.com, and at johnrcobb.com. Information about Cobb’s work also is available on Facebook and at twitter.com/john_r_cobb. Cobb can be reached at john@johnrcobb.com.
For information about Dawn Shain’s work, go to dshain.diviantart.com.