Beverly Ann Soucy is a writer, stained-glass artist and herbalist whose generational roots in traditional medicine go back centuries. Having moved back to the River Valley area in 2015, she is also the administrator of the River Valley Voice, a Facebook page dedicated to spreading positive information about the River Valley.

Name:  Beverly Ann Soucy
Age: 59
Town: Rumford
Job: Herbalist, writer, painter and stained-glass artist

You’re a fourth-generation herbalist. Tell us a bit about some of your family members and what kinds of herbs they worked with and what they made from the herbs. I walk in the footsteps of my family, which have been traced back to the early 15th century, where my ancestors were weavers, medicine women, artisans, farmers, silversmiths and woodsmen.

My grandmother and my great-aunt Helen were my first mentors on old-world herbal remedies and at one point had their own tearoom. My great-grandfather hailed from Ireland and with that brought cures that were steeped in old Irish history. And on my mom’s side, the recipes and remedies from my Acadian heritage got us through most of my childhood with cures for toothaches that involved chewing cloves and vanilla, and creating a sweat for flu using camphor and whiskey. Or stopping a cough with lemon and honey and ginger, or camphor and eucalyptus oil for chest congestion.

From my Irish side, it was always brandy and horehound with local honey for coughs and colds to be taken at bedtime, medicine cabinets filled with willow bark, yarrow leaves and arnica for headaches, comfrey leaves for arthritis ointment, mullein leaves for breathing issues, dandelion root for fever, vanilla and cloves for toothaches, chamomile flowers and dried cherries for when you couldn’t get to sleep, and there was always a little tin of pine pitch salve for splinters and cuts.

My grandmother’s use of raw potato for bug bites and slices of red onions on the bottom of your feet for when you have cold and fever inevitably always worked. And if you had a stomachache, it was burned toast and flat 7-Up soda. Then onto fennel and mint tea with a little blackberry brandy. We were rarely sick as children.

Right up until the end of her life, those little bottles of homemade syrups and tinctures sat in the medicine cabinet.

As a breast cancer survivor, you’ve used cannabis and other herbs for your recovery and healing. Explain why you chose these products and their benefits.  When I was in my early 20s, I apprenticed with a master herbalist in an immersive hands-on environment creating medicine from plants and roots that I had not known, and I also spent time at the Shaker Village attending seminars on soil content, companion gardening, heirloom plants, the importance of collecting seeds and simple herbal preparations.

When I was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 50 that ultimately resulted in a double mastectomy, it only made sense to me to go back to my roots for my recovery and to find a homeopathic route for recovery. At the time, one of my very dearest friends was dealing with prostate cancer and had access to cannabis in the form of edibles.

Before I even returned home after surgery, he had delivered a bag of cookies and candies, tinctures and oils to my home. To that, I added willow, arnica, and burdock, comfrey poultice, tansies and teas to my arsenal of healing. My diagnosis and aftercare were stated for a year-and-a-half out for full recovery, but in dismissing the pharmaceuticals I found myself back in my office after five-and-a-half weeks. While I was in treatment and ultimately reconstruction, I attribute my fast healing to the fact that I opted out of pharmaceutical pills and opted in for an all-natural homeopathic aftercare.

You’ve currently decided to stick with local sales of your herbal products after being hacked and losing all your online business’s social media and web page information over the summer. How will concentrating on local sales benefit you and the community? For over 14 years now I have had a successful online herbalist business with sales for ointments, balms, tinctures and general remedies going out all over the world. This past summer I was part of a very large computer hack and lost every online account from the past 20 years.

After sitting still for a spell, I realized that while losing my online presence was devastating, the good that came out of it was a renewed sense of purpose in deciding how I wanted to move into this next phase of life as an herbalist, medicine, teacher and artist. In the last few years, I returned to the community where I grew up, after a very big life away, bought a little house and have started my gardens from the beginning.

In loving living in a small rural community, what I have learned is that there is a real sense of connection with the people that you knew from childhood, and that in returning, I now have something to offer this community by way of my life’s work.

Because of this online hack, I find myself having a much larger sense of self and of my purpose, which is richly rooted in my Irish and Acadian history in practicing and sharing that knowledge of my ancestors that I learned as a very young girl and continue to hone as an adult.

Describe some of the herbal medicines and other mixtures you prepare and what people may use them for. Eight years ago I created a private label and perfected a very old recipe from my great-aunt Helen’s notes for aches and pains.

My label, One Blind Moose, is known for being a very intense ointment that takes months to come to fruition. That tint of copper-colored goodness is called Bog Mud Rub “for your trials and tribulations,” whose name was born out of a day spent on the trails in the middle of the western Maine woods, in a bog filled with beautiful medicinal lichens and roots. That particular remedy has been used for aches and pains of the neck, knees and back, and was originally created using a partial recipe from my great auntie that she created for the woodsmen and their working hands. I took her notes and perfected it with the wild plants and roots that I have an intimate relationship with here in the mountains of western Maine. It took several years to find the perfect combination of plant material and takes months to create, but the final product has been very well received.

You can often find me infusing and marrying tinctures and oils, planting and drying leaves and flowers, making dried tea blends with specific healing properties, or out on the trails foraging for roots and barks, mosses and plants. I stock a full medicine cabinet and a full apothecary with some of my favorite oak nets for each season. As we are heading into this cold season of rest, my shelves are filled with lemon balm, jars of horehound and mullein, tins of sage leaves and thyme and rosemary, pine needles and pitch, burdock and feverfew, chamomile and artemisias, comfrey and arnica and dried elderberries and mints, for cough drops, teas, and tinctures.

You’re also a freelance writer, and you teach painting and stained-glass classes. What kind of writing projects are you currently working on and what are your favorite subjects to paint and create from stained glass? As an artist and writer living in western Maine, I have spent a lot of my time prior to COVID teaching beginner stained-glass and painting classes and hosting plant identification walks and basic medicine making. I am known for my New England Tapa art, which is a Samoan art form dating back to the 14th century that involves using natural origins to create simplistic and earth-colored pieces of art made from paper created out of bark from the mulberry trees by pounding it out with many hands of the village ladies.

My stained-glass pieces lean toward nature and all things of the earth, and my mosaic windows create my interpretation of herbal flowers and plants and trees.

This past summer I spent the entire season transforming my shed into an apothecary and artist space. My dream and current plan are to finish the details in the spring, in being able to open up to offer herbal alternative holistic information and consulting, along with plants and herbs maybe one day a week and to bring the teaching part here to my new home and hold classes and retreats in the meadow.

As for writing, recently, I was asked to write for the Sun Journal advertising department’s special sections. That is where I am practicing my black and white writing in articles on topics given to me. It is great practice for what I envision for the next part of my life. For that? I envision this next stage of my time painting canvases of the places and buildings I am surrounded by and a life as a writer of books. I have some ideas.

My next dream is to see those come to fruition as yet another Maine author with tales of adventure and positivity in the form of a good read. I’m quite certain that when I get ready to walk on out the door to my very beautiful life, that when they talk about me after I am gone, they are going to say I was fun and funny, I was smart, kind, and that I always saw the world through rose-colored glasses. I’m very certain that is the only way to live a good life and to love.

You’re the administrator for the Facebook page ‘River Valley Voice!’ What is that page about and why did you create it? Lastly, in my free time, I have an online newspaper whose original inception and purpose was to connect a very divided community in bringing everyone together in one place to connect with local happenings and good news stories. (The River Valley Voice! also includes my) personal gleanings and observations from my own journeys in being back in the place that I grew up in after an entire adult life away.

It has allowed me to not only appreciate this community in its splendid natural beauty in such a positive light, but to help my entire hometown and the surrounding area that is the 10 towns of the River Valley to wake up and re-recognize what a beautiful, wonderful place we live in and that together we stand as we walk this journey that is life.

The River Valley Voice!’s original intent was to help everyone to see us through a different lens, to create beauty in small spaces, to get people out of their houses and to see this town and the surrounding area through someone else’s eyes and to only share the positive pieces that make up this community.

As of this year, I am heading into my sixth full year of doing exactly that. I have just under 3,000 members who read me regularly and I have had a very big voice, if you will, in making positive changes and helping businesses to be seen in a new light along the way. That page is now the first stop in the mornings in a lot of households, that everyone comes to with their morning coffee, to get information on current happenings and to be part of our entire community, instead of having to source information out from too many different sources that were just never current, nor inclusive. . . without having to get dressed.

I like knowing that I have, and continue to have, impact. I’m a very proud Rumford girl.

Copy the Story Link