My Connemara

Paula Steichen was only two when she moved with her immediate family, the Sandburgs, to Connemara, a beautiful old mansion on more than two hundred acres of farmland. While living on the farm, both Steichen’s grandmother, Lilian, and mother, Helga, made the soil bloom with crops and creatures—particularly their prize-winning goats. Inside the spacious white house, a young Steichen would find her grandfather, Carl Sandburg, composing prose, poetry, and guitar music. The famous biographer and poet taught Paula and her brother John Carl to love nature and respect work.

Profiles of the immediate family accompany many personal photographs, a wealth of anecdotes, and vivid descriptions of farm life. My Connemara, as the late Paula Steichen’s first book, produces a richly rewarding account of what it was like to grow up in this sunlit world bound by acres of sky, wildflowers, trees, and animals—and the value of learning what she could from the land that gave her and her family so much.


Product Details

• Memoir/autobiographical
• 178 pages, softcover, 6"x 9"
• Text by Paula Steichen
• Printed in USA, published by Eastern National