Thank you for visiting Farksolia! I’m Stefan Cooke, and I’m a freelance web designer—I work with my wife, Resa Blatman, at Blatman Design, in Somerville, Massachusetts. And I’m a publisher with two books on my Farksolia imprint: Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life in Letters (2015) and Lost Island (plus three stories and an afterword) (2020).
For the past 25 years or so I’ve been researching my family history. I had been planning a website for them, but my visit to the Follett archives at Columbia University in 2012 persuaded me that Barbara should have a site of her own. I find her writing so very good and her life so compelling that letting her vanish (again) into history seemed a shame.
Again, my thanks to you for visiting Farksolia.
Stefan Cooke • stefan@farksolia.org
I viewed a you tube video about missing people and that’s how I found out about Barbara. I’m both so very impressed by her writing and her letters and haunted by the circumstances of her disappearance. Would have loved to have known her somehow. Stefan you have done a wonderful job on the website and the book with her letters. Have just ordered Lost Island recently and cant wait to read it.
Thank you kindly, Shawn!
Dear Stefan,
stumbling over The House without windows by chance last year was the entry to constantly learning more and more about and way of submerging into the life and work of your aunt Barbara Newhall Follett since then by ways of visiting your website farksolia and reading your two books. A few minutes ago I eventually finished reading Lost island and doing so left me with a feeling of loss and grief and deliverance at the same time. What makes this experience even more intensive is the fact that many of the new aspects concerning Barbara’s fate (and also the heartbreakingly tragedy of Edward Andersons‘) have been revealed recently and therefore somehow simultaneously while I was reading about it. Since this moment right now sadly also being a moment of saying good-bye in a way to Barbara, all of her relatives and friends I also want to say thank you so much for the work you did and for all the love and passion you put into every single line and which give insight into the work and life of a highly impressive woman and writer and a deeply moving biography as well. Without your tremendous efforts of research and editing many people would never have had the chance of getting to know about Barbara‘s life and work and in the progress of time most of it would have slowly been forgotten and lost forever. All this is so much more touching as it is part of your own family history and being and I also want to say thank you very much for sharing your own personal thoughts and emotions with the reader.
I wish you and your wife all the best in every way and all your work the success it deserves.
God bless,
Margit Schmidbauer, Bavaria/Germany
Thank you so very much, Margit! I take comfort in knowing that Barbara really lived: she embraced the beauty of the world we are so lucky to live in and shared her love and knowledge through her words — which we, her descendants, are so very fortunate to be able to read. Readers like you make all I’ve done to share Barbara’s world worthwhile! I also take comfort in thinking about Barbara whenever I find myself in the woods with the birds singing and the sunlight filtering through the branches. I feel closest to her then.
Dear Stefan,
thank you very much for answering, it is a joyful experience being able sharing thoughts via this website.
I am absolutely sure Barbara really being close to you in these moments of deeply felt love to Nature and every creature great or small, plants or animals, the way she had felt it.
Reading your lines it comes to my mind that yes, it surely is comforting that Barbara lived (the way she did), but it’s touching me even more that she truly is still living through her being part of your life and emotional world. No wonder you both are members of the same family and so much of her being obviously is running through your veins..
May you keep on turning death and tragedy into love to life itself.
Therefore wishing you and your wife from all my heart all the best and many more moments of peace and joy…
Kind regards,
Margit
I’m a podcaster. We get into the family trees of killers, but sometimes we do something a little different. In November, we plan to cover Barbara’s disappearance and her family tree. I noticed you had several photos. I wondered if I could have permission to use them on our website with link backs to this website (and a further link as a source of information).
Denise Geelhart
I’m doing some independent research on Barbara and I’m trying to get ahold of any articles, newspaper or otherwise, pertaining to her disappearance. I have seen several references that indicate the press media was largely unaware of her disappearance until around 1966, possibly because she was reported missing under her married name, Rogers, and not her published maiden name. Do you know of any articles, particularly from the ’60s, that might reverence BNF? I would truly appreciate any assistance or direction you could offer.
I don’t think there were any articles about Barbara’s disappearance save for brief mentions in book reviews of McCurdy & Follett, which was published in 1966. Those reviews should be findable on newspapers.com and other archives; a few are collected at Columbia. I quote from two in “Barbara Newhall Follett: A Life In Letters”. No one in the media appears to have known about Barbara’s disappearance before McCurdy.
Hi Stefan,
I first learned about Barbara’s story a few years ago by chance while browsing online, and I found it remarkably impactful. Having read some of her works through online resources like Farksolia, I’ve found her writing powerful and impactful, and consider myself a big fan of her works.
However, while the resources you’ve compiled on Farksolia have been remarkably helpful in navigating her life story, I would be lying if I said I hadn’t found it a bit frustrating to track down some of her works even with the modern internet at my disposal. It’s also a bit disheartening to talk about her story with friends and family and not have an easy direction to point people to to read her books when that’s usually what they are the most curious about.
Which leads me to a question; have you considered or would consider trying to convert the first edition copies of Barbara’s published works into public domain e-books hosted on Project Gutenberg? At this point, from what I understand, the copyright on both The House Without Windows and Voyage of the Norman D has expired, with ninety-five years having elapsed since their original publication. I’ve used Project Gutenberg many times over the past few years, and I’ve found that it’s an invaluable archive of digitally preserved public domain literature. Also, its partner organization, Distributed Proofreaders, has volunteers who work to convert books into e-books, with all they need to get started on working on the process being digital scans of the pages of the book run through a few pieces of free software. Putting Barbara’s published writing up on Project Gutenberg would do wonders for their accessibility for those curious about Barbara’s stories, and alleviate a lot of the frustration of tracking them down for prospective fans curious to read her writing firsthand.
Thanks for creating this website! It’s done wonders for helping learn about Barbara’s story.
THWW is widely available in several languages in various formats, including e-book. There’s also a public domain copy here: https://sites.google.com/site/thehousewithoutwindows/download-books
I’m in the final stages of readying “The Voyage of the Norman D.” for publication–that will be available in e-book form, as is “Lost Island.”
If anyone wants to put any of these on Project Gutenberg it’s fine with me.
Hello, I am a student currently working on my internship report about Barbara Follett. During my research, I came across her work and am now translating The Voyage of the Norman D. I am particularly interested in the galley proofs she prepared while writing this book; however, as I am a student based in Portugal, I am unable to visit the Archives and Special Collections at Columbia University in person. I was therefore hoping to ask whether you might be willing to share any insights from your work with these materials, as I understand you have personally consulted and digitized them. Any guidance you could provide would be deeply appreciated and extremely valuable to my research. If you have any time to spare, please feel free to contact this student at (inesmargaridamachado@gmail.com)