Writer Biography

Isabella Fiske McFarlin, also known as Ladybelle Fiske, has lived most of her life in Vermont's oldest alternative community (or, as some would have it, "hippie commune").
Her father, Irving Fiske, had been a writer for the Federal Writer's Project of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA). He also was a freelancer whose work had been published in H.L.Mencken's legendary magazine, The American Mercury, among many others. He had corresponded with George Bernard Shaw, and was a Cornell graduate. He and Isabella's mother, Barbara Hall, a visionary artist and former cartoonist, helped Isabella and her brother learn whatever they wanted to learn.
In the 1960s, the Fiske family opened a gallery/performance space in New York City's East Village, then just beginning to be a hip destination. Irving, with Isabella's help, gave talks on comparative religion with catchy titles like "Tantra, the Yoga of Sex." Many people came to the Fiske mountain retreat, Quarry Hill, and began to build houses and have children. In the 1970s, many more arrived, and the group (the Fiskes never considered the place a "commune") opened its own school, which became a model for other such schools in Vermont.
Isabella helped to create The North Hollow School and taught English and writing there. She was an attendee at Bread Loaf Writers Conference twice, once on a scholarship from The Vermont Arts Council, and was a Full Fellow at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT. Her work has appeared in Vermont Life magazine and Vermont newspapers such as Burlington Free Press, among others.
For several years she has been at work on a memoir of her unusual life, which also involved complex relationships, shared child care, and friendships with many of the seminal figures of the 60s such as the most well-known of the Underground Cartoonists. For some years, Quarry Hill made pictorial rubber stamps from the images of such artists as R.Crumb, Trina, Kim Deitch, Art Spiegelman and others.
Isabella's interests include alternative lifestyles and alternative child raising; philosophy, religion, popular culture, homeschooling, art, literature, writing, and ways to have fun. Also nature, health, Vermont and New England, and much more.
See her Blog at http://quarryhillcreativecenter.blogspot.com.
Her work has recently been published as an audio file on Associated Content: "Vermont's the Peak for Foliage," and she is the Burlington (Vermont)Homeschool Examiner for Examiner.com.