Jo Merrill (March 11, 1929-October 19, 2002). Poet, painter, teacher, mother and gardener. Jo was born Bethel Joan in Boise, Idaho to Helen and Howard Packenham. She spent her childhood and youth in Mosco, Idaho, where her father was a professor of English. After one year at the University of Idaho, she married Bill Merrill in June of 1948. After a number of moves, Jo, Bill, and their sons, Michael and Timothy settled in LaGrande, Oregon in 1956. Bill joined the faculty of Eastern Oregon College, and Jo, seriously undertook building a career in poetry, painting and allied visual arts.
Over the next thirteen years, three people would loom large as mentors and friends, encouraging and supporting her work: Dr. George Nightingale, head of EOC Art Department. Ronald H. Bayes, poet and teacher at EOC; and Charles Potts, poet, novelist and publisher. In 1968, the University of Oregon made a film about her that aired on Oregon Educational TV.
1969 saw a sharp break in her career. Bitterly opposed to events in Vietnam, the war and teenage sons took the family to Canada, first to Montreal, then west to Vancouver Island. She wrote two unpublished book manuscripts. The first, Bailing Out Over Canada, dealt with the work and interviews she did for and with the U.S. war resisters in Montreal. The second, Funk Farm, recounts the family's settling in rural Vancouver Island.
Jo resumed her painting and writing, as she taught painting and drawing for Malaspina College in Nanaimo, British Columbia, where she became a founding member of the College's "Artists in the Schools" program. Her list of achievements continued to grow with exhibitions throughout the Northwest, as well as publication of her verse in Northwest Review, Human Voice, and St. Andrew's Review (to name a few). She also did theatrical set design at Nanaimo and authored three books of poetry: 12 Incants for a Christ Mass (Clandestine Press), Willow (Grande Ronde Press), and Waterweed (Litmus).
The Temple published three of Jo's poems: "Oil Spill Off Sooke," "McDonald," and "When Time Tries;" written four years after her son Michael's death from Aids in March of 1989.
Late in her life she assembled a large collection of her poetry, under the title Woodspurge. Jo died of complications of the lupus, which had plagued her for much of her adult life. Woodspurge was made available for distribution at the memorial exhibit of her work at Cedar Community Hall, Nanaimo, B.C., in March 2003. The collection was postmortem winner of an Honorable Mention in Writer's Digest's 2003 English Language Self-Published Book Contest.
Jo passed on her craft to her younger son Timothy (born 1952), who has worked as a carpenter, photo-journalist, newspaper correspondent, an editor for a small press, and a copyreader, among other things. He studied creative writing under George McWhirter at the University of British Columbia. He has three self-published collections, as well as three others: In Bare Apple Boughs (Fiddlehead Books), Hearts the Same (Catlin Press), and After the Beginning (Bravo Press).