After a lifetime of private creative writing, Mary Dingee Fillmore was seized by a subject too important to hide in her journal or a letter to friends.  Living in a house where Jewish people were hidden inspired her novel, An Address in Amsterdam, to be published by She Writes Press in October 2016.  Since Mary’s first lengthy stay in Amsterdam in 2001, she has been visiting, researching, writing, and speaking about the Holocaust and resistance in the Netherlands.

To develop her craft as a writer to be worthy of her topic, Mary earned her MFA at Vermont College in 2005.  Since then, she has published poetry in literary journals as well as gaining recognition for her essay, “Freeing the Hidden Camp.”  The Vermont Humanities Council Speakers’ Bureau sponsors Mary’s presentation of “Anne Frank’s Neighbors:  What Did They Do?,” which explores the many shades of grey in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam, and the wrenching choices which confronted good people.  Mary also wrote a nonfiction book in 1987 (Women MBAs:  A Foot in the Door, G.K. Hall), and contributed a chapter to Ourselves Growing Older (Simon and Schuster).  

Mary has been a resident at the Vermont Studio Center and a graduate assistant at Vermont College’s MFA program.  To keep on learning, she attends writing conferences such as The Muse and the Marketplace, the Associated Writing Programs, Write Angles, and the International Women’s Writing Guild.  For more than thirty years, Mary has studied with Deena Metzger, the author of the invaluable Writing for Your Life.

Since 1982, Mary’s other work has been as a facilitator bringing people together for a purpose, which she still enjoys after more than thirty years working throughout the US and elsewhere.  She lives with her longtime partner, astronomer Joanna Rankin, in Burlington, Vermont.

An Address in Amsterdam is about an eighteen year old Jewish girl, Rachel Klein, who is too busy falling in love to take the Nazis seriously when they invade in May 1940.  Her own father thinks it will all blow over.  But when her Gentile boyfriend must go underground because of his anti-Nazi activism, Rachel begins to change.  She ultimately becomes a courier for the underground, delivering messages, news sheets and false papers.  She’s not only in peril of her life, but must keep her activities secret from everyone.  After many months of clandestine activities during intensifying raids, Rachel goes into hiding along with her parents, moving from an elegant canal house to a dank basement, where much is revealed.