Opal Whiteley
A dreamily charismatic young woman from the little southern Willamette Valley logging town of Cottage Grove, Opal Whiteley became a national sensation in 1920 with publication of her extremely odd diary, which tells the sometimes fanciful story of her descent from French royalty and her friendships with the animals of the Oregon woods.
Opal spent her teen years in and around Eugene, attending the University of Oregon and giving nature walks and lectures to an adoring public. She eventually headed to Hollywood, found no takers, and made for New England. There she charmed Ellery Sedgwick, editor of The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, and convinced him to publish the childhood diary, written on thousands of scraps of paper.
A lyric tale that’s magically strange, the diary begins:
Today the folks are gone away from the house we do live in . They are gone a little way away, to the ranch-house where the grandpa does live. I sit on our steps and I do print. I like it — this house we do live in being at the edge of the near woods. So many little people do live in the near woods. I do have conversations with them. I found the near woods first day I did go explores.
Opal’s diary been published in various more-contemporary editions, including Jane Boulton’s 1984 verse version, “Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart” and Benjamin Hoff’s “The Singing Creek Where the Willows Grow.”
Whiteley died in 1992 in a London mental hospital where she had spent many of the last years of her life.
Buy The Singing Creek where the Willows Grow: The Mystical Nature Diary of Opal Whiteley