Ellie Busby cracks a smile while telling a story in her office at Mobius Inc. in Damariscotta. A mockup of the cover of her forthcoming book of poetry, Just North of Ordinary Tides, is visible on the table to her left. (Sherwood Olin photo)
For most of the past year, Damariscotta resident Ellie Busby has made it a point to say yes to opportunities she might otherwise pass on. Taking stock as the year winds down, Busby said she may scale back the volume of commitments she agrees to in the future, but she would absolutely do it all over again.
During the past 12 months, Busby has become a published poet, continued her professional acting career, and traveled internationally. Busby placed poems in two separate poetry journals and completed her first collection of poetry, “Just North of Ordinary Tides,” which will be published in February 2026. She also presented her work in live poetry readings, another first-time experience for her.
Busby said she isn’t going out of her way to find things to do as much as she is finally getting around to doing things she has always wanted to do.
“I have done more stuff in one year than I ever thought I would do,” Busby said. “I’m basically saying yes to everything; not absolutely everything, but darn close.”
Other adventures in the past year included taking in a week at the beach with her former sister-in-law, participating in a four-day, off-the-grid herbal retreat in Vermont, and taking a trip to England last October, accompanying a friend who always wanted to go.
“She said, ‘I want to go to Glastonbury. I want to go to Stonehenge,’” Busby said. “I said, ‘OK, fine,’ so I booked it. We went in October.”
Highlights of the English trip include climbing the Glastonbury Tor, a landmark hill in the Somerset lowlands, and landing surprise fifth row tickets to see a play in London’s West End.
“The crazy thing about Europe, I think, is the age,” Busby said. “I mean, people don’t even talk about it. It’s just part of the woodwork, but the age is the thing. (Americans) don’t realize it because we are so new. We’re brand new. We’re just babies in the universe.”
Drama of the theater kind has been a lifelong passion of Busby’s. She was barely older than a toddler when she started performing for her family and she was a theater veteran by the time she moved to Damariscotta with her husband and young son in 1978. Looking to meet like-minded people at the time, she dropped into a rehearsal of what was then called the Lincoln County Community Theater & Orchestra Co. and company founder Doug Wright immediately hired her as his stage manager.
“That was the beginning of the fun and games here,” Busby said.
Busby went on to make numerous contributions to local theater as an actor, director, writer, producer, and production assistant. Among other achievements, for more than 15 years, she produced annual stagings of “The Vagina Monologues” to raise money for New Hope for Women, which has since been renamed to New Hope Midcoast.
“We were the first to be licensed in the state,” Busby said. “They gave us the rights for free. We had protestors and everything. It was wonderful. We helped fund the 1-800 line for New Hope for Women. We did that for many years because everything was donated.”
Busby’s most recent performance was in the River Company’s reading of “Pride and Prejudice” at Skidompha Public Library opposite actor/director Nick Azzaretti.
Lincoln County is blessed with several thriving arts venues like Lincoln Theater, The Waldo Theatre, and the Opera House at Boothbay Harbor, but there is a dearth of places for a small theater companies to stage productions.
“There’s not a lot of place for us to play anymore; small theater groups,” Busby said. “No one has a barn anymore. There’s no place where you can take a small group of people that are good and have good shows to do. So there’s that.”
Also during the past year, Busby took a starring role in a professional murder mystery dinner theater production, much to her delight.
“I was the killer this time, which was fun, because nobody suspected the little old lady,” Busby said. “I made all kinds of friends. It was really a riot. It was so funny, when they figured it out.”
Returning to Damariscotta in 1978 was a homecoming of sorts for Busby. She was born at Miles Memorial Hospital – now MaineHealth Lincoln Hospital – in Damariscotta, the second youngest of 10 children in the blended family of the Rev. Curtis and Ruth Haley Busby, of South Bristol. The Busby family moved her father’s career, finding pulpits in Warren, then Massachusetts and eventually Rhode Island Ellie Busby spent much of her childhood.
“We were back every summer,” Busby said. “In 1960 they bought “The Farm” in Walpole, 78 acres of land at $4,000. So every summer, we spent August in Walpole.”
Busby went off to college where she met her husband, David Hinds. The union would last in 32 years before ending in divorce in 2008.
“We got married because we wanted to rent a place, and they wouldn’t rent it to us unless we were married. So we said, ‘Well, let’s get married,’” Busby said. “We can always get divorced. It took 32 years for us to get divorced because I was stubborn.”
The young couple moved around for a little while, living in Texas, Vermont, and Rhode Island where Hinds took job with General Dynamics. When the Rhode Island operation decided to focus exclusively on nuclear submarines, Hinds decided he wanted out and eventually caught on General Dynamics Bath Iron Works in Bath.
In Damariscotta, the Busby-Hinds family bought a farm on Bristol Road and settled down to raise two children. While her two sons were growing up, Ellie Busby did a few different jobs including managing call centers and working in human services.
When she is not otherwise occupied, Busby can be found in her office at Mobius Inc. in Damariscotta, where she works as quality assurance manager. In her current professional capacity, she is responsible for training new hires for Mobius and other state and local agencies serving the Midcoast.
She is also responsible for writing the individualized programs for each client based on information from the client’s case manager and ensuring the client’s rights are being observed.
Some clients might be best served working in a high-traffic area with a lot of people to talk too, Others may need a quiet atmosphere with limited sensory stimulations. Working with the individual case manager, Busby crafts an individual plans tailored for the client’s needs.
“It’s completely person centered,” Busby said. ”My job is to make sure their rights come first. It’s their life. It’s their dollars. No matter where that money is coming from, the clients are the ones that we need to represent. It’s not whether you think you know better than they do, because you don’t. They know themselves. They know what they want.”
Since her divorce became finalized, Busby has lived in an apartment in downtown Damariscotta. She loves her hometown, but she notes the community has changed during her lifetime. Part of it is generational, she said, acknowledging she hates sounding like geriatric baby boomer, but there is a lack of space where people can gather and connect with each other.
The problem is not unique to the Midcoast, she said.
“I remember one night years ago when Salt Bay Cafe was still there, there was this terrible snowstorm,” Busby said, “My friend Tom and I, he was not a romantic friend, but it was still the loveliest evening. I think we went to eat in there and it was snowing. Everyone in the community was in there. We don’t even have a place like that. That’s just a comfortable little, sort of a cafe where you stumble into your friends having a coffee. It’s not the same. You can’t just wander in anymore. There’s no wandering in place, and I miss that, especially this time of year.”
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