About Liz · Well in Hand Learning

I have always loved art and science. In college I studied zoology because I wanted to be a naturalist, someone who draws wildlife and learns from the natural world. I didn’t know you could make a living at that. So in 1983 I took a year off, moved to Maine, and stayed.

Well in Hand is an old name. Years ago I ran a little gardening and house painting business, and my dad, George Hoyt, suggested I call it Well in Hand, because everything I did was work by hand. It still fits.

What my children’s school taught me

My three boys went to Waldorf school, and I fell in love with how they learned. They were outdoors for much of the day, with gentle, meaningful routines tied to the rhythm of the day: first we play, then we clean up, then we get ready for lunch.

One night the school taught the parents a math lesson through movement. I’m not bad at math, but as we danced it, the whole idea rose up in me. I remember thinking, oh, I totally get it. I wanted every child to have learning like that, including the children whose families could never afford a private school.

Becoming a teacher

So in 2002 I went back and finished my degree at the University of Maine, in cultural anthropology, with the culture of schools as my focus. My first classroom came when I stepped in as a substitute and the teacher never came back. I stayed the whole year. I had watched one of my own sons lose his teacher in the middle of a year, and I was never going to be that person.

I earned a Master of Arts in Teaching at the University of Maine in 2005 and taught middle school math, science, and social studies until 2013. That year I went to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where I earned an Ed.M. in educational leadership with a focus on school development. I studied trust in schools, including a class with Howard Gardner. The biggest thing Harvard taught me was simple: we’re all human beings, and I was no less than anyone else.

Over more than twenty years in education I taught every age from second grade to high school honors English, and I served as head of a Montessori school and as principal of two small elementary schools. When the pandemic closed schools, I made little boxed activities and backyard science lessons for my second graders and met them on Zoom every Friday so no one lost touch. I retired in June 2025.

Through all of it I did the same thing: go in, see what the children need, be yourself, and learn with the kids. I’m a co-learner. That has been with me all along.

The book my students finished with me

Near the end of my teaching years, some of my 8th graders were children I had known as their principal when they were little, before the pandemic. The pandemic had taken a lot from them. By January I could see that the program we were using wasn’t meeting them where they were.

So I brought in a picture book about my dog, Davis, that I had started during the pandemic and set aside because I wasn’t sure it was good enough. I showed them how I write, and they helped me write it. They were so kind about it. “We don’t want to tell you what to do,” they’d say, “but we think it’d sound better this way.”

One day I was showing a girl in the class a drawing and criticizing it out loud, and I watched her wither. She liked the drawing. I stopped right there and told her I wasn’t going to criticize myself: I’m learning, and it’s just fine for where I am in the book. She brightened up and got on with her own draft. That moment taught me that how I talk about myself shows children what’s okay.

By the end of the year, two bouncy boys asked to be in the book. I told them it was about my dog. They didn’t miss a beat: “Well, we could be squirrels.” So I drew two little squirrels into one of the apple-picking pages, and they have those boys’ names. I showed them on the last day of school, right before they left for high school.

What I’m doing now

I self-published Davis Goes Apple Picking so my students could hold the whole book before they left. For the next ones, I want a publisher to vet my work, so after I retired I set out to learn the craft properly.

I had a head full of questions. What is a children’s book? What age range? What should the words be? How do you draw the pictures? One day I walked out of the post office and there was a children’s author and illustrator I knew a little, a parent from my boys’ school years. I stopped him on the steps, and he was so kind. He stood right there and talked with me about children’s book illustration and told me to join the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

So I did. In January 2026 I went to their conference in New York City, all by myself, and came home with a map of the whole field and a push to start a writers’ group. Now a group of us meets once a month to talk about writing and illustrating children’s books.

That conference also told me something harder: I hadn’t really prioritized my art in forty years. I dug out my old notebooks and found drawings I’d made four decades ago, and I still liked them. It would be a shame to have something you love to do and never develop it. So I enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design’s online continuing education program, working toward a certificate in natural science illustration, the same thing I dreamed about as a zoology student, and a micro-credential in children’s book illustration. One of my heroes is Beatrix Potter, a natural scientist, an illustrator, and a writer. Every six weeks I start two new courses, with deadlines every Sunday night. I’m learning that I’m good at it, and that I have a lot to learn.

I live in Hope, Maine, nine miles inland from the coast, in a house that sits between apple orchards. I draw upstairs in my son’s old room, at a drafting table that once belonged to an artist friend, with a window that looks over the gardens to the woods. This time of year I watch the maple leaves change. Davis lies on the couch and watches me draw, as if to say, “This is the life!”

I’m also working with a small school that teaches through the arts, and writing the next Davis stories. As an artist, I’m a student again, learning out loud and sharing my process as I go. With families, I want to be a companion to you finding your good way. You don’t get to write the script about where you’re going. Well in Hand Learning is where I share what I learn: gentle, practical tools for children and the grown-ups who love them, at a price every family can reach.

Portrait by Holly Walsh.