The Vine and the Cross

In 1988 during the cold war, Alexandra on a singing tour to the Republic of Georgia, U.S.S.R., found herself transported through the Georgian music, to the fourth century A.D. in a mystical journey full of mystery, romance, martyrdom, and ultimate faith that brought Christianity to that country.

Jean Marie Ivey lives in Maine, near Acadia National Park. She pursued a part-time career in photography, freelance writing and illustrating, and coauthoring the book Maine Paradise with Russell D. Butcher, published by Viking Press in 1972. She also published, co-wrote, and co-illustrated Facts and Fancy: Acadia National Park, Mount Desert Island in 1993, and published again in a revised updated version by Page Publishing in 2018. She wrote Cassie's Dream, published by Page Publishing in 2016. In the early eighties, Jean Marie began a thirty-three-year career at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. Her greatest love, of course, is for her seven children, fourteen grandchildren, and three great grandchildren. A major love throughout her many years is music. She loves to sing. Jean Marie has sung and played hand bells in many of the churches in her area of Maine. She directed a folk choir for ten years in Seal Harbor, consisting of her children and many others, both young and old from the community. She traveled throughout New England with Norumbega Harmony, singing shaped note, sacred harp hymns written for pre-Revolutionary war congregational singing. In 1986, she joined the Surry Opera Company in Down East Maine. She toured with the company to the USSR during the cold war, singing in Leningrad, Moscow, the Republic of Georgia, and Japan. Her two trips to sing in the Republic of Georgia haunted her with the feeling that she had lived there before. That d矇j? vu and her love for that country resulted in the creation of this book, The Vine and the Cross.