Jack Lazor of Butterworks Farm Writes a Book on 35 Years of Grain Growing
When Jack and Anne Lazor arrived in Westfield in the mid-1970s, growing corn was a fading practice. So was raising wheat, barley and other grains — the pursuits had become agricultural relics as...
View ArticleBook Review: Saved: How I Quit Worrying About Money and Became the Richest...
Is Ben Hewitt’s new book a manifesto disguised as a memoir, or a memoir disguised as a manifesto? The title, Saved: How I Quit Worrying About Money and Became the Richest Guy in the World, suggests a...
View ArticleThe Burlington Writers Workshop Has Ballooned, and Published
On a recent Wednesday evening in the basement of Burlington’s Halflounge, the Burlington Writers Workshop is trying to figure out what works and doesn’t in Lizzy Fox’s poem. Fox, a teacher and...
View ArticleBook Review: The Curiosity by Stephen P. Kiernan
Publicity copy describes the first novel from Burlington journalist Stephen P. Kiernan as “Michael Crichton meets The Time Traveler’s Wife.” That pitch suggests painfully cynical demographic targeting:...
View ArticleRenegade Writers' Collective Seeks 'Literary Citizens for New Word-Focused...
Pub crawls tend to be riotous affairs. Poetry readings, not so much. What happens when you combine them? Some attendees of this fall’s Burlington Book Festival will find out, courtesy of a new business...
View ArticleA Vermont Author's Book on Coca-Cola Undermines the Product's All-American Image
It’s ironic that one of the biggest selling points of the third edition of For God, Country & Coca-Cola is the inclusion of the original “secret” recipe for the famous soft drink. As author Mark...
View ArticleBook Review: Spiritual American Trash: Portraits From the Margins of Art and...
“I take nothing and make more nothing from nothing … it’s just what I have to do.” That statement could be a liberal paraphrase of Genesis 1 or something uttered by a Dadaist. It’s actually the...
View ArticleBook Review: I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place by Howard Norman
Howard Norman’s writing is compelling in its restraint. That may sound like trumped-up literary-critic praise and not an honest reaction: Who really likes restraint? It’s a withholding of something,...
View ArticleQuick Lit: Deluge, Sole in Vermont
“It was like thunder all day long.” “It was like Armageddon. I was in shock.” “At that point, there was nothing else we could do. We just watched.” Those are just a few of the chilling testimonies...
View ArticleUVM Prof Anthony Gierzynski Finds a "Harry Potter" Factor in Politics
If you spend a lot of time online, you may have seen a Vermonter mentioned recently in a slew of click-bait headlines. “Harry Potter cast a spell on the U.S. to propel Barack Obama to Presidency twice,...
View ArticleDartmouth Literary Journal 40 Towns Documents Upper Valley
When Danny Valdes stepped off a bus near a White River Junction motel one afternoon last February, he wasn’t sure how he’d approach the task at hand. In front of the Shady Lawn Motel, the petite Valdes...
View ArticleBook Review: Little Island by Katharine Britton
For the first half of Little Island, Norwich author Katharine Britton’s unsettling second novel, 64-year-old innkeeper Grace Little is stymied and confused — and we readers are confused right along...
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The 9th Annual Burlington Book Festival Takes Comics Seriously
Pictures in the realm of print? Some stuffy literati may look askance at the new legitimacy of comics, but at the ninth annual Burlington Book Festival, which begins this Friday, September 20, it’s...
View ArticleArcher Mayor
9/14/13: Vermont author Archer Mayor releases his 24th novel featuring detective Joe Gunther on October 1. Eva took a train trip to Brattleboro to meet Mayor and get a tour of the town, which appears...
View ArticleQuick Lit: David's Inferno
Clinical depression memoirs are a tough sell. The currently or formerly depressed don’t want to be “triggered.” The never-depressed don’t want to be “brought down.” And almost everybody who is willing...
View ArticleA Benefit for the Birds of Vermont Museum
Mr. Owl is coming to Vermont, and if you think that sounds like a children’s book character or a holdover from “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” you’re close. The man who wears that sobriquet is Denver...
View ArticleThe Family of Ewe
9/27/13: The Family of Ewe premieres at the Main Street Landing Performing Arts Center in Burlington on October 3 and plays through October 13. It's an original play written and directed by Vermonter...
View ArticleStorytellers Have 24 Hours to Spin a Yarn in Vermont's First Storyhack
The origins of storytelling are as ancient as humankind itself, and if that conjures up images of cavemen grunting around a fireside, you’re probably not too far off. Telling stories is a fundamental...
View ArticleQuick Lit: Don Mitchell's Flying Blind
It’s easy to express concern for, say, the plight of North American bats battling white-nose syndrome. But for a landowner on the front lines, healing the bats’ ecosystem could mean finding himself on...
View ArticleCelebrating Poet Hayden Carruth With a New Book
The poet Hayden Carruth (1921-2008) lived in a farmhouse on a back road in Johnson for 20 years. Despite his two dozen books of poetry and spate of prestigious awards — among them a Guggenheim, the...
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