the birth of other mountains

I'm delighted (& honored) to be introducing Rick Bass at the Brattleboro Literary Festival this coming Sunday. His work is stunning. Join us!
"As if within her, beneath the span of her own days, there are other hunts going on continuously, giant elk in flight from the pursuit of hunters other than herself, and the birth of other mountains being plotted and planned—other mountains rising, then, and still more mountains vanishing into distant seas—and that even more improbable than her encountering that one giant elk, on her first hunt, was the path, the wandering line, that brought her to her father in the first place, that delivered her to him and had made him hers and she his—the improbability and yet the certainty that would place the two of them in each other’s lives, tiny against the backdrop of the world and tinier still against the mountains of time."

- Rick Bass, “The First Elk”

Good morning, fall: 

veery, apricot-corn muffins, coffee, cream, blackberry jam, 

cheddar, bees, pollen, boys, sweet mustard, sun, tea. 

My walls are being coated in plaster. 

My children are growing older (and sweeter, and wiser).

Contemporary Vermont Fiction is nearing completion.

Blessed be, blessed be, blessed be

and forever and always:

grateful.

Dandy

Happy birthday to my dearest Pops (i.e. Dandy), who has dedicated his life to building good houses for others, loving his wife & children & grandchildren, providing a good education for the children in his community, being a steward of the woods and land he grew up on, providing good food for others, preaching simplicity & sustainability, modeling humility & humor, decorating our hillside with funny stone art, fearlessly loving and caring for all of humankind, practicing curiosity, and, in recent years, being one of the kindest and most badass grandpas that ever walked the earth.  (He has also, on this fine morning, eloped with my two-year-old so that I can work and write this post). All touched by the concentric circles of your generosity and compassion are ridiculously lucky.

a dreamer

Because it is fall now, and with every new season I seem to have to try and figure out who I am (again). 

Who are you this early autumn?

the world salvaged from the lords of profit

Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb's quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

*

Attention is the beginning of devotion. 

-Mary Oliver, from "Upstream"

contemporary vermont fiction

Friends....it's been a loooonnng time coming, but I am currently editing proofs of Contemporary Vermont Fiction and our publishing date is set for November 3rd! It's a beautiful thing to see all of these stories (and writers) together in one document. They are speaking to each other and bouncing off each other and echoing and reverberating in all sorts of surprising and interesting ways. (Helped along their journey by Dede Cumming's beautiful layout and book design.) 

And look at this line-up of writers! Laurie Alberts, Julia Alvarez, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Joseph Bruchac, John Elder, Castle Freeman, Jr., Miciah Bay Gault, Suzanne Kingsbury, Jeffrey Lent, Ellen Lesser, Howard Frank Mosher, E. Annie Proulx, Bill Schubart and Wallace Stegner. Some of my old faves and my new faves, together at last within these pages. 

The book is distributed by Midpoint and can now be pre-ordered from Amazon, here, or better yet, ordered from your favorite local bookstore. 

For Vermont natives and Vermont lovers alike.