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Guest Post by Laura Bridge.

“High Flight” by John Gillespie Magee (1941) is a special poem that I discovered at just the right moment. It was March 2020. In the UK, schools were preparing to close due to Covid-19. I was supposed to be teaching my class of eleven-year-olds about the Second World War, but the children were anxious and restless; I did not want to add to their worries. In a frantic panic to find something uplifting but still on topic, I came across Magee’s sonnet. It was the perfect combination of energy and hope. 

Continue reading “Flying High with John Gillespie Magee”

Guest Post by Alexandra Grabbe.

Many of the stories in Cara Blue Adams’s debut short story collection appeared in prestigious literary magazines. Readers follow a protagonist named Kate through her early twenties. She attends a New Year’s Eve party with postgrads in Cambridge, MA, socializes with a pushy former roommate, moves west to pursue a job opportunity, muses over the decision to discontinue a relationship with a married man, spends three days at the beach with her mom and sister. Nothing very monumental or out of the ordinary and yet the prose captivates, earning Adams both the John Simmons Award for Short Fiction and an Editor’s Choice pick from the New York Times.

Kate Bishop becomes Everywoman. She experiences heartbreak and joy and the everyday ennui that many readers will recognize from the same period of their lives. The collection begins with a gem in which Adams personifies loss, introducing a recurring theme. Read these stories slowly and savor them like fine wine.  

You Never Get it Back by Cara Blue Adams. University of Iowa Press, 2021.

Reviewer bio: Alexandra Grabbe has worked as an innkeeper, a lyricist, and a relocation consultant in Paris. For her most recent essays and stories, visit Alexandragrabbe.com.

Guest Post by Rick Winston.

David, the protagonist of Dan Chodorkoff’s insightful new novel Sugaring Down, is conflicted. He moved to Vermont in 1969 to be part of an activist political collective, but finds himself drawn to the quiet rhythms of the Vermont seasons. The more radicalized his comrades (and especially his girlfriend Jill) become, the more David finds true fulfillment in putting down roots.

David and friends come to Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom with very little practical knowledge. Through his closest neighbors, the vividly realized Leland and Mary Smith, he gradually acquires the skills to survive. He must use them all when the collective disintegrates and he faces a winter alone.

Leland and Mary do not pass judgment on the newcomers and become a guide to much more than splitting wood and boiling syrup. They advise David and friends on what not to say to hostile individuals in town, how to behave at Town Meeting, and in general how to act so that— eventually—they might be accepted in their community.

Through Leland and Mary, we also learn some Vermont history that predates the counterculture. David has never heard about Barre’s radical history (Mary, the daughter of a granite worker, has Italian roots), or the forced sterilizations of Abenaki people during the eugenics movement, or the bulk tanks that forced Leland and Mary to give up dairy farming.

Chodorkoff is especially evocative as the reader sees each successive season—their glories and their challenges—through David’s city-bred eyes. And it was painful to this veteran of the late 1960s to relive the heated political conversations of the time. The book takes place at a time when some on the “New Left” were turning to violence, and Chodorkoff does not shy away from these upsetting themes.

Chodorkoff uses the maple sugaring process as a central metaphor, hence the title. The sap boils off (and there is furious boiling indeed) and we—and David—are left with the essence. Sugaring Down is a worthy addition to the growing literature about Vermont during this tempestuous time.

Sugaring Down by Dan Chodorkoff. Fomite Press, February 2022.

Reviewer bio: Rick Winston lives in Montpelier, Vermont and is the author of Red Scare in the Green Mountains: Vermont in the McCarthy Era 1946-1960.