About a year before my father died, when I was visiting him at his home in South Florida, I told him that I was going to the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts to use their wifi and do some work on my laptop that I couldn’t do on my phone. “Chrissy,” he said – yes, my father […]
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Greetings! “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands” doesn’t go on sale for a month. The novel is the story of Emily Shepard, a young girl trying to survive on the streets of Burlington, Vermont after a cataclysmic meltdown at Vermont’s lone nuclear plant. She’s a cutter, an Oxycontin addict, and an aspiring poet who reveres Emily […]
In the spring of 1927, “National Geographic” profiled the Green Mountain State. The Vermont that the magazine shared with the world was at once recognizably ours, expectedly anachronistic, and weirdly prophetic. Portland, Oregon reader Clifford Sagendorf mailed me the magazine story last year, so I owe him both my thanks for sending it to me […]
My wife and I don’t have a lot of yard; our house sits on three-quarters of an acre. Moreover, a lot of that partial acre is taken up by the old horse barn that now serves as our garage and woodshed. But somehow we have found the space in our yard to bury eight cats: […]
When I was growing up, my family never had vegetable gardens, because my mother was unlikely to serve a vegetable that didn’t come from a can. In all fairness, it was the era: In the 1960s and 1970s, food was supposed to come from cans and boxes, unless it was a frozen TV dinner, in […]
The campers have survived cataclysmic car crashes. Bike accidents. They’ve been thrown from their horses. Their lives have been changed in a heartbeat by a stroke. The shorthand for what they have experienced is TBI: traumatic brain injury. And this coming week, 20 TBI survivors from around the country will be arriving at Zeno Mountain […]
A few years ago, a friend of mine had a delicate question about her mother, and wasn’t sure what to do. She decided to call a radio therapist for advice. Her mother, it seemed, needed to pay a little more attention to her. . .moustache. Now, we’re not talking walrus or handlebar. We’re not talking […]
Some people say that baseball is no longer America’s game because it’s too slow for the twenty-first century. Well, I’m here to celebrate it for that very reason – and how its occasionally glacial pace makes it a great game to watch in person. This may simply mean that I’m a dinosaur (I do have […]
Greetings. As many of you know, CLOSE YOUR EYES, HOLD HANDS, my new novel, arrives in a little more than two months — on July 8, 2014. And some of you have probably read about the novel on-line, and learned a little more. If you have a minute, you can now watch a video preview. […]
Six months ago, there was a three-year-old girl in the Committee on Temporary Shelter’s Main Street Family Shelter in Burlington, Vermont who wasn’t talking. She wasn’t speaking. “She was so shy. She wasn’t using words. We were really worried about her language acquisition,” recalled Cassie Paulsen, 28, the Children’s Education Advocate at COTS. The girl’s […]
