by Anna Super in the Journal Opinion

“I had just returned from the wilds of Manhattan, where lights twinkle near and in the distance. I was momentarily bewildered. I knew there was no city back in the trees. Then my country self kicked in, and I remembered. Fireflies.” by Nessa Flax, from Voices in the Hills.

Nessa Flax, known by many readers of this newspaper for her “Rambling Reflections” columns, paints a vivid picture of our lives in New Hampshire and Vermont. Nessa’s childhood as a “flatlander” gives her the slightest whisper of awareness that not everyone lives the way we do, but home is where the fireflies are.

When you read Voices in the Hills, her book recently published by Piermont’s Bunker Hill Publishing, you will feel you have made a new friend. I’ve never met her, but I immediately felt a kinship. I grew up just south of the North Country in Lyme, where I was raised on a blueberry farm by parents who were baby-boomer flatlanders. They moved to New Hampshire, as many did in those days, to get back to nature. Neither of my parents will ever leave northern New England, and I don’t blame them.

There’s something about this region that keeps its residents tethered to the land. I have friends who tried to move away, only to return. Other friends did get immersed in their away-from-here life, but still proudly state that they may live on the other side of the country, but are still a Vermonter, or Granite Stater.

When reading Nessa’s stories I am reminded of who I am, and where I came from. Her tribute to her former Rural Route address brought me back to the days when I didn’t have an address. I lived where River Road and Breck Hill Road met up. Or was it Brick Hill road? It seemed no one was sure in those days. I felt special, I lived on a landmark, not a street.

“I need to believe in a place where the volunteer firefighters just know where I live. Where ‘the old Etta White place’ is the only address I need,” Flax writes. Then there’s the well. Drying up in front of her. I know the “paper plates and quick showers” life you live when you have a dying well, and the feeling of a new beginning while drilling a new one. I know that old farmer around the corner that is still up at dawn checking the cows, I can feel the chill of a cold Vermont winter. I know what it’s like to keep up with those never ending berry bushes (raspberries for Nessa, blueberries for me).

As a child of flatlanders, I can understand her reflection and acceptance of neighbors who grew up hunting although she did not. The North Country is not cut off from the rest of the world, however. As a Beatles fan, I felt her sadness at the passing of George Harrison. Nessa just “gets it” here. She gets me. She gets you. She gets our people.

This book is not only for avid readers of Nessa’s column in the Journal Opinion, but for all of us in rural New Hampshire and Vermont to celebrate who we are and our way of life. It is also for former residents of the area, who can reconnect with the world they left behind. It is for all those people outside of the Upper Valley who don’t understand why you “can’t get there from here,” why so many of us choose to stay here all winter long and exactly how to speak up at town meeting. Now, thanks to Nessa, they will understand how we really are.

Nessa. If you still have any of those raspberries from your old house in the freezer, I’d be happy to trade them for some blueberries! Thank you for the ramblings.

Voices in the Hills

List Price: 22.50
Sale Price: 19.13
Savings of 15%

Voices in the Hills is a book with all the color and rhythm of the seasons of New England. Timeless and yet personal, universal and yet so local you recognize your neighbors, can count the logs in their woodpile, smell the smoke from chimneys on a sunny cold autumn day and savor the taste of last summer’s raspberries.

by Nessa Flax (author of Voices in the Hills)

 Regular readers here may recall a deliriously delighted column I wrote last spring reporting the acceptance of my collected-columns manuscript by Bunker Hill Publishing.

 Since then, I have been immersed in various stages of book production. It is a stress-inducing, crazy deadline, arcane process to a neophyte like me. Each step has been executed by electronic means. From reviewing cover design to seeing the work transformed into professional typeface, I have beheld the evolution of the manuscript.

 But it all existed only on my computer screen. Until last week.

 At a table in the Local Buzz, I held in my hands the stapled-together, not-yet-cut-to-size proof pages of Voices in the Hills: Collected Ramblings from a Rural Life. In my hands, I held the cover. In my hands, I held the blank-cover, blank-paged mockup of what Voices will be—feeling its heft and its physical book-ness.

It lives and breathes. It exists on paper.

 When I sat down at home—proofreading to be sure all the columns were there, in the right order, pages properly numbered, and the content scanned from one page to the next—I could curl up with my almost-a-book. No longer upright in my office chair staring at the screen.

It was in my hands.

 With the advent of eReaders and eBooks, the ultimate demise of traditional books has been predicted by geeks and publishing honchos. Lower cost for consumers and producers is a major factor. Storage is touted as another benefit. Libraries and readers can have thousands of “books” at the touch of a finger. Housing and dusting not required.

 I hope they’re wrong. I hope they’re as wrong about this as they were about the predicted demise of local newspapers when major papers moved into cyberspace. (While big newspapers have gone out of business by the dozens, small-town newspapers are thriving nationwide.)

 I hope they’re wrong, because a screen is a screen and a book is a book.

 Many claim this is a generational issue. That younger generations are more at home with electronic gadgetry than those of us who equate a computer screen of any size with work. Younger folks supposedly don’t have the sentimental attachment to books.

 Cyberspace discussions on the topic, however, give hope to booklovers.

 What I encounter is an attitude of both, like the young man who wrote: “I have 78 books on my Kindle. But all of them are not available in my country. It’s great for traveling. But I always bring a real book along. I love reading with a nice book. Nothing like flipping pages.”

 Another wrote: “If you could give an eReader that new book smell, it might have a slim chance with me.”

 My favorite was a poster who noted that eReaders are delicate gadgets: “Drop them or get them wet and they are toast. A book will last centuries.”

 Her sentiment was echoed by another—a kindred spirit—who said books will never be obsolete because “people will still want to read in the bathtub.”

 Right on.

*originally published in Journal Opinion 

Publishing has a thousand moving parts and far more than the day moveable type was invented (1040 AD by Bi Sheng in China) which makes it difficult at times to keep one’s eye on the Big Picture. We are publishing a marvelous children’s book about two butterflies and their adventures in The National Gallery in DC and things are coming together. They have an education department second to none and they like our book. That’s a big detail. A small detail would be my regret at not mentioning the author’s previous job at the National Portrait Gallery in the jacket flap copy. I hope the NPG book buyer will overlook the fact and indulge us.  Mr. Wyeth, our rep in DC, will no doubt berate us though. It would have made a good talking point for him.

A Green Garden

The author of our forthcoming The Green Garden has e-mailed a mild protest about the type on the cover, doesn’t like it and nor do her friends.  Small details on covers tangle us up. Is type chosen for image, for sales, for beauty, for composition or at random? It’s a typeface designed to indicate our author’s impeccable green credentials and note the recyclable, eco-friendly feel we thought we had created. Watch this space.

The big picture is tangled up too in all the small details of e-book publishing that we are about to dive into. Our two Vermont authors are about to get the treatment so watch out for Henry Homeyer’s Organic Gardening: published whole and in part (Print $17.50 Whole e-book $9.95 and $1.00 each for 12 monthly bits). We thought of publishing Willem Lange’s Dream of Dragons verse by verse at a dime a stanza but opted to push out the whole lot at $10.95. Big picture? I think e-books are essentially unshelvable and therefore will never replace the serendipity that our minds demand from books. Small detail? Folks are nuts about e-books by and large (in both senses of the word) so here we go!

from the Back Room at Bunker Hill

Willem Lange

From 1968 to 1972 Will directed the Dartmouth Outward Bound Center. From 1972 until his “retirement” in 2007, he was a building and remodeling contractor in Hanover. He’s an adopted member of the Dartmouth Class of 1957.

In 1981 he began writing a weekly column, “A Yankee Notebook,” which appears in several New England newspapers. He’s a commentator or host for Vermont Public Radio and both Vermont and New Hampshire Public Television. His annual readings of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol began in 1975 and continue unabated. He’s published several audio recordings and six books and received an Emmy nomination for one of his pieces on Vermont Public Television.

In 1973 Will founded the Geriatric Adventure Society, a group of outdoor enthusiasts whose members have skied the 200-mile Alaska Marathon, climbed in Alaska, the Andes, and Himalayas, bushwhacked on skis through northern New England, and paddled rivers north of the Arctic Circle.

He and his wife, Ida, who is the proprietor of a kitchen design business, have been married since 1959. After forty years in New Hampshire, they moved recently to East Montpelier, Vermont. They have three children and four grandchildren.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Favor Johnson

List Price: $16.95
Sale Price: $14.41
Savings of 15 %

With all the elements of a classic American winter folktale, Favor Johnson: A Christmas Story has been a favorite Vermont Public Radio story for twenty-five years and is now a bright and lively picture book. Favor Johnson is a compelling curmudgeon, a loner who lives on a farm with his livestock and faithful dog. Read More

A Dream of Dragons

List Price: 19.95
Sale Price: 16.96
Savings of 15%

A Dream of Dragons is a proper and modern Norse saga written with all the power of Melville and Hemingway and a true story now retold in the ageless rhythms of blank verse as irresistible as the beautiful and especially commissioned wood cuts of Mary Azarian. Read More

No shows booked at the moment.

Bert Dodson

Bert Dodson is a painter, teacher, author and illustrator. He has illustrated over 80 books for children . He is the author of Keys To Drawing ( North Light Books, 1985), Keys to Drawing with Imagination, (2006) and NUKE A Book of Cartoons, vols. I and II.( McFarland and Co., 1986 and 1988).He co-authored, with noted biologist, Mahlon Hoagland, The Way Life Works ( Times Books, 1995), and Intimate Strangers; The Story of Unseen Life on Earth (ASM Press, 1999, Needam, et all). He was animation designer for the four part PBS television series, Intimate Strangers (1998). He illustrated over 30 opera stories for children, a series commissioned by The New York Metropolitan Opera.His work appears in Vermont Life, Northern Woodlands, and Dartmouth Medicine.  He regularly exhibits his watercolors and drawings. He has drawn and painted over 200 portraits. He lives in West Fairlee, Vermont, and works in his studio in Bradford, Vermont.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Helping Santa

List Price: $17.50
Sale Price: $14.88
Savings of 15 %

Grandmas are wise beyond their years and often give us memories to cherish for the rest of our lives. Helping Santa: My First Christmas Adventure With Grandma is the story of one of those enchanting moments. Read More…

Favor Johnson

List Price: $17.95
Sale Price: $15.25
Savings of 15 %

With all the elements of a classic American winter folktale, Favor Johnson: A Christmas Story has been a favorite Vermont Public Radio story for twenty-five years and is now a bright and lively picture book. Favor Johnson is a compelling curmudgeon, a loner who lives on a farm with his livestock and faithful dog. Read More…