Peter Gould will read stories from his award-nominated memoir, HORSE-DRAWN YOGURT, at 7:00 on Wednesday, August 1, at the Jeudevine Library in Hardwick.
HORSE DRAWN YOGURT is a gathering of stories from the decade that Peter Gould lived on Total Loss Farm. Peter was part of the back to the land movement in Vermont. He turned all that living, dancing, working, loving, and gardening into fiction: his first novel BURNT TOAST (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) told the commune story in backwoods fantasy form.
His second novel WRITE NAKED (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)—set in the deep forest near the farm—won the 2009 National Green Earth Book Award for Young-Adult ecological fiction. In this book, two sixteen year olds with commune ancestries confront the threat of climate change in their own way.
A few years later, MARLY (Green Writers Press) told the story of a backwoods female chain-saw professor fighting ridge-line industrial wind in Vermont. MARLY is a new fictional form. "Call it a monologue/dialogue," Gould says.
Now, in HORSE DRAWN YOGURT, Peter Gould has created a patchwork of true, and nearly-true, tales of farm and commune life. In these stories you'll learn how locals and newcomers to the land helped each other out in a pivotal moment of U.S. history, and how young people new to Vermont learned how to tend farms, while still reaching out to belong to a national movement--against the Vietnam war, for peace and justice around the world, and towards a new local economy of local food.
"But, this book is not a memoir," Gould says. "It's more like a comforter. It's as if I didn't throw all my old farm clothes away. I cut and pieced and sewed them together. Now they keep me warm. And you can see the stories in each piece of cloth."
The reading and signing at Jeudevine is free and accessible. Gould will happily sign books and talk with the public after the reading.
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