BRATTLEBORO — Writer, director, and actor Peter Gould has written a new book about his experiences living in a commune at Packer Corners in Guilford in the 1970s.
Published this spring by Green Writers Press, Horse-Drawn Yogurt: Stories from Total Loss Farm is a collection of true-life stories of Gould's life on a Vermont farm commune at the height of the back-to-the-land movement.
In 1969, Gould moved to Vermont. Soon after, he turned all the communal living, eating, smoking, dancing, loving, and farming into fiction in his first novel Burnt Toast (Alfred A. Knopf, 1972) and Write Naked (Farrar Straus, 2008), which won the 2009 National Green Earth Book Award.
Now, in Horse-Drawn Yogurt, he has written a nonfiction version of events.
Gould's collection of stories of farm life describes how locals and newcomers helped each other out at a pivotal moment in history, as young people, new to the land, learned how to tend gardens, animals, and fields, while participating in a national movement against the Vietnam War and for peace and justice around the world.
“But, this book is not a memoir,” Gould says. “It's a comforter. I didn't throw all those old clothes away. I cut and pieced them and sewed them together. Now they keep me warm.”
The Vermont Historical Society says “Peter Gould's voice and personality shine through all the stories with wit and incisive insight. His perspective on life in Vermont's 1970s counterculture is an invaluable one ... incredibly helpful, personal, and emotional.”
Physical comedy
On Wednesday, June 14, at 7 p.m., Gould will read from Horse-Drawn Yogurt at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro in the main reading room. The performance is free, accessible, and open to the public. Gould will have copies of his book for sale. For more information contact Brooks Memorial Library at 802-254-5290 or visit www.brookslibraryvt.org.
While he was a founding member of the 1970s “Back-to-the-Land” commune movement in Vermont, he is better known in these parts for his part of the legendary physical comedy team of Gould & Stearns.
In addition, he founded and still runs Get Thee to the Funnery, a youth Shakespeare camp in the Northeast Kingdom, and he directs at the New England Youth Theatre. In 2016, Gould received the Arts Education Award from the Vermont Arts Council.
Gould is also a visual artist, a skill he has put to work in Horse-Drawn Yogurt. The book is complemented by numerous uncredited line drawings which were, in actuality, created by Gould himself.
“The illustrations were all drawn many years ago, when I was still living on the commune,” Gould says. “Each was painstakingly done with ink and quill. You need to be careful not to take up too much ink into the quill or it will blot and ruin the picture. There is no room for mistakes in this style of composition.”
Writing is a different story, however, and Peter took much time revising each of the stories in Horse-Drawn Yogurt to get them into the final shape to suit his artistic vision.
“I love to rewrite and edit,” he confesses. “In many ways, that is my favorite part of writing. I keep working on a piece to get it right, and after maybe four or five drafts, something clicks, and I think, 'Yes, this will get people on their feet.' I honestly think those authors who have no need to revise are missing a lot of the fun writing has to offer.”
Back to the land
The stories of life on Total Loss Farm have been told and retold and finally written down over many years by Gould.
“My wife Molly urged me to gather the material together to make up a book,” he says. “I do believe the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s deserves to be remembered.”
But Gould's work is no dry academic treatise.
“I leave it to others to write about those days in sociological or scholarly ways, but that is not my style,” he says. “I write stories, whether fictional or from real life.”
Several years ago Gould published one such story in Green Writers Press' Contemporary Vermont Fiction: An Anthology, and it was was very well received. Using that story, along with two other previously published works as a backbone, Gould refashioned pieces of writing from the past 20 years of work for this project.
“I reworked a dozen or so stories [that were] half done, and composed four or five more to pull together a work,” Gould says.
Gould compares his artistic process to that of making a patchwork quilt, and he envisions himself springing from the ancient tradition of the oral storytellers, a role audiences will see in action when he reads from Horse-Drawn Yogurt in the Brooks Memorial Library Reading room.
“I do not so much read as act out what I write,” explains Gould, who definitely knows the difference, with his long experience in the performing arts. “Like an actor, I get into a performer head and in touch with my stage voice. I suspect that at the reading there are even some farm activities I will act out for the people. I think this method will help [bring] alive for people what it was like to live on the commune.”
Gould lived on Total Loss Farm for nine years.
“I was a student in Boston and knew some friends from BU who were buying a farm in Vermont,” he explains. “I visited the place the first month they owned it, and I thought to myself, 'Gee, this would be a great place to live.' I honestly was not sure if I could thrive in a group of six or seven people, yet at the same time I had always wanted to live the Utopian collective life.”
Pooling resources
Gould acknowledges that the U.S. has a rich tradition of communal living, going back to the Pilgrims.
“But it was different in the early 1970s,” he says. For the first time, the prospect of communal living was part of a national rural back-to-the-land momentum. “Here we had a group of people who had grown up in individual households deciding to pool their resources to create a new style of living,” he explains.
According to Gould, The Vermont Historical Society says there were four common elements to this communal movement.
“The first was an opposition to the Vietnam War,” Gould says. “The second was to question capitalism; the third was the desire to grow our own food; and the fourth was to live in a community lifestyle through which members tried to seek some kind of transcendent experience, whether in drugs, prayer, mysticism, or music.”
Gould claims that each commune had its own road to transcendence.
“I believe that Total Loss Farm's way to transcendence was through nature mysticism, which included things like walking in the dark at night - and having great parties,” says Gould, who was Total Loss Farm's resident beer brewer and winemaker.
All the neighboring communes joined together for partying.
“There were four communes just on our road in Packer Corners, each with a different philosophy,” Gould says. “Some, like us, were veterans of the antiwar movement, while others were slightly different as promoters of the idea of brotherhood of spirit.”
'Enjoying life and having fun'
While the communes of the 1970s may have been bastions for ideologies, Gould also sees his life on Total Loss Farm in a simpler way.
“We were just a small focused group of friends who lived and worked together,” he said. “We worked hard and had no leaders. Yes, in our commitment to an agrarian life, we did things like found the Brattleboro Farmers Market in 1977, but essentially what we were doing was enjoying our life and having fun.”
Not all communes were the same.
Gould feels that one way Total Loss Farm was special was because it had a nice balance between gay and straight members.
“We did a lot of soul searching to understand each other, and I can honestly say that there was no homophobia among us,” he says. “Gay or straight, male or female, everyone was equal. We all cooked the meals and shared the child care.”
Another difference from a traditional conception of communal living was that each person had his or her own room.
“Total Loss Farm recognized the importance of privacy,” Gould says. “As each new person joined us - and that was not that many, we had maybe one new person a year - he or she figured out his means for privacy. For myself, I built a room in a loft in the tractor shed where I lived for the next nine years.”
Not a day goes by that he doesn't think about his life on the farm. He misses the days when he owned neither a bathing suit nor a flashlight.
“The experience gave me relationships that have lasted my lifetime,” he says. “It also gave me a significant attitude towards money. Unlike most people in power who seem to be motivated by greed, I know money is not one of life's important things, and have shaped a life around that fact.”
As Packer Corners approaches its 50th anniversary in June 2018, Gould more than ever believes people need to know this history.
“Horse Drawn Yogurt was a book I had to write,” says Gould, who is still a trustee of the farm. “I am not bragging, but these are such good stories. To tell these stories is important, so people can know what happened there. As I worked on the book, I would read each one out loud, and if it made me cry, I knew this was a tale worth the telling.”